Since the weather is still warm, I’m experimenting with making a coffee soda for my 3 p.m. drink. I recently got the Fellow Prismo attachment for my AeroPress since it was on discount, and you can make approximately espresso-strength coffee with it (though it is not, as coffee enthusiasts will point out, an actual espresso drink). So I make a double shot and mix it up with ice and club soda with a couple of drops of Stevia, and it makes for a surprisingly refreshing drink.

Here’s the recipe I use to make my espresso-style shot. I tried a few, and this is the one I liked best, from the European Coffee Trip channel:

Grind 18g of coffee somewhere between the grind size you’d use for a pourover and French Press (I set it at 18 on my Baratza Encore).

Set up the AeroPress with the Prismo over a glass – make sure it’s a thick glass because you will be applying pressure over it. (Alternatively, use a regular coffee mug and then pour the coffee into a glass – whichever you prefer.) I also add a paper filter since the Prismo used by itself can leave some sludge at the bottom of your glass. Place the paper filter over the metal mesh and not under, as I’ve found out the hard way. (It jams up the pressure valve.)

Add your coffee. Pour 65ml of water just off the boil. Start the timer. Stir vigorously for 20 seconds.

Let it sit until the timer reaches 1:10. Then insert the plunger and plunge as fast as possible. (Don’t insert the plunger beforehand since that can trigger the Prismo’s pressure-activated valve.)

Enjoy!

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This week was light on work. I continued to stay away from the computer to let my hip injury heal, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the monsoon has begun, and I got soaked three times in one day – being cold and wet tends not to help old injuries.

But I’m nearly back to normal now. I’ll still take things easy for the next week, and work standing up as far as possible.

Work-wise, I sent in revisions for two issues of comics, delivered final files for my Harley Quinn story with Juni, and read and gave feedback on 80 pages of thumbnails for a graphic novel I’m lettering sometime next year.

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Writing-wise, I’ve cracked the second issue of the outline I’m rewriting. As I mentioned, I needed to fix the beginning of the story, which led to cascading changes that I had to figure out.

After years of resisting them, I’ve gained an appreciation for outlines this year, if only for comic books. For prose, I’d still prefer to write the whole thing and then throw out whatever doesn’t work, but a comic is such a strange beast made of plot, visuals and words that it helps me to have one thing nailed down before moving on to the next.

I also wrote a blog post about my return to writing as a pursuit, but it came out far more intimate than I’d expected, and I’m vacillating on whether to publish it as-is or to cut the personal stuff out. I probably just need to muster the courage to publish it as I wrote it, so you might see it in the next few days (that’s why nothing has been posted here since the last update).

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I forgot to note this earlier, but I lettered three short stories in DSTLRY’s upcoming The Devil’s Cut anthology:

• “What Happens Next” by Jamie McKelvie
• “Waiting to Die” by Ram V, Lee Garbett & Lee Loughridge
• “Spectregraph” by James Tynion IV & Christian Ward

All three were a delight to letter, as you might expect with such strong teams involved.

I’ve wanted to work with Jamie for ages, particularly since we were supposed to collaborate on his book The Killing Horizon which ended up being moved because of the pandemic and various other issues that Jamie speaks about in his newsletter. I think this collaboration turned out great.

It’s always a delight to work with Ram, as you might expect. We’ve been collaborating for eight years and have grown together in the industry. And so many years in, he still finds ways to challenge me as a creator, which is gratifying. For me, this five-pager feels of a spirit with the stories we did in Razorblades – similarly apocalyptic, but coming from a more scientific existentialist point of view than those. It was a pleasure lettering Lee Garbett’s work for the first time.

Spectregraph will be James’s first series for DSTLRY, and this is the prelude to that. So I got to work out the style I mean to use for the main series, and I got to create some strange and interesting SFX here to go with what Chris is doing with his art. I can’t wait to start lettering the rest of this one.

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On the personal front, as I mentioned, the hip injury is settling down, which is a positive development. I hope to start working out again soon.

I finished reading No Country for Old Men, which was great. I will be reading more McCarthy now that I’m comfortable with his writing style. I’ve heard that this was him in easy mode, and I can believe that. There were a few surprisingly sloppy bits – some of the writing when it comes to the drug bosses and the secretive cabal behind them read like a very middle-class writer’s idea of “badass” dialogue – but I’m going to chalk that up to McCarthy as a writer not being particularly comfortable with modernity. In any case, the only reason that stood out was that the remaining 99% of the book is pitched so perfectly.

I also finally finished A Clash of Kings, the second book of A Song of Ice and Fire. This book was where I’d abandoned the series in my first read a decade ago. I only came back because I loved Fire & Blood so much (I’m obsessed with that book) that I figured that ASoIaF couldn’t be as bad as I’d thought. The only problem is, it took me almost a year to finish this one because I’d stall out at nearly every Jon or Bran chapter and it’d take me weeks to pick up the book again.

