We skipped a few weeks here because, well, I’m on holiday. But even before I was travelling (I’m in Vietnam at the moment, sitting cosy in our hotel room in Hanoi while K reads a book), I had a couple of weeks of mild back pain, and this time, I decided, for once, not to prioritise my writing over my health.
I also had to finish up my remaining work for the year before my vacation (December usually has early closing in comics, so you end up with a month’s worth of work to finish up in two weeks), but I wrapped this up in the first week, and decided to rest before travelling.
I did entertain the idea to finish up my big series outline/beat sheet on vacation, but once we got here, I figured it’s a vacation, and I’d rather be out and about in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi than sit in a café and write (though there are some wonderful cafés here and we’ve done some champion sitting around in them, usually with a book each).
I did, however, want to post a final blog/newsletter to close out the year before we start fully anew next year.
On the blog, I wrote the post about how I feel seven years since I quit smoking. This seems to have touched a lot of people – I got a lot of responses in support, as well as people telling me it helped them quit or stay quit. That was my hope in writing this, so I feel good about this.
Before I closed up for the year, I also started writing a post on why I feel Substack isn’t a great newsletter platform, from the point of view of a blogger/newsletter creator, but then people spoke up quite loudly about Substack’s whole Nazi problem (i.e. it’s got a bunch of them), and Hamish McKenzie made a doltish statement on the whole thing, and I figured what I wanted to say was pointless in the face of … all of that. My points were mostly technical, and I was thinking Substack’s transition into becoming a social media app/Medium. This is more important in the scale of things.
Looking back at this year of blogging/newsletter-mongering, I’m happy with the tweaks I made here. The site now feels like a more permanent home on the Internet as social media decays further. I’m happy that I integrated the blog and the newsletter, and it’s given me some fun ideas on things to write about in the future.
Apart from the post on smoking up there, here are some posts from this year that I was particularly happy with:
- I revised and posted my old lettering checklist – the way I think things through while lettering, particularly back when I was still learning, and especially when I had to finish up a lot of work fast. This is stuff that I feel always works.
- “Why You and Nobody Else?” – It’s been a year of slowing down and thinking hard about what I add to the world as a creative person. This one emerged out of conversations with some fellow writers and letterers.
- Is Writing Optional? – I went through a bit of a struggle earlier in the year about writing fiction (see the previous post), and this formed my conclusion on the topic, at least for now.
- We’re All Going to the World’s Fair – probably my film of the year.
- I wrote about my Doctor Who origin story.
Work-wise, I lettered w0rldtr33 #7 and The Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos #8 in the first week of December. No other lettering work after that – just a few revisions and prepping stuff for print. So I spent some time working on the new font.
Lettered previews of The One Hand #1 and The Six Fingers #1 are now up on Comicbook.com. Both begin release in February 2024. Don’t know why I posted them together though.
Also on the work front, I’m one of the nominees for Best Letterer in Comicbook.com’s Golden Issue Awards for 2023, alongside pals and esteemed colleagues Clayton Cowles, Becca Carey, Ariana Maher and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou.
Looking back at 2023, I think this was the best work year I’ve had since 2019, and for very different reasons. In 2019, I was just reaching the point where I wanted to be in my lettering career – my work had finally reached a quality I could be confident about, after seven years of professional lettering (three years as a full-timer for Graphic India and four years of freelancing). I had accumulated a group of consistent and high-quality collaborators who were making some of the best books in the industry, I was nominated for (and won a few) lettering awards, and people were writing about my work as something to be watched.
I made a mistake by trying to keep up the same amount and intensity of work for two more years – in 2020 and 2021. The mistake wasn’t taking on work, it was doing this while disregarding how the world was affecting me and everyone else at the time. At the end of 2020, I decided to slow down, but it took me a year-and-a-half to finally give myself the break that I needed, and not just the one I felt I deserved.
I wrote about this in the middle of last year, in a sort-of goodbye to lettering work. I had to write this because I wanted to hold myself accountable and do better for myself – if I didn’t “semi-retire” publicly, I knew I’d find an excuse to work myself to death again.
2023 was the year I saw the results of this, and the reason this was the best year since 2019 was that I felt proud of the work as well as how I’d balanced it with the rest of my life. I worked a lot, but I did several other things, all while feeling relaxed and in control of my schedule.
In 2019, I lettered 1,500 pages of comics. This grew to 2,400 in 2020 and then 2,800 in 2022. This was officially a lot. In 2022, largely on the basis of the back half of the year, I got this down to 1,600. This year was a delicious, restful, and overall satisfactory 1,100 pages. Just right. After being frustrated with myself for two-and-a-half years, it feels good to have learned to be kind to myself.
