It’s been a nice week at Casa Bidikar.
I’ve finally started working out regularly again. I’d been waiting for my various chronic pains to recede enough, and I’d got myself a gym membership at the beginning of the month, but it took a while to find the bandwidth and motivation to start going regularly. My aim is to hit two functional training days and two cardio days per week minimum, and anything above that is gravy.
It helped that I didn’t have as much work as I’ve had for the last few months. Things (cautiously) seem to be falling into place.
I’m writing this one on my favourite keyboard – the Keychron K1 low-profile mechanical keyboard with brown switches – but it’s one that I’ve barely used since I bought it three years ago. The reason was: because it’s low-profile, and the desire was to make it slimmer, it doesn’t have a kickstand to change angles, and that meant I’d always get an ache in my wrist after using it.
It was a shame, because it’s a lovely keyboard, and also one of the more expensive ones I own (the import duty itself could’ve covered multiple other keyboards).
Finally, a couple of days ago, after toying with the idea of getting a wooden stand made for it, I had a brainwave and decided to check if one could get detachable feet for keyboards, and turns out you do!
So now it’s at a very comfortable angle, and I can write without worrying whether the book I used to prop my keyboard is going to slip.
I thought I’d write this as a public service for anyone else in the same position.
Unlike the previous week, I had a whole lot of books in stores last week.
- Dawnrunner #3, with Ram V, Evan Cagle and Dave Stewart
- DC Pride 2024, in which I lettered two stories – “Hello, Spaceboy” by Al Ewing and Stephen Byrne, and “Marasmius” by Gretchen Felker-Martin, Claire Roe and Tríona Farrell
- w0rldtree #10 with James Tynion IV, Fernando Blanco and Jordie Bellaire and Dylan Todd
- The Six Fingers #4 with Dan Watters, Sumit Kumar and Lee Loughridge and Tom Muller
Work-wise, I wrapped up ten pages of The Six Fingers #5 (I’m working off partials as Sumit finishes pages) and, after a style option was approved, I lettered the first 24 pages of the new unannounced OGN.
Links for the week:
- Kieron’s put together a list of his top 50 singles from 1954-1976. This is roughly what I’d call “my era” of music, and what I listened to the most in my teenage. But this was in India, and pre-broadband, so what you could listen to was largely down to luck, incredible patience with dial-up Internet, obsessive rabbit-hole reading of awfully coloured, hand-coded HTML pages, and scrimping your pocket money to buy CDs that you’d share between friends. So while half of Kieron’s list is essentially my canon, the other half is completely unfamiliar to me, and a lovely discovery. There’s a handy Spotify playlist link at the bottom too.
- The moral economy of the Shire.
- I haven’t watched this yet, but it can’t be less than interesting – A walk across Northampton with Iain Sinclair to visit Alan Moore.
- Alexander Chee on how to unlearn everything. An essay on “writing the other” that I have some thoughts on, but which is worth a read by itself.
- A grand unified theory of the AI hype cycle.
- This topic has been on my mind for a while – Is line editing a lost art?
- L. M. Sacasas on “the Apple ad” and a well-lived life.
My movie-watching has picked up in the last month or so, though I’m still not watching as many new films as I’d like.
While We Watched is an intense, gloomy documentary about Ravish Kumar, one of the few mainstream voices in Indian journalism who has consistently and clearly stood up to the Indian government, unlike the many foot soldiers of hate and Islamophobia that are the faces of most English-language news channels here. What you don’t see in the documentary, which ends in 2019 on a surprisingly hopeful note, is that NDTV, his channel, was eventually also taken over by an oligarch in 2022, and Kumar resigned from his Senior Director post the next day in protest.
The difference, as I call it, between what’s happening in India and the slow rise of fascism in the West is that in the West, there are loud liberal and left-leaning voices that are countering the hate, and a sizeable population that supports them. In India, the authoritarian/right-wing view is the majoritarian view. This is, fundamentally, a conservative country, and people like Ravish Kumar are getting rarer and rarer.
On the other hand, we just had our national elections, and while the current government will likely get a third term (the votes are being counted as I post this), it seems like this will be with a smaller margin than before. One wishes this would be because people are pushing back against hate, but more likely, this will be because of pervasive corruption and bad governance.
