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I'd like to introduce the improved Events page! Now you can just go to our all purpose Events Page and see what's coming up! It's a little barebones now, but eventually it will have the week's events listed. You can also see the three upcoming events in the sidebar. (Sorry about that dingbat -- still trying to fix it.) As very observant readers may have noticed, I've been struggling with events for a while -- they were way too NYC-centric to be really useful, but this way, events can be quickly added and a database maintained. I'll still be doing some spotlight posts, as well, but this is, hopefully, a useful resource. So keep those events coming!

The expected tsunami of San Diego news is well under way, and we'll start our annual mega posting tomorrow. In the meantime apologies for the erratic Beat posting schedule of late due to conflicting deadlines on a variety of fronts; juggling all this stuff seems to take as much time as getting it accomplished. Despite all the problems, I hope you can stick with me. Of course, I'll be in San Diego to report on as much of it as one human possibly can -- we'll have a few stringers and correspondents on the scene as well and hopefully we can dig a little into the behind the scenes of the hype and hoopla.

We're back from our little working vacation, but sadly, we're more tired than ever! How does that happen? The Beat feels relaxed for about five seconds upon returning home, but then. the stress of catching up on everything we missed erases all progress. Plus, there is so much to see. Within five minutes of alighting at Penn Station we had already seen TWO men wearing eye bandages!

Housekeeping notes: • The OLD Beat is up at a new URL: whenmonkeysattack.com. Believe it or not we're still trying to get all the old...

This blog has been getting around lately -- links on Boing Boing, Reddit, Digg, Kottke, and so on -- with a corresponding increase in commenting. Without wanting to play Dean Wormer here, I am scrutinizing the comments a bit more closely, and personal attacks, trolling and general asshatery will not be tolerated. I will PARTICULARLY not tolerate jerkishness in obituary threads because they are often read by family members and believe me, you'll thank me later. ... And to all you lurkers out there, feel free to bust out if you are so moved.

I was saddened to learn this morning that frequent Beat poster Lewis "Alan" Coil died of a heart attack on Friday. He was 55.

I never met Alan in real life, and certainly he had his disagreements with many people on the internet, but he was a constant presence here and at many other sites, and obviously passionate about comics and participating in the discussion. Alan was a ubiquitous internet presence in the tradition of the great letterhacks.

On Peter David's site, Alan's friend Paul Shiple wrote:

Things have been a little erratic around Stately Beat Manor this week, and although there's no way to write about this without sounding like a whiny ingrate, the Beat is just burnt out from some annoying ongoing problems. But now they look like they are getting partially solved so maybe happy faces are coming soon. But before I delve into tech-moaning, I wanted to grouse about something else. I have just been going through my emails and putting together some FCBD listings -- not comprehensive but if people bothered to promote their events, they should get some promotion. And I learned some things.

Aid The Beat and the Elite Beat Squad! We're trying to import the old posts from the Old Beat, so we can shut down...

Despite being sick as a dog, The Beat and crew have made it to Chicago! If the flu didn't kill us, the red hot...

After a couple of months of non-stop travel and activity, The Beat finally got sick; not so sick that we can't go to C2E2,...

We're on the road today with no reliable internet access, so no posting on all the exciting news, like Rob Liefeld's exclusive comics for...

If you are interested in advertising on The Beat, shoot us an email at heidi dot macdonald at gmail dot com. As you can...