Qualitatively, I don’t think my lettering has gotten much better since 2019 – I’ve certainly gained more storytelling and graphical skills in the last four years, but I think I’m at a point where the shifts are incremental rather than paradigmatic. But being able to do fewer books, and being able to spend more time on them, being able to step away and come back as the work needs – it’s all led to much higher satisfaction with my work.
I’m very grateful for all my collaborators who’ve supported me and adjusted gracefully to my health issues over the last few years. Because of this, I’m in much better health now than I’ve been in a while, and I feel that shows in the work too. I’ve done some fantastic books this year – many of which you’ll only see next year – and I got to do them with the best people. As I said in my interview with David Harper – only bangers.
When I decided to cut down on my work, I had this fear that people might stop asking me to work with them. That was, other than my addictive tendencies, a big reason I’d said yes to far too many projects in previous years. The fear has been realised to some extent – particularly with corporate projects – but all my closest collaborators will still check in with me, and I still get more offers of work than I can handle. The deciding factor here is that every book I’ve done this year has in fact been one I’m incredibly proud of.
The other fear though was that people would stop paying attention to my work – being prolific, after all, is a great way to stay in the public eye – and that seems to have come true. This could be in part because I’m doing less work, and partly because I’m not on social media anymore. But I find that I don’t mind as much as I thought I would. I’ve always felt that my primary audience is my collaborators – those are the people I strive to make happy, and it’s their work that is embellished by mine – and they continue to be very happy with what I’ve been doing, and so do I. And secondly, I wanted to get out of the weekly grind and focus on work that I feel will last through the years. Whether I’ve managed to do that is something only time will tell.
The one thing I still miss about Twitter, having now not been on it for more than three months (more on this in my first post next year), is my film/tv and book threads. I started both of these to push myself to read more and watch more films, and they had really helped. I mean, I also miss the kind of spontaneous connections I used to have on Twitter, but those had largely dried up by this point, while the threads were still working. I enjoy the increased space of the blog where I can write thoughts that are more complex than can be fit into 280 characters, but there’s a little something-something about those threads that I don’t have anymore.
In any case, I went back to Twitter and counted the reading and watching I did this year so I’d have a tally, and here’s the final count:
- Prose books (fiction/non-fiction): 44
- Plays: 2
- Comics (ranging from single graphic novels to entire runs): 44
- Films: 107
- Seasons of TV: 18
I’m okay with this number. Ideally, I would’ve liked a book per week, and maybe 150-200 films, but 44 is close enough for the first, and I’ve become more picky about the circumstances in which I watch films and tv shows (in the cinema or on a good tv with decent sound – never on my laptop or on a small tv).
The funny one to me is the two plays. I’d airily made a deal with a friend that we’d read and discuss a play each week, and alas, that wasn’t to be – I was a fool, I tell you.
Like every year, I’d made myself a little goal card with my 2023 resolutions, and unlike every other year, when I would achieve some things and not achieve others, I achieved none of my goals for the year. Here they were:
K asked if I was upset about that, and the fact is, fuck no. After a difficult few years (both the pandemic and after), I’ve had a lovely year. From a point of severe burnout, my work has balanced out to where I feel relaxed, and I’ve started enjoying it again and looking forward to it every week. My health is better than it has been in a few years – my chronic pain levels are low-to-none for the first time in ages, and I’m developing something of a health routine, though, as before, it could be better. After some mental and emotional struggles due to circumstances beyond my control, I’m enjoying my life again, and I feel content with my lot – which used to be my default state, but hadn’t been for a while. My family is doing well, and we haven’t had to spend the kind of time on crisis management as we used to. And finally, this year gave me a wonderful, loving partner who brings me great joy. Knock on wood, but I did just fine this year.
I’ll have more goals for next year, but I think for the first time in a bit, I will have different goals rather than reiterating previous unfinished ones, because I’ve had time to rejuvenate and think about where I want things to go next.
I haven’t watched any movies after we came on vacation, but I did watch a few before that I hadn’t written up.
