After a very hot first half of the month, May has settled into surprisingly pleasant weather here in Pune – I don’t know if I can fully trust this weather, since our “summer” has had two weeks of daily rain. We might be about to have a strange mixed monsoon/late summer that we’ll encounter in a few weeks. Climate change!
Five months of the year are nearly done, and looking back, I feel like this has been a learning experience of a year.
I found a good balance of things last year, so I assumed this year would be the same without taking things as slowly and carefully as I did last year, and that didn’t really work out. Mind you, it’s been better than some years I’ve had, and the rest of the year looks far lighter and less stressful, so the warning came early this time.
I’ve said this before in my newsletter – we have a tendency to plan for best-case scenarios, to think we can hit that career-best day every single day. It’s far better to plan for your most average-performance day – that’s the one that’s the most repeatable, and you can try and improve on that, and cumulatively you’ll do far better than if you push yourself and have a crash and then repeat that pattern.
Work-wise, it was a light week. I did a bunch of revisions, delivered a couple of books, but only one full day of lettering. K and I took a three-day staycation to make up for the fact that we were still dealing with my dad’s health issues around our actual anniversary.
It’s rather lovely to take three days off in the middle of the week. I need to remember that more often.
Last week saw the release of Hellblazer: Dead in America #5, my final issue on the series. Blue Book: 1947 #4 by James Tynion IV and Michael Avon Oeming also contains a True Weird backup by John Harris Dunning and John Pearson that was lettered by me.
The release catalogue also shows the release of the Room Service one-shot by James Tynion IV, Elsa Charretier, Nick Filardi and me that was created in conjunction with James, Elsa and Pierre Colinet’s short film Room Service (which they released a couple of days ago and which was great), but I haven’t seen/heard that anywhere else, so I might be wrong on that one.
I managed to watch three movies this week:
Visions of Light is a documentary about cinematography from the early 1990s that features well-known Hollywood cinematographers commenting on the history of cinematography and on their work. A few years ago, some enterprising people on the internet “remastered” it by seeking out remastered versions of the movies referred to in it and then painstakingly creating a new version of the film using those. A friend alerted me to this freely available high-definition version, and I watched it last week.
It’s entirely possible that people familiar with the craft will learn nothing new from this, but for me, this was a veritable textbook on the use of light in film and photography. My favourite genre of non-fiction is reading/listening to/watching people who know a lot about something talk about their preferred subject, and this is exactly that.
In fact, I had to watch this over two evenings, because halfway through I realised my head was full to brimming with what I’d been listening to, and I couldn’t take in any more in the same sitting. You know how sometimes you go into hyperfocus on a subject and feel almost drunk on suddenly learning a lot about a subject in a very short duration? Just me? Well, it was like that.
I’ve been toying with the idea of learning photography properly because image-making is so closely tied to my work, and this gave me a lot of ideas to hang onto as I think about that.
Onibaba: K and I watched this on our staycation. It’s an incredible movie, beautifully shot in black-and-white, with stark images that sear themselves into your mind, and a piercing, melodramatic soundtrack to match. It’s my favourite kind of historical film – a bit like the ones Robert Eggers makes – which tries to take people from a different era on their own terms rather than making them palatable to a modern audience.
My one complaint would be that it’s discussed as a horror film, but that’s the wrong expectation to go in with – it’s a spooky, eerie drama, but it mainly works on a dramatic level, and barely as a scary movie. K and I kept waiting for “the scary bit”, and it never came.
Poochandi: A friend had recommended this a couple of years ago, and I came upon it on Netflix while looking for an Asian horror film. This is, of all things, a Tamil film made in Malaysia (which houses the second biggest population of Tamil people after India).
It has all the flaws of a low-budget first film – the performances are uneven, the writing and pacing is a bit rough, and I wouldn’t say that it holds together overall – but it also has all the energy of a film the creators felt they had to make. There are some great setpieces as well as genuinely spooky moments.
The film is strongest when it’s focusing on the characters and showing rather than telling, and to its credit, nearly every misjudged bit of over-explaining is balanced by some clever visual storytelling.
I found it worth a watch if only for the central horror concept, which (mild spoiler here, though I’m trying to keep it vague) has a similarly Lovecraftian approach to looking at Hindu mythology and estranging it enough to turn it into horror that Tumbbad had, and that I’ve heard Bramayugam has, though I haven’t watched that one yet. This certainly isn’t as good as Tumbbad, but it’s good to see this kind of homegrown horror that, like Junji Ito or Masaaki Nakayama’s manga, manages to process a Western influence into something uniquely of its own culture.
I’m currently reading a few long prose books, so I haven’t finished any this week, but I have been continuing my X-Men background reading by reading either acknowledged classics or runs whose creators I’m interested in.
X-Men: Days of Future Past consists of just two issues, but the collection I read starts from the very next issue after The Dark Phoenix Saga and goes on till the issue after Days of Future Past, because it’s part of Marvel’s Epic Collection line which is trying to collect classic series in order, but which is releasing out of order, starting with what they see as the important storylines.
Given that, the actual two-issue Days of Future Past story is pretty great – it’s concise, dense, and feels modern in how it approaches the storytelling. In fact, the film version feels downright flabby when you compare it to the leanness of this. The rest of the issues I’m less entranced by.
Something I was saying to K the other day was that most of Alan Moore – even his early work – reads great even now, but you only get a sense of how far ahead of his time he was with those only when you read other acclaimed comics from around that time.
Between Dark Phoenix Saga, God Loves: Man Kills and Days of Future Past, you get a sense of the things Claremont does well – he’s always got B- and C-plots going, he’s very willing to put himself into the work, and he’s got a great sense of loony science fiction ideas. But you also have the ponderous narration, the broad approach to voices and accents, the predilection for catchphrases, and a complete aversion to subtlety.
Given this was among the best of Moore’s competition (alongside stuff like Crisis on Infinite Earths, Hard-Travelling Heroes and Levitz’s Legion of Super-Heroes), you start getting a real sense of what an epochal genius we got in him.
X-Men: Schism comes smack-dab in the middle of Kieron Gillen’s run on Uncanny X-Men, which I’ve been reading this week. Rather than gloss over it, I thought I’d read the whole thing before moving on, since it’s available in handy collections.
The Prelude to Schism story is a strange one, written by Paul Jenkins seemingly without any briefing on what Schism itself was going to be. He makes a game attempt, writing four POV issues about Scott Summers/Cyclops as a character as he faces an unspecified crisis (whose non-specificity starts to feel strange and almost dreamlike by the end). The first of these is decent, from Xavier’s point-of-view, but the rest are tedious, except for short flashback scenes with Scott himself, because even here, Cyclops can’t help but be a genuinely fascinating character – a former child soldier so dedicated to his mission that he’ll sacrifice everything for it, including himself. The internal struggle that results from that repression, and the conflicts it puts him in are always fun to watch. Plus, that easily makes him the hottest X-Man.
Schism itself, written by Jason Aaron, also reads as inessential, but in different ways. There’s one page towards the end that the whole series is about, and the rest of the story consists of waffling till we get to that one page (you’ll know which one it is when you get to it). Honestly, after I read this, I realised I didn’t need to read it, because Gillen’s Regenesis issue is the only part of this story that feels necessary, and that issue is printed in his run as well.
I don’t regret reading this, though, because now I realise that even when the story is boring, the X-Men characters are pretty interesting to read about, unless the creators really shit the bed. So now I want to read all the big runs and at least the recent events, like Messiah Complex and AvX and so on.
Guys, I think I finally get the X-Men now.
On that note, I’ll see you next week.