Rejig
Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma
Updates
Links
Just Enough Kindness
So! It’s 2025, and I wanted to do the newsletter differently this year – consider it a new season, so to speak. There are, most likely, going to be more work updates – in terms of lettering and writing – so this newsletter will focus on those. I’m also going back to writing a short essay at the end of each one – the “soft self-help shit” as one of my friends used to call it – something I’ve been thinking about that might help people.
And I’m moving the book/film/tv reviews out of the newsletter into their own little post at the end of each month – so there’ll be twelve of those a year, and I’ll keep a running tally at the top of each one for how many books I read &c.
I will continue to send out posts via email that I feel are significant. The rest of them will live here on the blog and will be linked in each newsletter.
Big news this week was the announcement of my new book with Ram V, Anand RK and Mike Spicer at DC Black Label – Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma.
Here’s the pitch:
After living and dying his latest life, Shelley awakes with a new purpose to go along with his latest power: saving the universe. This version of Resurrection Man must battle across time and space against a sadistic Word War II internment camp captain who has inherited a twisted version of Shelley’s abilities. As the lines of cosmic order begin to blur, Mitch Shelley will literally die to save the universe, more than once.
We’ve been teasing this one for a while, and we’ve been working on it even longer. Ram first told me about this idea before the pandemic, I believe, and it was something he was excited enough by that it stuck around till now. In some ways, it harkens back to DC’s pre-Vertigo Mature Readers line in its approach to the character, but it also follows naturally from the original concept. Per Ram:
This is a story I’ve wanted to tell since I first started writing for DC. It’s lingered and stayed and got its hooks into my mind, and my love and excitement for the character and story has only grown. Part of the joy of writing comics, for me, is getting to reinvent, reimagine characters in a way that speaks to my own preoccupations and joys; with Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma, I hope readers will share in my excitement as Anand, Mike and Aditya and I tell a story of endless lifetimes, saving universes and falling in love, spanning the length of all existence.
In a fun move, the co-creator of Resurrection Man, Jackson “Butch” Guise, returns to provide a variant cover as well as one interior “synopsis” page per issue.
For myself, it’s thrilling to be back working with Ram and Anand – this is our fourth big collaboration, after Grafity’s Wall, Blue in Green and Radio Apocalypse, and our second time working together at DC, after our “Wight Witch” three-parter in Batman: Urban Legends.
I like to do something special for each of our projects – I hand-lettered the first two graphic novels we did – so I’ve created a new font based on my hand-lettering to letter this one, as you’ll see when we start posting lettered previews.
In lettering work, I delivered The Department of Truth #28 this week, and began work on lettering Resurrection Man #3 and w0rldtr33 #13.
In writing, I finished the final-ish outline for SEASIDE and sent it over to the editor and the prospective artist. The editor was very happy with it, as was the artist, so I’m going to start scripting it next week while the artist and I discuss approaches &c. Once they’re fully on-board, I might talk about who’s drawing it. Or I might just tease it.
I’m a bit nervous, since this is my first attempt at a novel-length project in about a decade, but it’s a good kind of nervousness, because I’m very excited about this story, and I can’t wait to flesh it out in words.
On the blog, I reposted one of my most personal essays – a reflection on Ice Cream Man #18 and my family history of men losing their words as they near death, originally posted in PanelxPanel magazine.
Links (some of these are left over from unsent Weeknotes last year):
- I just finished watching Steven Zaillian’s Ripley, and it was my favourite tv show I watched last year, and easily the best-photographed. This is a fun video analysing the way Ripley is shot from a photographic perspective.
- Fujifilm invited photographer Sam Abell to Japan for a promotional video which doubles as a retrospective on his photographic journey in Japan. Promo videos don’t get better than this.
- Loved this article on Lavinia Schulz and her masked dancers.
- A fine introductory essay on Jean Giraud a.k.a. Moebius and what makes him a visionary but also a deucedly odd one.
- Here’s a short clip from Craig Welch’s animated short film How Wings Are Attached to the Backs of Angels. You can watch the whole film here.
- Southasia Review of Books has a great interview with Vajra Chandrasekera, author of The Saint of Bright Doors and Rakesfall. I also liked this Tricycle Talks podcast with him about Buddhism and his essay UnBuddhism.
A friend and I were chatting the other day about my attention issues, and how I’d learned to deal with them over the decades, and I mentioned that I don’t think I could’ve found ways around them by believing what everyone around me kept telling me – that I was lazy.
I only managed to work around my specific issues with attention and procrastination by assuming that I wasn’t lazy, that there was something else going on, and furthermore, by being kind to myself whenever I failed – by allowing myself time to get up, rather than berating myself for being a failure.
My friend then pointed out how much easier things get when everyone around you is similarly kind to you. When people help you get where you want to go rather instead of telling you it’s your fault for not being there already. It just opens things up, having kind people in your life.
But this doesn’t apply only to productivity, it applies to everything in life. It’s easier to be yourself when people around you either enable it or, at least, aren’t unkind when you’re trying to be yourself.
For example, I learnt how to be queer in isolation – there was no one around me who was queer, or who I knew would react well to it (though thankfully, over the decades, all my friends have been wonderful when I did come out to them) – so I had to figure out what I was and what I wanted to be by myself, with the help of the internet. And I see young people now, who are so much more open about things, more willing to be their own queer selves, because they live in a far more affirmative culture than I do, a culture they’ve either created for themselves or received from people of my generation who realised they could pass on the kindness they wish they’d had growing up.
And this is all simply people, not the entirety of culture – it doesn’t require everyone around you to be kind about whatever you’re going through, it needs just enough people. People who model something for you, or who simply enable something that the rest of the culture doesn’t.
Just enough kindness.
