Late Night

Autograph authenticator Steve Grad has a collection of 100s of Star Wars cards signed by the original cast, and he's posted a gallery on FB, with more to come. But I think this one...

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....

There is nothing quite like EternalCon. It's a throwback comics show with longboxes, cartoonists, wrestlers, Star Trek Cast members, toys and masks...all set in an aviation museum, namely the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, LI. This year's event expanded quite a bit from last year, and artists alley was set up in the actual museum, so you could wander around and buy a comic from Greg Pak and then look at a Spitfire, or buy some old books while perusing the terrain of Mars. I saw a lot of oddball robotic sculptures dotting the premises and I never figured out of they were part of the con or part of the museum.

Here's the part where you support your favorite comic book creators almost as much you endorse the films they help make possible. Kelly Sue DeConnick's husband, Matt Fraction, will be making his first appearance on...

Last night twitter nation became one as never before—from Taylor Swift, Demi Lovato and Gerard Way to millions of Tweets around the world, everyone was obsessed with the optical illusion of what color this dress is:

Last week, a sad story made the rounds about cartoonist Jim Wheelock having all of his comics stolen out of a storage unit in Vermont. It was quite a large and potentially valuable collection that went back to the 60s and in an interview at Seven Days he mourns its loss.

  Word on the street is that we're getting some snow here in the Northeast.   NYC may get as much as three feet in a historic snow dump that is expected to last from this morning...

You know how sometimes being a snoopy Lois Lane leads you to discovered things you wish you hadn't? Or how innocent symbologist Robert Langdon was just puttering along when suddenly the Pope was trying...

(Photo from and © American Virus) When I moved to Los Angeles in the 80s, I lived in West Hollywood at the height of the AIDS crisis. I was a sheltered young woman without much...

How a stop for a bit of hearty breakfast can change your life.

We mentioned this in our official MoCCA report for Publishers Weekly, but if there is one must-read this week, it's The Cartoon Crier from The Center for Cartoon Studies. Distributed as a lovely free paper at MoCCA, you can now read it in Issu form at the link. But we must warn you. DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE NOT SAD. Because it will make you sad.

About once a year, we give Stately Beat Manor a really good going-over — tossing out unwanted pamphlets, moving some stuff into storage, organizing permanent additions and so on — and after doing so we write a post with our thoughts about storage and hoarding and so on. This is that post, c. 2011. I assume most of you reading this are borderline hoarders, like The Beat. Your shelf porn resembles a splatter film. You have more longboxes than you do pieces of silverware. Your home contains at least one Billy. You have at one time -- perhaps even at this very moment -- made use of some kind of software to catalog your collection even if it was just Excel or Google spreadsheets. You know the drill.