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.
If you’ve been following me on Twitter or through my newsletter, you might know that I’ve been writing a lot more these days, and particularly trying my hand at writing my own comics.
In that vein, I am extremely proud to present to you, a short comic written and lettered by me, with art by my friend and constant colleague Anand RK:
Late December, I’m not quite sure why, I felt moved to make some diary comics. I’d had a few conversations with artist friends, one of whom recommended that a good way to improve my drawing fast would be to make comics (these are not those, though). But mainly, I’d just finished making our “Monkey Man” comic, and wanted to continue marinating in comics thinking.
Anyway, I made four. I’m not sure I’ll be making more, but they were rather fun to make. Each took 20-30 minutes, and I got to improvise making comics – that subtle chemistry of text and image. Here you go:
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