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The Beat is home! Charlie and Lucy are thrilled and I'm trying to reset my sleep schedule. With this year's Comic-con in the rearview mirror, the attention span of the nation has moved on...

It's July 1st, meaning it's the day we celebrate the Beat's birthday and today marks 11 years of daily comics news! It's a very special day—I even ganked some clip art for the occasion....

This weekend there's plenty of comics activity around NYC. Many will be interested in FlameCon, the first ever queen comic-con in NYC, to be held at the Grand Prospect Hall in Brooklyn.... but I...

The priceless Deb Aoki has created yet another masterful Storify called Twitter for Comics Creators - Do's & Don'ts and rather than embed here, it just go read it. But here's the nut graph:

§ By chance, two websites have been devoting some time to overviews of...non Big Two Comics I guess you could call 'em. Multiversity is running Small Press Month and offers A Brief History of...

Last fall, we here at The Beat teamed up with the awesome folks at The Devastator to put together a survey for convention exhibitors. With all the controversy over who is spending and what cons are con games, it seemed like time to seriously upgrade this survey. And you responded, with more than 100 people taking the survey, giving results on the top cons and CAFs that revealed average sales and average amount of satisfaction with each show. In case you've never heard of them, The Devastator is a humor/comic magazine based in LA that features sharp satire and art by founders Geoffrey Golden and Amanda Meadows as well as people from The Onion, the Daily Show, Adult Swim, Marvel and more. The result, as crunched by the Devastator's staff, has some eye-opening statistics. You can read the entire report right here, and see some of the Devastator team's own comments below, but here are a few of my own eye-openers:

I've been slaving away on an outside project ever since the holidays wrapped, and I've had very limited time to write anything too substantial here. Luckily the new kids have been keeping things going reading comics, posting news and generally running wild in the place. So thank Brandon, Alex, Kyle, Hannah and Dave! The project is wrapping up and I'll be back in the saddle I hope. The new features like reviews and entertainment news won't be going away but I hope to get back to the regular Beat recipe which has been altered a bit of late.

Anders Nilsen sees the year out at Medium with a beautiful full color comic called On Optimisim: Why 2015 Won't Suck. It's a very direct and straightforward work from the often oblique (and marvelously...

I imagine most of you reading this aren't reading this, but are already off on your holiday travels. While the team at Stately Beat Manor is going to remain vigilant for exciting, world changing breaking news, we're going into "holiday mode" for posting, which is about the same as the regular mode except we gave it a name. But to make the holidays bright, I have some previews, art, webcomic alerts and maybe a few other surprises lined up in case you get bored. In the meantime, safe travels and happy holidays to all.

Retailer and frequent Beat contributor Brandon Schatz has hit the big time—or at least the local news appearing as a nerd news expert with commentary on the Star Wars trailer and holiday gift suggestions...

I'm hitting the road for Thanksgiving frolic, so we're shifting into exciting HOLIDAY mode at the Beat! Oh there will be some news stories, and some GIft Guide suggestions, but also a lot of art and comics recommendations that I've been stockpiling for no good reason. Also, Beat contribours will be along with their own gift guide suggestions.

Housekeeping: The Beat was down a bit over the weekend when my web host moved it to a faster, more up to date server. I also got one of those new fangled Time Warner modems that offers five times faster internet speed. So we're TURBO here! At the same time, the mouse I've been using for about five years went belly up. The coffee spill that happened a few weeks ago may have contributed but the autopsy results aren't in yet. I immediately went to Staples and bought a $10 mouse as a stopgap, and upon getting it home it did not work. PERIOD. MELONFARMER. NEVER BUY CHEAP TECH. However, luckily later in the day I was walking by a pile of discarded computer equipment and was able to obtain a Mighty Mouse from the pile.