The other matter of hope is that voices against hate are starting to get louder than they have been in the last few years. People like Dhruv Rathee and Prem Panicker are continually fisking the lies flying around, independent reporters like Samdish Bhatia are presenting us with ground realities, and, as I discovered after I’d watched this documentary, Ravish Kumar has had a YouTube channel since 2022 that has now crossed 10 million subscribers. Those are just people in my reading, and in languages that I understand. There are hundreds more out there, braving the tide to bring us the truth. People, one hopes, are listening.
In the meantime, While We Watched is well worth your time, and available on MUBI.
Challengers: I joked on BlueSky that Challengers is Celine Song’s husband trying to tell her that he, too, wanted to fuck her hot ex just as much as she did. But let’s be honest, this movie absolutely rinses Past Lives in matters of complexity, depth of emotion portrayed, as well as artfulness. I also joked that this is an object lesson on why you should finish your threesomes, and that’s only partly said in jest, because thematically, the three leads are living out the rest of their lives suspended in the moment before the threesome that never happened – stuck in childhood, unable to grow up and take each other for who they are. Each of them imposes on the others a dream of who they want that person to be, and therefore who they want themselves to be.
And most of this is shown not through dialogue and conversation but through action – sinewy human bodies shot lovingly in movement. This is a horny movie, but thank god that unlike the previous era of horny movies – the 90s – this era is far from straight, because this movie would be so much less interesting if it was fully straight. All three corners of a triangle touch, Guadagnino told the writer as a justification to revise the script to be more gay, and we must thank him for it.
Nowhere is this queerness, and this willingness to talk through action, clearer than in the ending, which calls back to Zendaya’s pronouncement early in the film that real tennis is the small duration when the two players are speaking to each other through the game – it’s like love, she says. If it were written down, or shown through dialogue, it would come across as pat and a bit smug, but as shown – through silent action – it’s exhilarating.
Mad Max: Fury Road: Speaking of a movie that speaks through action, I rewatched Fury Road with K, because she’d never seen it, and we plan to go watch Furiosa sometime this week. This is a near-perfect action film, incredibly edited by Margaret Sixel, and a lesson in how, if you spend years tuning each scene to be as dense, complex yet visually clear as you can, a threadbare plot will not hold you back. This film is a triumph of construction and detail, and one I’ll never get tired of rewatching.
Nope: K also hadn’t watched Nope, so we watched it together Sunday. On my second watch, this is still a complete delight. You can tell in every moment that Jordan Peele absolutely loves film, and wants to use all aspects of filmmaking – performances, staging, art direction, lighting, VFX, sound design – to make the most film-laden film he can.
Further, this film is an entry in the genre that I’ve come to realise is my favourite – the eerie. Throughout the film, Peele uses a sense of estrangement/defamiliarisation to render the UAP that one might consider the antagonist of the movie into an uncanny, eerie entity, and nowhere is this clearer than in the final scene, where … well, if you haven’t seen the film, I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you, partly because the eeriness is aided by the way information is doled out through the film. Like I told K after we’d finished the movie, if you were given the premise in a straight sentence, you’d expect a very different movie. The art here is in making you think you’re watching one thing, but making you slowly realise that you’re in for something completely different, and it’s because you’ve been looking at the object at an angle rather than head-on.
This is also, I suppose, why the back half of the film didn’t work for some people – they weren’t happy with the story it turned out to be, and preferred the story they thought it was going to be. This is valid, of course, but it’s the precise reason I adored the movie.
Yes, Prime Minister Season 1: As a teenager, I was a member of the British Council Library in Pune, and spent a lot of time borrowing DVDs of old British tv shows and movies. Yes, Minister wasn’t one of my favourites, because I had no understanding of world politics and missed most of the jokes. Years later, though, I read the novelisations, which were presented as Jim Hacker’s diaries, and quite liked them.
Recently, since I finally got myself a BBC Player subscription (this isn’t the iPlayer, but a sub-channel on Amazon Prime that has selected BBC programmes), I figured I’d first watch everything I hadn’t seen – that being the Yes, Prime Minister series – and then rewatch the original at my leisure.
I’m not sure if my memory serves me right, but compared to the original, the characters seem a bit more flattened out in their roles, and more catchphrase-y than the original. The character of Hacker’s Private Secretary Bernard seems particularly diminished. Again, this might just be my memory, and perhaps this is how the character has always been portrayed.
However, the writing is still funny, and it’s always interesting to see who gets their way in which episode (it’s not always the bureaucrats). It does get repetitive after a while, and I definitely need a break after this season before I go on to the next, but I had a good time.
