Yesterday was a fairly busy day, in that we were up early, my wife, daughter and I, and we grabbed breakfast at the modestly-named Sam’s Diner in Glens Falls, which  has the best breakfast in town, and the crispiest bacon, two not-unrelated facts. There’s a fine line between crispy and burned, and my formerly favourite diner hits the latter mark far more often than the former, primarily why it’s my formerly favourite diner. After breakfast we swapped out our daughter for our son (he had slept in late, she had to go to work) and drove down to Saratoga County where I failed in my goal of finding a decent pair of winter gloves, but succeeded wildly in accidentally stumbling upon a Chinese restaurant (“Sam’s Chinese Restaurant,” which I assume is a coincidence — I doubt it’s the same Sam from Sam’s Diner) that served up an unexpectedly tasty and beautiful-to-gaze-upon lunch that was filling enough that dinner was hardly thought about hours after dark.

After lunch I stopped at not one, but two comic shops to pick up the newest issues of the only remaining comics I am still buying, IDW’s Star Trek and Image’s Fatale. I read both last night and enjoyed them both thoroughly. I was especially surprised by how much I enjoyed Fatale, because I had been on the fence about whether it was as good as Sleeper or Criminal, to name two great previous titles by the same writer and artist, but I think it helped that I was two issues behind, and in reading the two most recent Fatales (#8 and 9), I got a good dose of what makes the book fun, and a timely reminder that I can still enjoy comics as comics. See, as much as I enjoy the IDW Star Trek, it’s because it’s Star Trek, more than because it’s comics, if that makes any sense. Well-written and illustrated Star Trek, set firmly in the universe of the 2009 reinvention, and I am very anxious to see the next movie (coming in 2013), and so the current ongoing comic serves as a nice substitute. Fatale, though, shows that there are still good comics being made, and I can still enjoy them, which is nice, since I pretty much broke up with comics back in September, selling off the vast majority of my collection and dropping virtually every title I had been reading. I don’t even read about comics anymore, which is strangely freeing. Maybe, as my wife says, I’ll dive back in eventually. We’ll see. 

My breakup with comics isn’t the reason I’m not at the Albany Comicon (happening today at the Wolf Road Holiday Inn from 10-4, don’t let my absence stop you from attending!), though. Most of the past month or so I’ve been struggling with some occasionally debilitating back pain, and the running around I did with my family yesterday caught up with me at the end of the day, so I’m giving my back a rest today and spending some quality time with my ice pack and the Shirley Jackson anthology I’ve been reading. “The Summer People” is a fantastic short story almost as entrancing as “The Lottery,” by the way. I’ll probably finish that book today, and catch up on the last three episodes of Boardwalk Empire with my wife. It’s Sunday, and it’s casual, at least at my house.