2025 / #06: Looking Forward
May and June are my busiest months every year, and somehow, every year, I forget this fact and am surprised anew by it. I haven’t figured out why, but lettering work accumulates to the middle of the year, while December-January are arid, cleft as they are by the American holiday break.
That goes some way towards explaining why this newsletter has been missing in action. The other reason is I have been writing, and what do you know, if you spend a whole week writing, you don’t feel like ending it by writing some more.
The busy period is coming to an end, though, and the next few months look normal. I’m a taking a two-week break in July to travel with K, and do some thinking about the next few years and what I want to do with them. My fortieth birthday is coming up, and I want to get a headstart on the whole mid-life crisis thing.
I’ve got lettering work planned out till the end of the year, when the AiR programme with Tiny Onion ends (these currently form the bulk of my lettering work). The programme has been great for me, both allowing me to relax in terms of knowing where the next paycheck comes from, as well as pushing me to write (more on that below). I want to take what I’ve learnt in this time and make use of it.
I have a feeling I’m going to take things lighter next year, work-wise, and really jump into doing something else seriously. What that’ll be, I’m not sure yet, but I feel like taking a big step into something new.
I’m not going to stop lettering entirely, but my current thinking is that I won’t pick up anything new that I haven’t already agreed to, at least informally. Those include some new Tiny Onion books to replace ones ending this year, and one big new project with Ram V. I’m not promising this hand-on-heart, but that might be it for the next few years.
The following books I lettered came out since we last spoke:
- Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma #1-4 from DC Comics – my current book with Ram V, Anand RK and Mike Spicer.
- The Department of Truth #29-31 from Image Comics – this series with James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds continues, with the first of three guest issues drawn by Letizia Cadonici and coloured by Jordie Bellaire.
- w0rldtr33 #14-15 from Image Comics – continuing series with James Tynion IV, Fernando Blanco and Jordie Bellaire.
- The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos: Children of the Night #1 from Dark Horse begins the new mini-series of this comic, with #2 coming out later this month, with James Tynion IV, Tate Brombal, Isaac Goodhart and Miquel Muerto.
- Let This One Be a Devil from Dark Horse wrapped up in June, and contained the True Weird backups lettered by me.
- DC Pride 2025 continued my involvement with this anthology with a story written by Vita Ayala and Maya Houston and illustrated by Vincent Cecil.
Couple of specific things to call out – one, we recently had the announcement of The Department of Truth #0, celebrating the five-year anniversary of the launch of our series. More on this here, including the announcement of a three-part backup written by Scott Snyder and drawn by Joshua Hixson, delving into the secret history of Elvis Presley.
Finally, it appears that this week saw the release of Superman: The World, a global anthology of Superman stories, for which I lettered a comic drawn by Sid Kotian and written by Rana Daggubati, an Indian actor who is a pretty big deal round these parts. My friends are chuffed about my involvement in this one.
(Superman The World cover)
At the end of May I finished a first draft script of the entire long-form comic I’m working on (codename SEASIDE) – all four issues.
If you’re familiar with comics production, you know that comics issues are usually written one at a time – as serially as they are released. But we had some breathing space and control over the schedule, plus this is my first long-form comic, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t fuck it up – give it my best shot at putting together the whole picture before we start tightening the screws on each issue.
This draft is, of course, far from the final – Eric (my editor) and I immediately jumped into throwing things out and moving things around – and I’m looking forward to months of painstaking but exciting work.
After that, I also did a second draft of Issue 1, which went to the artist, an editorial consultant, and an artist friend who’s never read the story before – just to see if it works like I want it to – and then a third draft which is now with the artist for drawing.
The artist has been working on finalising character designs, and just started the thumbnailing process, which I’m very excited about. We’re still some way from an announcement, but I might drop a few WIP images as the thing takes up shape.
I did realise in this entire process how much I love writing a story, and putting it together in images, on a comics page. The layering of idea and image in comics, the density available with this layering – these are very exciting to me, and I want to do more of it. I definitely want to start working on the next book once all the issues of this one are in first draft form.
A friend recently asked if my plan with this book was to go back to my old writing career. The answer is … no. I want to continue writing, and therefore be a writer, but I don’t want to be a jobbing writer and pick up gigs where I can. That’s what I did in my 20s, and I ended up working on a whole lot of stuff I didn’t believe in, and I don’t want that anymore.
