In 2019, something very exciting happened to Marvel’s X-Men comics, which, by that point, were sustaining themselves mostly with a readership that was already thoroughly invested in them, as is the case with a lot of corporate comics these days. (Also, at the time, Fox wasn’t owned by Disney, so Marvel wasn’t as invested in the X-Men, but they tend not to come out and admit that.)
First newsletter of 2024! I’m back home in Pune, settling in. We got back home early on the 5th, which turned out to be Friday, so I don’t have to officially start the year till Monday.
Since I have that breathing space, I wanted to reflect on the coming year before it properly begins.
Writing this one from my parents’ home. My mother’s taking a well-deserved vacation, so I’m taking care of my father while she’s away. The nicest thing about this is, of course, the constant presence of my cat Loki, who is currently asleep in the chair next to mine, having first arranged my messenger bag into a little bed.1
It’s a nice Saturday evening, K and I just got back from a long walk (like the proper old people we are), so I think it’s a good time to write this week’s update.
Here’s this week’s earworm, from the Killers of the Flower Moon trailer:
The Halluci Nation Ft. Black Bear – Stadium Pow Wow(more…)
Hello, the Internet! It’s Saturday afternoon, and K has forbidden me from humming “Voodoo Mama” from the Babylon soundtrack because it’ll inevitably get stuck in her head and she’ll keep wracking her brain about where it’s from. So instead, you can listen to it:
Comics pal and frequent collaborator James Tynion IV recently sent over an advance PDF of his upcoming horror comic The Deviant, created with artist Joshua Hixson and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. Since, I’ve come to realise, this blog can be whatever I want it to be, I thought I’d use this place to shill what I think is an excellent comic.
I’m writing this from my other favourite café – the one where I’m friends with the owners. One of them had just come back from a coffee conference, and gave me a packet of coffee to take home, and made me a delicious pourover of an as-yet-unlaunched coffee.
I’ve said many times over that I want to use my blog more, so I want to start doing that. All the stuff that I naturally post on Twitter? Let’s see if it can go here. I want to live here again, if I can.
I’ve been working on an essay about learning new things as an adult, and I pulled this up as an example of something that I absolutely needed to have at hand when I was starting out, but which I don’t need much anymore.
When I started out, there were too many lettering guidelines for me to just keep in my head, and I’d end up forgetting one thing or the other, so every time I finished lettering an issue, I’d go through the whole issue with this checklist next to it and fix my work one item at a time.