Updates
New books
Shout-Outs
RIP David Lynch
This week has been a light one at work. I wrapped up the lettering for Resurrection Man #3 and w0rldtr33 #13, but there wasn’t much left to be done on either.
The main project for the week was to begin scripting on SEASIDE. I’ve scripted two scenes so far, and they both feel good for a first draft. I’d forgotten how hard it is to script a comics page – there’s always a lot more going on than the basic “here’s what happens, here’s who says what”. At least there is if you’re more ambitious than simply telling a story with pictures.
But a week in, I’m getting into the groove of it. The trick, I feel, is to keep doing it regularly so your brain gets used to working in that mode.
Out on the stands this week: The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos #15, by James Tynion IV, Tate Brombal, Isaac Goodhart, Miquel Muerto and myself, which closes out our first series. Christopher Chaos and his friends will be back in 2025 in a different form.
I wanted to shout out a bunch of my friends’ current work, since I don’t think I do this enough.
The New Gods #2 just came out from DC Comics, by my Dawnrunner cohorts Ram V, Evan Cagle, Francesco Segala, along with letterer Tom Napolitano and a new guest artist every issue (it was Jorge Fornes for #1, and Jesse Lonergan for this one). Ram has been telling me about this story as he’s developed it, and I love the mix of Kirby grandeur, DC universe world-building and Hindu myths this team is concocting. These are the kind of stories I wish I could read as a teenager, but I’m pumped that they’re happening now, and I get to see both the back-stage workings as well as the final work. The first “season” will be 12 issues, but the idea is for it to keep going, I believe.
Juni Ba’s Monkey Meat: The Summer Batch begins serialisation on 5th March, from Image Comics. If you’ve read the first batch of Monkey Meat (and you should!), this second batch of issues is even more ambitious, with two stories per issue and the same bonkers energy. Much as I love Juni and my work together, there’s a pleasure to seeing a singular vision at work, with no compromise to commercial or collaborative concerns. This is my kind of comics!
Batman: Dark Patterns by Dan Watters, Hayden Sherman, Tríona Farrell and Frank Cvetkovic is also currently serialising. A 12-issue maxi-series set in Batman’s early career, divided into four three-issue stories, this is an attempt to bring the tonal feel of Matt Reeves’s The Batman into comics, and I applaud the effort. I’ve always been a fan of Dan’s writing – his mix of erudition and pulp aesthetics is very much my jam – and Sherman is one of my favourite artists currently working (and God knows how they’re so prolific – they’ve got three books serialising at the moment). Dan has also begun a newsletter, which is one of my favourite reads every time it comes out – a download from Dan Watters’s brain is essential reading.
Assorted Crisis Events is an upcoming ongoing series from Image Comics, by Deniz Camp, Eric Zawadzki, Jordie Bellaire and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. I’ve been reading this one as the team has developed it – each layer adding its own flair to the book (in particular, Jordie’s doing some career-best work here, I feel – along with The City Beneath Her Feet, she’s really on a roll at the moment). More than anything else on the stands right now, ACE captures what it feels like living in the current moment, with a hundred small apocalyptic events interspersed with the giant ongoing one of climate change. Deniz is also currently writing Ultimates for Marvel Comics, which, as with other superhero comics Deniz has written, is my ideal superhero comic – big ideas with fun action and character moments.
The Nice House by the Sea by James Tynion IV, Alvaro Martínez Bueno, Jordie Bellaire and Andworld Design continues serialisation from DC Comics Black Label Vertigo. The first volume of this story – The Nice House on the Lake – was the only comic at the time I was following month-to-month instead of waiting for the collection, and that remains true for this one. That’s one of the highest recommendations I can give a comic – that I can’t wait to read the whole story, I need to get it now.
David Lynch passed a couple of days ago. I saw the news at 3 a.m., as I was about to go to sleep, and it kept me up for more than an hour. I wasn’t grieving, exactly – the man was 78 and had lived a full creative life on his own terms – but I was thinking about what his work meant to me, as well as the fact that he was a lifelong smoker who had emphysema. One searches for one’s father figures in art, and sometimes they’re just that straightforwardly a simile for your actual father (sometimes, like David Milch, they have a problem hanging on to their money and they develop dementia – lots of Davids in my list of found father figures).
I thought about how Lynch’s unpretentious speech hid all these emotions he expressed through image, movement and sound. The wholesome and the grotesque coexisting, inseparable each from the other. The primal screech smothered in modernity.
I thought about the fact that everyone I know interprets his films differently. They each have a specific, individual relationship to his work that is more about them than what his work is “about”. He refused to interpret his work for you, he refused to tell you what he thought about things other than the basic – the idea of love being an essential good in the world.
This is in some ways “true” art if one can forward such a notion. Instead of standing in front of the art and mediating it, to let it out of your grasp, to refuse to apologise for it, and to withstand interpretations even if they don’t meld with your vision.
I thought about how Lynch was able to make this happen in the mainstream – rather than on the esoteric edge of cinema – by being budget-conscious and good to work with. Whereas in other mediums, artists like him languish in poverty, he invited people to like his work, and he allowed them to feel what they felt about it.
He made work that was specific enough that we call it by his name – Lynchian. Like Kafkaesque, Pythonesque. Like Shakespearean, if I may stretch a little.
Twin Peaks: The Return meant several different things for me. I watched it in the early days of the COVID pandemic, alone at home. I watched it over a period of 18 days, one episode a day to start my day. It gave me something to hold on to in those days.
It also began a practice that I continue to this day – every day, before I played the episode, I put my phone in the other room, in silent mode. This was partly to tackle the kind of distracted life I was living, but it was also a mark of respect – someone has made this thing with intention and thought, that uses the labour of hundreds of people. The least I can do is give it all my attention while it’s playing.
I hadn’t watched the original Twin Peaks series at this point, though I watched it later – I don’t feel it’s essential to get what The Return is doing, beyond reading a précis on Wikipedia, perhaps. Lynch eschewed nostalgia, and weaponised our affection for these characters, while loving them far more than anyone watching.
He was also unafraid of longueurs. What he understood, what I was only beginning to understand then, and only fully understood last year, was that there is no such thing as a scene that is too long. He created spaces where the viewers could inhabit his world, where they could be mesmerised into forgetting that they lived outside the show. Jane Schoenbrun has talked in interviews about wanting to make films that put people to sleep, that the audience can be so comfortably inside that they can sleep through them. Lynch was my introduction to this idea that brevity isn’t necessarily a virtue, something that I more fully understood watching Iranian cinema and the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Just as importantly for me, though, Lynch wasn’t afraid of being goofy. Between Sense8 and The Return, I was able to articulate something that had been brewing in my mind – that irony, while protecting a creator from ridicule, is a cage. A creator can never fully embody themselves in their work if they’re not willing to be sincere. In 2020, a lot of pop culture was beginning to be irony-poisoned, and it was leaving a bad taste in my mouth. The Return showed me what I was looking for – artists making work with sincerity, showing as much of themselves as they can, unafraid to be thought of as silly.
Twin Peaks: The Return changed my life. This isn’t an understatement. It changed my life the way I’ve heard people speak of Mulholland Drive changing their lives, or Wild at Heart, or Lost Highway, or Blue Velvet, which I watched for the first time the day after his death, after which I drew that portrait up top.
Lynch made so much work that changed people’s life. While being a good collaborator and (mostly) treating people well. I’ve got a lot more to say about his work, and about his thoughts on creative work (I find both Room to Dream and Catching the Big Fish to be essential reading) but we’d be here all day.
He will be missed.