Rather, I have some specific ideas that I want to execute – make around 5-10 books over the next couple of decades, that I really care about and have been mulling over for a long time – rather than take on client projects for the sake of it. If something irresistible comes up, sure, but I don’t believe I’ll go looking for projects, and I have no interest anymore in executing other people’s visions.[1]
I also wouldn’t be a good jobbing writer in terms of schedule. The second draft of Issue 1 of SEASIDE took me three full working days – just the second draft. I’m a slow writer, and I’m fine with that. I’m a slow letterer as well, and nobody has a problem with that.
This book has been four years in the making, and the next one will have, hopefully, a somewhat shorter timeline, but it’ll take as long as it needs to take, and I’m good with that. I hope to end up with a small but respectable bibliography filled entirely with books that I feel I gave my best to.
I did a lot of random stuff in the last few months that would usually go into these newsletters, but I can’t remember everything. I do have a fairly comprehensive accounting of everything I’ve been up to since 1st May, though, because of my sweet, sweet Bullet Journal. I just set it up for the month of July, and I can’t express how very useful this notebook has been for me as a combination organiser/journal. I’m going to wait till the end of this first notebook, or to hit six months, and then I’ll write about how I’ve customised it for my personal requirements.
Speaking of which, since the last newsletter, I made two posts on the blog:
- This one, on productivity systems and the Bullet Journal,
- and this one, on the British Raj-era reference book Hobson-Jobson.
My bullet journal tells me that in May, I celebrated K’s and my second anniversary together, I got a Doctor Who tattoo (a Russell T. Davies-drawn cartoon Dalek from A Writer’s Tale), I attended an analogue photography workshop, where I learnt how to develop my own film (funnily enough, everyone I mentioned this to at the time assumed I was learning to write movies), I designed the wordmark for the tabletop game studio a few of my friends started together (I did the lettering for the name of the studio, not the logo tile), and redesigned a game logo they’ll be revealing soon. I also co-judged the lettering section of the American Manga Awards wherein my talented colleague Ariana Maher and I shortlisted the final five nominees, and I took an eight-day writing break in which I wrote the aforementioned rough draft issues.
June, it seems, was largely spent at work and in writing, and reading a lot of old favourite Doctor Who novels. I also started thinking seriously about turning forty and having that mid-life crisis I mentioned up there. Takes a lot out of you, that. I’ve also been rewatching Deadwood, because it always helps me when I’m writing dialogue. My ritual on writing days is usually to read a few poems before I sit down, but in June, it’s been Deadwood.
I also found myself, over the last two months, retreating from online life and focussing on analogue life, i.e. real life, as they used to call it, where the people are. It’s been a blessing.
Quick links about interesting things:
- I really enjoyed this series of videos by Smarter Every Day about how film is made at the Kodak factory. It comes with additional videos (that I haven’t watched yet) on the chemistry of film and on quality control, and is a follow-up to an earlier video on developing film. Whether or not you’re a photographer, if you find yourself interested in the process, these make for a fun watch.
- Type designer Pooja Saxena has a new Kickstarter project currently going with Blaft Publications called India Street Lettering, which is a photo book of, you guessed it, street lettering in India. I’ve backed the project, and I think if you like lettering/typography of any stripe, it’s a must-buy.
That’s it for now. I’m currently investigating the idea of moving this blog off Wordpress and onto Ghost (Wordpress has gotten increasingly horrible in the two years I’ve had it running this blog, and, let’s face it, over the last 20 years, not to mention Matt Mullenweg’s recent clusterfuck), so the next newsletter you get might be from there. We’ll see.
Those tended to be a whole lot of my paying writing gigs back in my 20s, when I wasn’t writing book reviews. Someone would start a comics company on a whim and declare that they “had a story to tell”, except I’d be writing it and they’d never quite know what they wanted from it, so I’d be stuck revising it incessantly, or making it dumber because “our audience doesn’t get this kind of stuff, Aditya”, when there was no audience in the first place for us to disappoint. I even once ghost-wrote an eighth of an “inspirational autobiography” for a CEO type, who would, in our interview sessions, make cryptic pronouncements rather than tell me things that had happened to him, and then rejected my eventual outline because he couldn’t remember saying anything I’d written down. ↩︎