All-New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men (including The Battle of the Atom, The Trial of Jean Grey and The Black Vortex) by Brian Michael Bendis, Chris Bachalo, Stuart Immonen et al: Let me begin this by saying – the art on this run is gorgeous. This isn’t a given – there are too many prestigious comics I’ve read recently which start out with great art and then gently peter downwards as sales and budgets diminish. So it’s an achievement that, from the beginning to the end, this run looks very good.
Immonen, who draws All-New X-Men, is a journeyman when it comes to layouts and page design, but his understanding of anatomy and body language are pretty close to the top in superhero comics. Bachalo I last saw drawing Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, and he’s stayed restless, paring down his style from its busy heights in the late 90s, tuning it to highlight shapes and design. They are aided on occasion by Mahmud Asrar and Frazer Irving respectively, who are no slouches themselves. The only bit of art that doesn’t quite hit those stratospheric levels is the couple of issues during the Black Vortex drawn by Andrea Sorrentino, who has a great sense of page design, but whose heavily traced figures aren’t my personal jam.
Coming to the story – this is only the third long run written by Bendis that I’ve read. I read Alias and Daredevil a long time ago, and tried to reread Daredevil recently but failed. What I see as the flaws of that run are instructive in talking about his X-Men run as well.
First, we should concede that in the years between Daredevil and this, Bendis has very much learnt how to write comics as opposed to the slow-burn style of Daredevil that felt like it wanted to be tv. But in both, he begins with a strong concept – Daredevil being involuntarily unmasked to the world there, and here the younger versions of original five X-Men being brought into the present to see how they’ve gone wrong over the years – but the rest of the story seems to just … mark time till the ending. And in both cases, there is no actual ending. In Daredevil, we end with Matt Murdock in prison, waiting for Brubaker to continue the story, and in X-Men, we end with the original five still in the present, leaving it to someone else to wrap up the concept.
Here, we should consider the behind-the-scenes reality of publication. The “young X-Men brought to the present” was an idea from editorial, and Bendis has implied in interviews that his decision to leave the original five in the present was an act of writerly generosity because editorial as well as other creators wanted to continue playing with the idea. This is very possible. Bendis is aware that most readers are here for the characters and not for the storyteller, and it might be an honest decision that it would be better if, rather than finishing, the story continued with other writers. It’s a decision I don’t vibe with, personally, because I come to a run to read stories, and I like stories to end, if not always conclude.
We should also reckon with the fact that comics are a monthly business, and if anything, the way Bendis has approached his X-Men stories is to prioritise the monthly story over the overarching story. Because the curious fact is that the overarching story doesn’t just mark time, it barely moves ahead – apart from the conceit of All-New X-Men described above, Uncanny X-Men is about Scott Summers walking away from the Xavier school in order to lead a mutant revolution, and yet, there is never a revolution.
Bendis is very good at making you ask, every month, what will happen next, but intentionally or otherwise, he doesn’t explore the implications of the premise beyond low-key character beats. After a flash-bang beginning, the story taps its feet till it’s time to wrap up, and then it does so with whatever it has at hand, not with anything that has to do with the premise.
So Cyclops and his colleagues’ ongoing troubles controlling their powers, their war against a mysterious enemy attacking them with sentinels, end with the enemy revealed to be an alternate-universe future version of Beast, who hadn’t been part of this story at any point before this. And the young X-Men’s troubles end with a failed intervention for Beast, who brought the young heroes into the present.
All of that sounds bad, of course, but here’s the thing – I can’t deny that I had a good time reading this book. At every page turn, I wanted to know what happened next, and even if the revelation was disappointing (Dark Beast, or the needless return of the Brotherhood from The Battle of the Atom), there’d be something after that which might be enjoyable. I didn’t feel the same way about Bendis’s Daredevil, but I liked his X-Men, sometimes despite itself.
Does that remind you of someone? Bendis is, I have to say, writing a modern version of Chris Claremont’s X-Men here. There is constantly something going on, not everything will pay off, but you’ll always want to turn the page. And he does so through the characters’ interactions with each other, rather than their interactions with the story. It’s a soap opera in the truest sense of the word. Sure, I would’ve liked the overall story to make sense as well, but I’m starting to realise that no long run on the X-Men ends up being a unified story – at least none that I’ve read yet.
The big difference from the Claremont approach would be that Bendis’s X-Men are desperately un-horny. One of the best things about the X-Men as characters is that they’re constantly making terrible decisions for sex and romance, and Bendis’s run is almost arid when it comes to sex. Among the few hints are the Kitty Pride/Starlord long-distance courtship, Jean Grey’s fleeting interest in Beast, Iceman being revealed to be gay far too close to the end to be use_ful, and a budding Laura Kinney/Young Cyclops romance that goes nowhere. (Compare that to the very sexy _and emotionally effective Laura/Synch romance in Hickman’s X-Men.)
