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Been a while since the last one of these. They’re not on any kind of schedule this year, so I’m not late, but I like consistency, and it’d be nice to get back to posting these regularly-ish.
For a week or so in February, I was busy with the Pune International Film Festival (more on this below), and before and after, I was busy covering up on things that were supposed to be done in that time. March has been easier, but it’s also suddenly gotten much hotter in India, and that tends to sap my productivity big-time. You win some, you lose some.
Work-wise, I lettered two books in February – The Department of Truth #29, and Resurrection Man #4. My slate this year has been a bit more sparse than I’d expected – I still anticipate that a lot of the books that were supposed to come in January and February will be coming later in the year, so I’m not rushing to fill the space (though I did pick up a few shorts here and there). Furthermore, I’m happy to be occupying my days with writing, drawing and photography, so I’m taking it as a blessing.
There is a small portion of my mind – the one trained on a culture of scarcity and hustle – that thinks I should be picking up more work, but I’m trying my best to quiet it down.
In March, I worked on the stylesheet for Through Red Windows, with Ram V and Joëlle Jones, and I’m currently lettering the first issue.
I’m also lettering the first of the aforementioned shorts, which I can’t discuss yet.
The big milestone in the last little while has been in terms of writing. If you’ve followed me for a long time, you’ll know that I’ve been working on my first long-form comic (codenamed SEASIDE). I’m happy to report that I finished scripting issue 1, and I’m now halfway through issue 2.
The original plan was to try and finish scripting all four issues (at least in first draft form) by the end of March. That’s looking a bit difficult at the moment, given that I took two weeks of February off from writing, but I’m still hoping I’ll be done with a draft of the whole thing, say, two weeks into April.
In the meantime, after I take a second look at issue 1, this will go to the editor, Eric Harburn, and we’ll start hammering the book into shape.
It’s a complex book, and I foresee a whole lot of figuring out the structure and rewriting things to fit, but I have to say I’m very happy with what I’ve written so far, and the book is starting to feel real.
This is also helped by the fact that I’ve started getting character designs from the artist, and I can’t wait to share snippets of you as we get further into the process.
Since the last newsletter, we’ve seen the release of w0rldtr33 #13, by James Tynion IV, Fernando Blanco, Jordie Bellaire and me, and The Department of Truth #28 by James, Martin Simonds and me.
Among books by my friends, Monkey Meat: The Summer Batch by Juni Ba started serialising two weeks ago, and Assorted Crisis Events by Deniz Camp, Eric Zawadzki, Jordie Bellaire and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou started last week.
Something fun I got to do last month. I’ve been listening to and enjoying Kieron Gillen’s Decompressed podcast for years, which just came back with Season 4. To promote the release of The Power Fantasy Vol. 1, Kieron’s been interviewing the creative team of TPF, and because he didn’t want to go too meta and interview himself, he asked if I’d like to interview him.
I’m a big fan of Kieron’s work, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying The Power Fantasy (I even wrote about it here), so of course I said yes.
The result was a two-hour-long interview with Kieron about his process, his approach to comics, and how he works with a team, and we digressed and chatted about community, promotion, and even went on a death-of-the-author tangent. You can listen to the whole thing here.
Links for the … er … month, I guess?
- During our discussion about comics promotion during the implosion of social media, Kieron mentioned this Off-Panel interview with Kenny Meyers, who runs the marketing tool Bindings, as well as the upcoming digital-store-cum-social-media site for comics called Sweet Shop, and it’s well worth a listen.
- The Sandip Roy show continues to bring up thorny topics in Indian politics and handling them with grace. I really enjoyed this episode about the religious significance of the Indian cow and how this impacts dairy production and animal slaughter.
- Frequent readers will know I have a fondness for interviews with Vajra Chandrasekera, and this one at Big Echo is no exception. Vajra’s recent novelette “The Limner Wrings His Hands” is also now free to read online.
- I haven’t watched the recent Bollywood film Superboys of Malegaon, about the no-budget bootleg film production industry that popped up in the small town of Malegaon in the 90s, but I’m a big fan of the documentary it’s based on, Supermen of Malegaon, which is free to watch on YouTube.
