This is what breaks my blogging silence?

I realize this won't interest everyone who reads this blog, but the ones it does interest I expect to be very, very interested:

Tricia Helfer, Battlestar Galactica's Number Six, to appear nude in next month's Playboy. [Link features NSFW pictures.]

Yeah.

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I can't have that be the only item I post after an eight day absence! So I'll briefly mention my return to the comics shop after a much longer absence.

I went in to pay a visit to Mike and the shop this weekend, and I can't even remember the last time before that I set foot in the store. Maybe a full two months. Or more. And as I looked at the comics on the rack, I realized that in that time away, I hadn't really missed comics that much. Not the actual ink and paper books, anyway. But I had missed the social aspect of comics.

I know, it's a contradiction -- comic books and social interaction! Har har. But what I've been missing is going into the shop every Wednesday and hanging out with/bothering pal Mike, whom I don't often -- almost never, really -- see outside of the shop. As well as the other store employees -- employee? Is Aaron the only one left? -- and the occasional cameo from Dorian, Chris, or Corey. It was a great treat to look forward to in the middle of my work week. And I always left feeling upbeat, at least for the walk back to my car. Mike's always so easy-going. Even when he's pissed off, it's such a low-key, good-natured anger that he's still pleasant to be around. (Me, I'm barely pleasant to be around when I'm not angry. Which isn't often.)

I've also missed the online social interaction. (Insert second "contradiction" joke here.) I liked perusing the various comics blogs, many of which are featured just over there to the right in the sidebar, and checking out the wide array of thoughts and opinions floating around about the comics I'd read that week. I still keep up with any number of those blogs, but it's from an outsider's perspective. What's that, you say? Grant Morrison wrote something completely insane and awesome? Okay, I guess I'll have to take your word on it.

Anywho. While at the comic shop, I bought four things.

#1: the new issue of Cracked magazine. As with the last issue I bought (which was the first issue, if you follow me), it had its moments, but was mostly a lot of skippable material.

#2: Evan Dorkin's latest issue of Dork. The whole thing is crammed full of single panel gags or four-panel strips -- not even one full-page story. Far more miss than hit, sadly. I've been a fan of Dorkin's for well over a decade now, and maybe that's why I felt like there was very little new here.

#3: Jeph Loeb & Darwyn Cooke's Batman/The Spirit one-off. The artwork is frequently gorgeous -- especially the blatantly telegraphed, but still thrilling, splash page complete with giant letters spelling "SPIRIT" in the background -- but the writing is somehow labored and lazy at the same time. It's like Loeb and Cooke (mostly Loeb, I'm guessing) took great pains to craft grand introductions for various iconic elements from both the Batman and Spirit mythoses (if that's a word, and I bet it isn't), but couldn't really be bothered to tie them together into an interesting or sensible story.

#4: The first trade paperback of Noble Causes. I've seen a lot of praise online for this book, which is a soap-operaish look at the dirty laundry of a superhero family and the non-superpowered woman who marries into it. But it didn't impress me much. The first issue ends with a genuinely surprising twist, but its impact is lessened by the fact that we've only known these characters for that one issue. And the rest of it is petty bitchiness and bed-hopping, tied together by a meager murder mystery.

So, yeah: looks like I miss everything about comics except the comics themselves. Granted, none of the titles mentioned above are my favorites; there's no She-Hulk, no Y: The Last Man or Runaways or Ex Machina, no Dorothy or Fables or All-Star Superman. I'm still sticking with my plan to buy only trade paperbacks from now on; it just hasn't been long enough for any of those titles, or others I've neglected to mention, to produce new collections. And the two single issues I bought aren't going to be collected in a TPB for ages, if ever.

There. Did I write enough about something else to make up for the Playboy link?