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.
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.
When I last did one of these – sheesh, three months ago – I was writing them to figure out how I wanted to use the blog.
I feel closer to having it sorted out – it’s a good place to do series of posts about the samethought, for example, and post half-formed thoughts that you don’t particularly feel like following up on.
But once I stopped doing these updates, I realised they can fulfil a function other posts won’t. I don’t want to do dedicated posts with publishing updates – social media is better for that, since it’s far more “real time”, and a blog post on those lines would be instantly dated – and I have no place to self-indulgently talk about what I’ve been up to in life.
So that’s going to be the purpose of these going forward.
I’ve been reading more non-fiction these days, and I wanted to note a trend in the kind of books I’ve enjoyed most.
One is American Prometheus, the in-depth biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that formed the basis for Nolan’s recent film (which I thoroughly enjoyed). I’ve been listening to this one on audiobook on my evening walks.
The other one is Space Odyssey, a book by Michael Benson on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I finished reading last week in preparation for a rewatch of the movie.1 I expected this one to be 200-250 pages when I bought it on Kindle, and it turned out to be a hefty 600 pages – a good surprise.
It is early afternoon. Not raining yet, but the air is moist and rapidly cooling.
I’m sitting at the neighbourhood café by myself. I came here to write, but I’m avoiding it, nibbling on a sandwich while hunched over my phone.
There are three men at the next table – old friends catching up, it looks like. There’s music playing in my earphones, but I hear snippets – talk of family, traffic in Pune, and something about emigration to the United States.
These are two drawings that I made on the iPad ten months apart – one in August 2022, the other this June.
Titas Mandal/Stephanie Fox Lawrence.
I’ve always been fascinated by negative space in drawings. As a comics creator, I think negative space defines how we approach storytelling. It’s not just gaps in the art – how we draw the eye and where – negative space is fundamental to writing a comic too. Scott McCloud talks about this as closure – someone looking at the space between panels and filling in what happens there.