- El Sandifer continues to release entire books as blog posts. This time, she takes a swerve in her Last War in Albion project to write a book-length essay about Sandman and Neil Gaiman in the new light of the accusations against him. It’s a hard read, but if you can handle that, it’s a worthy read.
This year, I attended my first film festival – the Pune International Film Festival – in almost two decades. Since I moved back to Pune, I was always too busy to attend, and for the last couple of years when I wasn’t, I’d always find out that PIFF had already happened. This time, I’d been tracking it for months to make sure I wouldn’t miss it, and it helped that my friend Omkar, who was my constant companion for this year’s festival, was editing their catalogue.
The first time I attended PIFF was the 3rd edition, back in 2005. I was in college at the time, and I was more than happy to skip out to watch films all day. Over the weeklong festival, I watched 30 films in their entirety, and left 6 more midway. By the time it was done, my brain was fried, but it had also expanded – I had been given the chance to watch stories from all around the world, stories I hadn’t thought existed, having been a science fiction nerd thus far without much interest in the literary fiction of the world.
I still remember some of those films – Amu, Klorox, Ammonia and Coffee, Kontroll, Black Friday – vividly, and I even got to rewatch Fitzcarraldo on a big screen, having only seen it before on a VHS on a CRT tv at the Max Mueller Bhavan. I also watched a fair number of bad films, but that was the inherent risk of choosing films live, without the help of internet research.
I’ve loved films most of my life, but always as a storytelling medium among others – comics obviously remains my favourite, and back then it was followed by novels, but watching films from around the world, made under various circumstances, after mostly being limited to Bollywood and Hollywood, was a revelation. I got to understand something of the magic that cinema cast on the public in those days, though for me it came from a different place – that of story rather than celebrity charisma.
After that, I attended the festival on-and-off till 2010, when I moved to Kolkata. After the first concentrated shock, I had other priorities – college, part-time jobs, comics – and I only watched 5-6 films each time, though in 2008, a friend and I managed to take time off and watch 15 films, and I ran into Anurag Kashyap, who was a judge that year, and told him how much his film No Smoking had meant to me.
For the last couple of years, though, I’ve been reevaluating what I appreciate about film. As a storytelling medium, it has the advantage of involving real people (over written media like prose and comics, I mean), but that’s true with television as well, and these days, television is nearly as well-produced as good cinema. So what’s so special about film?
Here, I think the nature of it being a bound medium – both by time and by the frame – allows it a certain unity that television doesn’t have.1 That unity, then allows a freedom of form. The fact that these shots and scenes have been placed together in this order makes them belong together – the human mind will find a narrative – and this gives you a latitude that the split nature of television doesn’t afford you. I wrote something similar about novels here, and I think film has this too.
This is why I try not to watch a film with breaks in the middle, however long the film itself might be. It is a unified piece of work that should be experienced as such.
This is the point of view I took into the festival this time. But there is another thing. In my teens and 20s, I loved meta storytelling – fourth-wall breaking, fictional awareness, authorial intrusion and so on – but by the time I got to my 30s, I’d lost some of my respect for it. Comics, you see, is formally primed for stuff like that, and we’ve had a lot of it – Grant Morrison’s Animal Man (“I can see you”, and of course, the writer’s appearance in the final issue) and Seven Soldiers for just two examples. We’ve also had a whole lot of “turn the page on its side”, characters trapped in the white space between panels. Stuff like that.
Comics aren’t naturally an immersive medium, so it’s easy to do this stuff without breaking the story-world, so while I still thought it was fun, it’s just that – fun. It doesn’t usually say much. And that’s the feeling I had about film, where I felt this stuff adds an element of play, but not much else.
Omkar and I had a lot of discussion about this, particularly with respect to Jafar Panahi’s films, such as Taxi Tehran or Mirror, and even Three Faces and This Is Not a Film, where he plays himself. Panahi’s usually using the tool to make a point, but I wasn’t always sure that it improved the story beyond making the membrane between film and reality thinner.
