Aditya Bidikar is a comic-book letterer and occasional writer based in India.
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.
(more…)So Russell T. Davies wrote three specials to essentially close out the 2005 Doctor Who series before moving on to the Disney+ co-production with a new Season 1, and it struck me that each of the three 60th anniversary specials, consciously or unconsciously, mirror the three eras of modern Doctor Who.
(more…)(Content warning: This post describes the act of smoking several times, sometimes positively. If this might trigger or affect you emotionally, please prioritise yourself and feel free to skip this essay.)
30th September this year marked seven years since I quit smoking. When I completed 100 days of not smoking, I thought I’d learnt enough from the experience to write about it on my old blog, so I figure seven years marks a milestone to be celebrated.
(more…)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
(more…)Originally posted in my newsletter dated 3rd September 2023.
There is a tendency in commercial art to “create to brief”. That is, as a creative, you fulfil the brief you’ve been given, but don’t add much to it. If you work like this, your work is likely to be interchangeable with that of hundreds of other people. Presumably fun to experience once, but forgettable after that.
(more…)Hello, the Internet!
I’m writing this on a lazy Sunday afternoon. After a friend’s quiet birthday celebration yesterday, I was reminded that I am now old and, in fact, loving it.
(more…)I mentioned We’re All Going to the World’s Fair in my last post about The Deviant, but I wanted to expand on that. (SPOILERS AHEAD.)
(more…)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.
(more…)Due to many factors, including some physical ones, I’ve had to step away from doing much work in June – particularly in the back half.
In that time, I’ve been working on this outline for a comics mini-series (a four-issue horror story that I’ve codenamed SEASIDE). As I’ve written before, I finished around 80% of this before I stopped working on it, and only started back up in the last week of June.
In the meantime, I wrote two comics scripts and several blog posts and essays, so it’s not like I haven’t been writing. It’s more that I haven’t wanted to … take up space.
(more…)That’s half the year done! Wow, we made it.
It’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m on my second cup of coffee. I usually drink only two cups of coffee a day – at noon and 6 p.m. – because historically, my body has had a low tolerance for caffeine, but I just like coffee so much that I decided to experiment with adding one more cup at 3 p.m. Doing this might turn me into a jittery, overemotional mess, but we’ll get through it together, won’t we?