Never mind, though, because the rest of the book is terrific – this melancholy, elegiac meditation on the nature of war and the brutality it inflicts on people. Also, the last fifth or so – Blackwater and its aftermath – is an absolute banger. Just perfect fantasy writing, from the scene with Sansa and Cersei in the Red Keep to Jon’s dilemma at the end to Theon’s comeuppance and, of course, the battle of the Blackwater itself. The man knows how to close a book.

Hopefully A Storm of Swords won’t take me as long to read. I’m reliably informed that this is the one where the story begins to diverge from the tv show, so I’m looking forward to unknown territory.

I watched a few movies this week:

Cam is a low-budget horror movie about a camgirl whose feed gets hijacked by someone who looks and acts exactly like her. It’s a great premise, and results in a very well-made, claustrophobic film. The climactic revelation didn’t impress me much, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the film in sum. There are several great setpieces and character touches, and it’s refreshingly non-judgmental of its main character’s profession.

I rewatched the original Blade Runner after more than a decade. (I watched the Final Cut this time, for anyone interested.) I’d watched it twice before but had not been very impressed, so this was my last attempt to like it before declaring an abiding incompatibility (which would be fine, of course – one can still respect art that one doesn’t like).

This time, something clicked. The languorous tone worked for me, the plot came through clearly, and while I still think there are some clumsy moments, and it’s a messy movie, it’s a glorious mess.

The world always felt lived-in, even on my first watch, but the story felt a lot more engaging this time. The literary approach to the characters – lots of gaps for the viewer to fill in, a lack of explanation for their motives – all felt impressively ahead of their time. You can also see why the studio baulked from letting it out in this form, but I’m glad this version is available.

I watched Nimona yesterday – I opened Netflix to watch something from my list, and it was on the front page, so I thought I might as well watch that now rather than later. And, I don’t quite know what I was expecting – I wanted to like it, honest – but it didn’t click for me.

There are some great moments, including some emotionally genuine sequences, and the animation is competent if rarely adventurous. But the entire story feels contrived, like each scene is happening not for itself, but so the writers can do the next thing.

Here’s what I said to my partner after watching it: as a writer watching someone else’s writing, my hope is that the writing will either feel organic enough that I lose myself in the story, or novel enough that I don’t know what to expect next. Nimona sadly didn’t give me either at any point in its runtime. It’s not bad, it’s just … eh.

Funnily enough, there was one moment when I was genuinely taken aback. I’d paused right after what I’d thought was the climax to get some water, and saw that there were something like 17 minutes left. That was a moment which made me feel, Okay, I don’t know what else they’re going to do for 12 minutes, and I perked up.

Turns out Nimona just has a very long end-credits sequence.

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This one gets its own section, because it’s a bit special, and there’s a story to go with it. It’s been four years, so I think I’m safe to tell it, given that it’s a nice story in the first place.

This week, I watched Stewart Lee’s new double-album comedy special that he released last year with the BBC – Snowflake/Tornado. I was concerned I might not enjoy it – after all, Lee’s been doing his thing for a while, and it’s a very specific thing.

But Snowflake/Tornado is fantastic – the man knows exactly what he’s doing on stage at any point and uses it to his advantage, in both old ways and new. There are things here he’s been doing for his entire career reaching an apotheosis, and new things which tell me that he is still restless and willing to try new ideas.

Anyway, that’s the version we got in 2022. But I watched an early version of this show in November 2019, live in London. That one I have no way to judge objectively, because I got to watch one of my comedy heroes live on stage and got to meet him after.

But it almost didn’t happen.

I visited the UK every year from 2017 to 2019 to attend the ThoughtBubble comics convention. I’d stay in London with my buddy Ram, catch up with friends, go to museums, and wander around one of my favourite cities in the world. (The pandemic put paid to that, though I hope to start again this year.)

And each time, I’d check if Stewart Lee was performing while I was there. I knew he did a lot of small shows in London to build up his recorded shows, and I was hoping to attend one of them.

In 2019, as it happened, he was performing while I was there, but when I went to buy tickets, they were sold out. I was bummed out, and I tweeted about it. I thought that would be the end of it.

But a week later, I got an email from one of Lee’s publicity people, offering me two complimentary tickets to one of his shows while I was there.

I was over the moon, to put it mildly.

This was the 2019 version of Snowflake/Tornado, a wonderful two-parter about Brexit, age, comedy, political correctness, and several other things.

I took Ram with me because he’d never seen a Stewart Lee show (thankfully, he thoroughly enjoyed it, and got exactly what Lee was doing), and after the show, we met him, and I thanked him for letting me attend his show. Thus far, I had assumed that since Lee is a known comics fan, I’d been offered those tickets partly because I work in comics, but when I introduced myself, he said, “Well, it seemed like an awfully long way to come to be disappointed.”

Which could not have been a more delightful response to get – he just wanted to be nice to a fan who’d come from very far away.

Suffice to say, I come away from that experience an even bigger fan. You hope that the people whose work you enjoy are nice people. It’s gratifying when they go above and beyond that to be kind.