First up was May December, which I expected to either be a dark comedy or a poignant drama, but which in practice, fascinatingly, fell somewhere in between. It’s a very enjoyable film, with great performances by all three leads as well as the various walk-on parts, but I do wonder if it might have been better-served by picking a lane. This, I feel, is the reason the Internet has been referring to it as “camp”, when I think it’s nothing of the sort. But of course, a piece of work is not beholden to people’s interpretations of it, and it’s very likely the attempt to balance tones makes May December a more interesting film. I feel the script could’ve done a sharper job with the emotionally intense scenes – some of them feel oddly truncated – but given the straightforward punchline the film ends on, that might be beside the point. I would, however, like to point you to the real-life interview one of the later scenes is based on, and oh my god, I don’t think a film could capture the horror and the heartbreaking wrongness of something like this.
I rewatched the classic BBC tv event Ghostwatch. I remain fairly sceptical about how many people were fooled into thinking it was real, but I love how it plays with the television format in a similar way to a lot of Monty Python’s formal comedy used to. It’s using its medium as fully as it can, and that’s so much of the joy of it. I think the idea isn’t to actually dupe anyone into believing (for example) that ghosts are real, but to invite the audience to play a game and make them feel clever. It’s a joke the audience shares in, not a joke on the audience.
Since I’ve been doing some reading on old rock bands I used to love, I watched the documentary In the Court of the Crimson King by Toby Amies. It’s an entertaining film, particularly if you’re familiar with the band, but more than anything else, it’s a fascinating portrait of an English eccentric. There’s nobody else in rock music like Robert Fripp, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I watched Leave the World Behind on Netflix, directed by the guy who made Mr. Robot and produced by the Obamas, of all people. I have a split opinion of this film – I liked it, but I don’t think it works, all in all. It’s a taut, tense film when it’s in the realm of the uncanny – when you’re not sure what’s happening, when the characters are struggling to react appropriately to their environment. It stops working when the plot starts to unfold. The problem with that is twofold.
One is that if you guessed what’s happening early on, as I did, you’re waiting to see what the twist will be, and it’s late in the film that you learn that, hold on, what you thought was the setup was in fact the twist, which means much of the back half feels pointless.
The second problem is that parables don’t make for good stories (one can argue about whether parables for adults should even exist, but that’s a separate question), so if you begin with a taut horror theme and then switch to the parable, you’ve front-loaded the good bit and are then switching to the more flat, uninteresting part, which is a mystifying decision.
So, if you can ignore what the movie is “about”, there’s a lot to enjoy, like the aforementioned uncanny bits, the constantly unsettling music, some of the shots, the seemingly emergent horror, and the characters’ alienation with their environment. Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali are fun to watch, while Julia Roberts … well, she’s trying something. I don’t know if it’s good, but I’m happy she tries.
I finally watched Good Omens Season 2 because they announced that Season 3 is in fact happening. I’d heard mixed reports on this season – that it was an overlong lead-in to Season 3, that it’s slack and self-indulgent.
And, yeah, it’s all of those, but … I think that’s why I liked it?
So, here’s the thing. I really didn’t enjoy Good Omens Season 1. I know that puts me in the minority, and I think it’s at least partly because of how much I used to like the original novel. My feeling, however, was that the novel was very specific to its time, and if you were turning it into a tv show, you’d need to revamp a huge swathe of it. As I’ve mentioned with regard to the Sandman tv show, when it comes to adapting his own old material, I don’t think Gaiman is great at telling which parts need to stay and which need to go. Or, more accurately, he’s playing to a particular audience, and they largely like what he’s doing, it’s just that I’m not a part of that intended audience any longer. Perhaps I simply don’t think the original author of something needs to be doing the adapting, especially when the “institutional” status of the original, and the time elapsed since it was created, has likely simplified and calcified the author’s relationship with the thing.1
Good Omens Season 2, on the other hand, feels … relaxed. Like Gaiman’s finally getting to do something new, after ages, and he’s having a lark. While the Aziraphale/Crowley ship is what the audience is clamouring for, it’s also what Gaiman wants to do with the material – just have David Tennant (who continues to give great slouch) and Michael Sheen spending time together. It’s almost funny how blatantly Gaiman leans into the Coffeeshop AU approach for Season 2 (there’s a literal coffeeshop, even). It’s everything you wanted to happen to the characters, with little-to-no actual conflict, and it works. Of course, this is not life-changing tv. If anything, it’s farther from that than Season 1 was. But it’s enjoyable tv, and I don’t think I’ve been enjoying Gaiman’s tv work much. I’m also happy to see that Gaiman co-wrote this with John Finnemore, who’s been beavering away in radio for decades making his marvellous Souvenir Programme, and who more-than-deserves this bigger platform for his work.