But over the course of the festival, I watched 8 films that played with form in some way or the other, and I watched 12 straightforward drama films, and throughout, Omkar, me, and the friends who joined us for a variety of these films, discussed the nature of film, and the camera. For one thing, when you watch 12 dramas over a week, you start to feel the limitations of pure drama as medium to provoke emotion – the seams start to show, the manipulation, and the artifice. For another, watching so many formal experiments with people who understand the medium allows you to reconsider your biases.
In Leos Carax’s essay film It’s Not Me, he talks about the gaze of the camera. During the era of studio film, the camera was God’s gaze within the frame of the film. But now, if you saw a shot of someone walking, and a camera films them, moving with them, you’d be much more likely to assume this is their partner filming them, because that’s what cameras do these days.
Two other films that played with the camera and form were Narges Kalhor’s Shahid and Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act. Shahid follows an actress playing Kalhor as she reenacts the director’s attempt to have her name changed while a refugee, but the film keeps falling apart and restarting, and the director herself becomes a part of the film as it is being made. I argued that the formal play here was a way for the director to avoid being fully vulnerable, while my friends argued that it made the film more real.
I leaned on my experience in comics – formal play adds a level of artificiality that takes away from the “realness” of a story, because it breaks immersion. And here’s where something clicked. My friends, most of whom work in film, argued that rather than the meta elements breaking the reality of the film, they allowed reality to break into the film. Their point here, framed by Omkar, is that cameras are a part of reality now – we talk to cameras constantly, whether live or through recording. Our reality is consistently mediated by cameras, and the camera is simply one layer in the overall reality.
And he’s right. And this is a way in which film is different from comics and novels – film actually involves people within the medium. This argument wouldn’t apply to a written medium – it applies to film, and I had to see it on its own terms rather than just another medium for story and narrative.
This was a realisation that had been building for me, but it completed over the course of the festival, particularly with my final film – The Second Act. The Second Act is pure formal play. There are no real characters here, only actors, and the “story” being told is thrown out about five minutes in. What it is is an exploration of film as a medium and as a craft in the current moment. It is far more fascinated by the mechanics of film, including its making, than it is with creating a world within the film itself. But it also explores the idea of layers of reality, and the mediation of the camera. It is, if anything, a humorous essay posing as a fiction film. And while essayistic, didactic storytelling makes for bad narratives, the fact that this is not a narrative, but instead something else, but still something unified by the nature of being a film, drove the point home for me.
Of course, I’m simplifying all of this – there are so many other factors, so many other films involved in this realisation, as well as the fact that I’m writing a lot more these days and trying to contend with the function and craft of writing, which is why this stuff has been on my mind in the first place.
Plus, other films in the festival contributed to this – Caught By the Tide, which assembles a story out of stock footage, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which integrates real phone footage of the hijab protests in Iran (and happens to be one of the bravest acts of film-making I have experienced) – but more on them later. While narrative and stories are wonderful and essential to us, there is more to thinking about a film than just “this was the story, and here’s how I felt it was told”. Film is a part of our experience of the world, and the world changes how film is experienced.
We are of course in a time when mainstream cinema is diminishing both in importance and in its ability to reflect the world. This is where non-mainstream cinema, be it experimental or merely independent, becomes a far better mode to feel where the world is right now.
Every time I experience a work of art, my hope is that it changes me in some way, that I emerge a new person. And that’s something that happened this year. What more could I ask for.
- And you can see modern television struggling with this unity – as more shows try and do isolated episodes within a larger serialised narrative, such as The Last of Us, Barry or, recently, Severance Season 2. But unlike comics, where its history allows it to accommodate both single-issue narrative and multi-issue stories within a larger narrative, television finds it difficult to square the circle. Television fares better as an either-or – entirely episodic sitcoms or genre shows (whether it be procedurals or episodic-shows-building-to-a-big-story like Buffy or Lost), episodic dramas like The Sopranos or Mad Men, or a fully serialised drama that plays out like a long film. The mixed approach is coveted as a prize, but rarely achieved. ↩︎