But the ways in which Bendis’s run works for me brings me to some thoughts about what I said last time around, that I get the X-Men now.
After I wrote that, a writer friend asked what suddenly worked for me about the X-Men now that hadn’t before, and why the X-Men rather than any other superhero characters.
With most characters in superhero comics, I tend to read stories written by creators. Pretty much no character is inherently interesting to me – I’ll read anything if a creator I like is working on it, and I’ll give it up after that is done. Which also means that the usual things that superhero fans care about – continuity, status quo, characters being “ruined” – don’t make a difference to me.
The one time I stopped reading a character because of a story decision rather than a creator change was when I stopped reading Spider-Man after One More Day – not because of the break in continuity, but because most of the Spider-Man I’d read before that were married Spidey stories, so this wasn’t a reset for me, it was a new status quo, and one I wasn’t interested in. That was why I picked up Renew Your Vows, even though it wasn’t the same continuity, and why I’m enjoying the current Ultimate Spider-Man.
Other than that, again, I read individual stories, however long they might be, and however “true” they might be. I don’t care if a version of a character is in-continuity, an “Ultimate” version, Black Label, Elseworlds, what have you. In fact, when I started reading superhero comics, Elseworlds were my favourite version of the comics, till I realised too many of them became about how the “real” version was better.
But the X-Men feels like one story that’s been going from … maybe not the Lee/Kirby version, but from Giant-Size X-Men till date, and it’s the fact that it’s been going on so long that makes it work, despite so many different creators putting their spin on things.
But you could say that’s the case for every other Marvel/DC character, and that would be true.
But here’s the thing – with a single character, over time, you can see the creators’ handprints, as the character goes through different versions – either over the decades as different styles come into vogue, or, like any continuing story, the character undergoes concept drift. It doesn’t feel like character development, it feels like different people writing a character, which is what it is.
The X-Men, on the other hand, are a true ensemble. Unlike the JLA or the Avengers, where most of the characters have their individual books, the X-Men books are where you see all these characters. And that makes the difference. In an ensemble, you’re only ever getting glimpses of characters, and they’re always positioned against each other. They’re nodes in a matrix (which is, of course, what characters always are in relation to a story, it’s just more obvious in some instances). And the cool thing about an ensemble is that you can put them in any situation, as long they’re together, they’ll still work even if individual characters have drifted. It’s still just a preference, but there’s a meaningful difference here for me.
Timothy Olyphant was once talking about David Milch’s writing on Deadwood, and he said (I’m paraphrasing) that the reason Deadwood could only work on tv was that Milch’s idea of drama was long-form character development, and you can’t do that in movies.
I’m not comparing the X-Men to fucking Deadwood, but these characters are interesting because they’re constantly interacting with each other over decades – Cyclops is probably my favourite character in these books, and his 50-year development is interesting because you see him rubbing up against Xavier, Jean Grey, Emma Frost, Beast and Wolverine on the reg. And Kieron Gillen once pointed that Cyclops was an example of long-form character development that couldn’t have been done by one writer – it’s incremental, over decades, different people picking up different aspects of him and running with them.
This is why I don’t care about a Wolverine comic by default, because it’d likely take place away from the X-Men, and I don’t care about that (unless Barry Windsor Smith is drawing it). But I like to read Wolverine and Cyclops chafing against each other, or Wolverine warning Beast or Xavier (as applicable) about the path they’re planning to walk down.
(This also tells you the difference between the X-Men and the JLA or the Avengers as characters – for any member of the latter two groups, the “primary” version of the character will be the one currently in that character’s solo book, e.g. Iron Man, Superman, Captain America, but an X-Men solo book will reflect the version of the character currently appearing in the main X-Men book.)
Of course, this yes-anding leads to some incredibly convoluted histories like that of Madelyne Pryor or Cable or even Jean Grey. But it also leads to these characters feeling lived-in, because you don’t just get to know them, you get to know what these twenty people close to them also think about them, even if this is messy at the best of times.
I think this is what people mean when they say they like a character or they want to follow a character – that they’ll find that character interesting even when they’re in bad stories. And for me, it works with this whole set of people rather than any individual among them.
At least for now. It’s entirely possible I’ll get bored with the X-Men next month. We’ll see.