Finally, in stuff I watched, I did end up watching the Doctor Who Specials. All four of them, in fact, because I’d warned K that on 26th December, I would be using a VPN to connect back to my Indian streaming platform and waste precious international roaming data on watching the new Ncuti Gatwa one. Because I simply must.
I quite enjoyed them, some more than others. I don’t find it very productive to talk about what I think of current Doctor Who, because you can’t yet the see the forest for the trees, and you don’t know which ones will matter (except when you watch something like The Day of the Doctor or Turn Left, of course). It’s also a very personal experience – one of the tenets of being a Doctor Who fan is that a lot of it is shit, but you love it anyway. RTD’s Doctor Who was rarely my Doctor Who, but it was always watchable, and I’m enjoying watching it now it’s back.
I had forgotten how daffy his writing for the series can be at times, though, and it was amusing to watch the internet be reminded of this in realtime. (He’s someone who can bring back the phrase “the DoctorDonna” with a straight face after, what, fifteen years? And not rethink it? Gotta admire the man’s lack of irony.)
I did also see some people be put off by how goofy “the Goblin Song” and surrounding plot details were, and … I’m sorry, that’s what Doctor Who is for, you know. Every episode doesn’t have to be for everybody – that one wasn’t for me, actually – but the fact that Doctor Who, with that large an audience, can fuck around and do a musical for a little bit, and it fits right in? That’s one of the best things about it.
I started reading the recent book The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk. Let me explain. It was unlikely that I was going to be convinced by a book that talks about identity politics from a centrist standpoint. But Cal Newport recommended it on his blog, and I’d seen it mentioned in a few other avenues that Mounk’s book was the “reasonable” version of this argument of identity politics being the new “political correctness gone mad”, and that he was in fact coming from a slightly left-leaning point of view, so I wanted to try it.
Fundamentally, it’s not good to be blind to the flaws of people just because they believe similar things as you. Plus, there is a tendency within individuals, though I haven’t personally seen a big trend, to allow their identity signifiers to limit their personhood, and I think that’s something worth arguing against.
So I started this book, and within twenty pages, I started smelling some grade-A bullshit wafting off the page. It began on page 1, which made big claims that would be extremely disturbing if they were true (spoiler: they’re not) but I kept giving Mounk the benefit of the doubt, letting him do his “I’m a reasonable person” spiel, till it began smelling rank. So when one of my favourite podcasts – If Books Could Kill, which is explicitly about how much bullshit there tends to be in popular social science books – did an episode on The Identity Trap, I paused my reading to listen to it, and then, as gingerly as I could, put the book down, never to pick it up again.
While on my Doctor Who trip, I read Rob Shearman’s Dalek novel, adapting his own (excellent) tv episode from Series 1, which was in turn adapted from his (incredibly good) Big Finish audio Jubilee. I’ve read a few other recent Target novelisations (as mentioned in my Doctor Who reminiscence here), and while I’d say I still enjoy Moffat’s The Day of the Doctor the most, Dalek might be the best one yet. Shearman is an effortless prose stylist, and he knows how a novel works better than the other two, as good storytellers as they might be. There are several lovely touches Dalek, with entire sections expanding on the backstories of minor characters, including a gorgeous one about the Dalek itself. If you enjoyed the tv episode, you owe it to yourself to read this.
El Sandifer also dropped TARDIS Eruditorum Vol. 8, which was my most looked-forward-to instalment, since much of it is about the Eighth Doctor Adventures. This is manifestly not El’s favourite era of Doctor Who, but she tries to take it on its own terms, and gamely makes her way through novels, comics as well as audio, before landing on the Ninth Doctor and the first series of the RTD era. This is Volume 8, so the deciding factor in my recommending this to you is … did you enjoy the first seven? If you did, then this is for you. On the other hand, f you don’t know what an “Eruditorum” is, but it sounds intriguing, you can read about it here.
I’ll be back in the new year, and I’ll most likely talk about my favourite things from my Vietnam trip, and then progress to “business as usual”, whatever that might mean for next year.
Until then, you folks all have a great New Year’s Eve, and a wonderful year ahead, okay? Bide well!
- I had a long discussion with a friend on this once where he advocated for “accuracy” in an adaptation, regardless of whether it fits the new medium or not, because he feels that’s what an adaptation is for, while I think the adaptation is the important – figuring out how to fit the new medium, and whether those bits come from the original is beside the point to me. If you want something that just ports the original to a new medium, I don’t see the point of the exercise, unless it’s accessibility, as with the Sandman audiobooks. ↩︎
