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Old New While I was running around last week, Newsarama rolled out its redesign, which isn't really that different from the old site, as you can...

We celebrate the Beat's anniversary on July 1st every year, and guess what? We're 12! I don't have too much to say this year,...

We lost another one yesterday. David Harper of the oft-linked to and discussed Sktchd sitecalled it quits after a year of think pieces, surveys, podcasts and charts. He'll continue doing his podcast after a break for the warm Alaskan summer, but those long investigations are a thing of the past. The reasons were the usual: burnout from writing about what you love.

Speaking of crowds and branding, we have a FEW openings for staff reporters for The Beat's coverage of the 2016 New York Comic Con on October 6-9. NYCC has cracked down on the number of press passes this year, so I know a lot of good people have been left out. We have been given a handful of slots to fill up, so here's your chance. What we need:

When I started writing about comics I never thought that would make me an amateur Kremlinologist about west coast convention centers, but there you go.

Here's John Cusack in his best known role as Lloyd Dobler in the beloved Gen-X comedy Say Anything. You may have been thinking about John Cusack...

Another event, another Marvel teaser campaign! And this time it's Minority Report, aka Civil War II, one would suspect.

We survived the server move! Did you miss us? Don't lie! A lot more change and improvement lie ahead but we're settling into our new IP nicely. And it's Leap Day! What better way to celebrate than with a salute to Batroc...the Leaper! This Captain America villain was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and appeared in Tales of Suspense #75. A French kickboxing champion he has no superpowers...save the ability to talk in a horrible French accent and...to leap!

The Beat is planning to move servers some times over the weekend, so there may be weirdness, drama, UFO sightings or other unexplained phenomenon during this period. Please, stay in your homes and stay tuned to the emergency band of your radio to listen for instructions.

Storage: the secret shame of the comics world. Like many in the comics industry I'm a bit of a packrat (to put it mildly)...

Oh speaking of Amazon, I didn't realize that they have sub categories in all their best seller list now. Thus you can not only see what's selling in the main graphic novel category (answer: coloring books) but in more than a dozen subcategories, such as Manga, Romance Manga, Superheroes and How to Create Comics and Manga.And when you click on some of them, like Publishers, you get sales charts for the top 7 or 8 publishers in one click. (Can you feel teh excitement??!!??)

When you click on Graphic novels you get a Russian nested doll of genre categories, all the way down to zombies.

If you're a faithful Beat reader, you know the past year has been filled with discussions of the economics of running a comics news website. This talk was prompted by an unprecedented run of comics sites closing down or losing key personnel. I summed up a lot of my thoughts back in September, pointing out that the realities of the web make running any kind of independent site very difficult these days.