It's actually my birthday today, or is for another 1.5 hours. One of the least festive of them, but not bad at all. My old friend Robert has the same birthday, so we had sushi with a bunch of his coworkers--I had soft shell crab roll. I didn't make a big deal of it at work ata ll, and it's not the kind of company that celebrates everyone's birthday, but late in the day I heard someone else being told Happy Birthday, so I went to tell her we had the same birthday and it turned out hers was actually Aug. 8th. After that, the word got out a little, but no big deal. Had pizza with the kids and two beers, let them have some tokens for videogames there but instead they used them to buy temporary tattoos and ugly jewelry that comes in a hard plastic bubble. The real celebration is Saturday night, anyway, with hopefully around a dozen friends, give or take, and that should be fun. I'm actually changing life insurance carriers and need to make sure my cholesterol and blood pressure are below certain numbers to get the preferred rate, so aside from that night and a Padres game I'm attending Monday, I need to eat well, drink less and cut down on Starbucks, as well as exercise a little more. It's real fun to get older, huh?

Finished the new BREAKDOWNS last night, as EiC Chris Hunter needs them at least 24 hours ahead of time. That's actually good for me, as it forces me to get it done in a couple days, as I usually have a lot to do on either Monday or Tuesday every week. I feel like I'm on a pretty good roll with the column, really trying to dig into every book a little more than before, or maybe I just wasn't good enough to do this before, I don't know. It's very easy to get, not exactly bad habits, but a sort of method of reviewing something that's moderately smart and professional but not fully invested, if that makes sense. Part of why I think the stuff's a bit better now is that I'm doing far fewer reviews of superhero books, quite frankly. It's not an elitist stance--I read and enjoy my fair share of them, but there aren't too many right now doing anything very different. Where there are, I try to cover them, but you know, just describing some of the various plot turns of a graphic novel like PARTING WAYS makes for a more interesting review than most issues of the perfectly fine ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, you know? Anyway, the new column is at www.comicbookgalaxy.com and reviews the aforementioned PARTING WAYS, as well as PAUL MOVES OUT and a couple others. The title of the column is something of a reference to Hell, which is one of the settings of PARTING WAYS, but it was a bit of a happy accident.

Reading Jerry Stahl's I, FATTY, a fictional autobiography of wrongly disgraced, tragic silent film comedian/director Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. It's such a sad story, just heartbreak and mistakes and abuses on every page, but Stahl takes the right approach with a funny, snappy and not self-pitying voice for Fatty, in very tight chapters of just a couple pages each. This is what I read during lunch at work rather than comics.