It’s been an interesting week here in India. For one, Pune has been bombarded by torrential rains all of last week, which is usual after a cyclone hits the east coast of India, as Remal did at the end of May.
Things came to a head on Saturday, when Pune had the worst rainfall it’s seen in June since 1991. Several parts of Pune were flooded, a friend was stuck in traffic for four hours getting home, my parents’ house flooded (only a bit, thankfully), and a video went viral of a man floating down a busy road on a foam mattress.
For another thing, the Indian election results are out, and the BJP has won once again, but with a much smaller margin, to the point where it had to form a coalition government. As several commentators have said, you could see this as a Pyrrhic victory, or as the loss of a mandate. What sticks with me is a comment from Ravish Kumar (whom I talked about last week) in which he said that usually an election ends with the public giving the country a government, this time the public gave the country an opposition. More on this in the links below.
I had a couple of weird dreams this week.
One was a sequel to a dream I’d had last week, right after we’d decided that my dad needed to go to the hospital for a checkup. In it, I was a teenager, and living with my parents in our old home. I was sweeping something off the bed, and I realised there was a snake on the bed – a very slender green snake with a prominent head. Instead of catching it by its neck, I picked it up by the tail and swung it out of the window, only to realise that the house was covered in snakes, so I went about whirling them out as fast as I could. My father joined me – in the dream he was younger and much healthier – and tried to help, but the first snake he picked up was a brown one, which turned out to be venomous and bit him.
The sequel came this week, the night after I’d taken my dad for the checkup we’d scheduled last week. This time, I dreamt I was in Mumbai, at my grandma’s house, and I was chilling with my uncle (who’s now passed), when I noticed, once again, that the room we were in was infested with snakes – the same beautiful green ones. I tried to get rid of them, for some reason using the same tail-first method, and the first one I picked up bit me in the face.
The funny thing to me about all this is that I adore snakes, and wanted to have one as a pet when I was a teenager.
The other dream this week was much more pointed. I was consulting a time management expert to figure out how I could psychologically convince myself to work less, because I didn’t want to work myself to death. I felt happy when I woke up, because I’m more-or-less at my target work-per-month ratio, and I’ll be doing even better in a couple of months, but it tells you how much this has been on my mind.
Work this week was cooking up styles for a new DC project with Ram that he’s been hinting at which hasn’t been announced yet. It’s going to blow your mind, folks. This is also what I’d been developing the new font for (to the point where it’s named after the book), and thankfully everyone on the team plus editorial liked the way it looked paired with the art by the amazing Anand RK.
Other than that, I wrapped up lettering for The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos #12.
I had one book on release this week – Robin: The Boy Wonder #2 with Juni Ba and Chris O’Halloran, edited by Chris Conroy.
But other than that, I want to point you to two books that I’m not involved in but which two of my close friends in comics have on release.
First is Precious Metal #1 by Darcy van Poelgeest, Ian Bertram, Matt Hollingsworth, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou and Ben Didier. Precious Metal is Darcy and Ian’s follow-up to Little Bird, which is a book I was very proud to be a part of. I was originally involved in Precious Metal, to the point where I lettered a rough draft of #1 over inks, but this was when I was still going through some health issues, and I had to ultimately back out. Thankfully my pal Hass stepped in and has done a bang-up job (he’s done his own thing with the lettering, as is only right). I’ve seen the art, read the story, and this is shaping up to be as good a book if not a better one than Little Bird, so if you liked Little Bird, you owe it to yourself to check it out.
Next, my friend Deniz Camp is now writing the ongoing Ultimates series for Marvel. He sent me the first issue to read before final order cut-off, but I’ve been so outside the social media hype cycle that I forgot to talk about it back then. But now, Ultimates #1, by Deniz Camp, Juan Frigeri, Federico Blee and VC’s Travis Lanham is out, and I can tell you that this is my platonic ideal of a modern superhero comic. As with his last book for Marvel, Children of the Vault, Deniz’s approach remains a distillation of everything that’s cool about Grant Morrison’s 90s work, Jonathan Hickman’s “big ideas” style, combined with Deniz’s own empathetic feel for the world beyond Western hegemony. Ultimates is a rollicking read, but it’s also one of the smartest books you’ll read this week.
Writing-wise, I forgot to update you folks last week on CODENAME SEASIDE – I finished the outline/treatment (this was Draft 5) and sent it over to my beta readers and my prospective editor. Initial responses are encouraging, and I’ll be having a call with my editor about it soon before she decides if she’ll take on the project as I start scripting it. In the meantime, I’m working on a couple of shorter comics that I’m writing for fun. (They are thematically linked, so hopefully they might turn into something, but for now, they’re just little experiments in writing.)
I also took delivery of the comps for Harley Quinn: Black + White + Redder which includes the short comic I made with Juni Ba, and it feels great to have something I’ve written packaged along with so many cool creators.
Links for the week:
- Like a lot of people, the iPad is very nearly my favourite device to use, if not for certain limitations that send me running back to the Mac. Federico Viticci, who’s been reporting on iPads for more than a decade, rounds up what remains lacking in the iPad right now.
- Sarayu Pani with a concise but sharp summarisation of what this year’s Indian election results mean for us.
- Prem Panicker has a more detailed commentary.
- Men’s Health magazine interviewed 45 comics creators about comics that they love or that they’d recommend to new readers. It’s a great list for any reader to get started with, or to fill the holes in your reading.
- For the last couple of years, I’ve quite enjoyed having slow tv on to accompany my writing. My favourite sub-genre is train journeys, perhaps because I have a nostalgia for the train journeys of my childhood, and I love looking at the world go by as I think about what to write. I told K about this last week (she thought it was a bit weird) and sent her some of my favourites – you might want to have them too. 10 hours to the Norwegian Arctic Circle, the Serra Verde Express, Brazil and the same one without rain.
- Sam Kriss on how to live without your smartphone.
- I have no idea what Scott Wampler looked like – I knew him only as a voice on one of my favourite podcasts, the Kingcast, where he and co-host Eric Vespe would talk to a guest about Stephen King’s projects. They differentiated themselves by having a much higher-profile guest list than you’d expect from a fancast, but this was down to the hosts as well – Vespe’s sincerity paired well with Wampler’s acerbic wit and slightly anarchic sense of propriety. I found out what he looked like when I saw the news of his passing on BlueSky. Vespe and some of Wampler’s closest friends got together for a remembrance of their friend, and it’s an incredibly touching, funny, and sometimes-tearjerking recording. It feels a bit voyeuristic to look in on someone’s grief, but it’s an act of courage on their part, and it gives a sense of who this person was, and the impact he had on the people around him. It’s a hard listen, but if you were a fan, worth listening to. Here’s one of these friends with an obituary characteristic of Wampler.
Comics read this week –
SHIELD by Jonathan Hickman & Dustin Weaver: This begins as something like Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle but for the Marvel universe – an ambitious attempt to pull together a science-fiction history of the MU’s present through the ages – but by the end, it’s content to be smash-’em-up adventure fiction with a bunch of science icons that all fall under the Type-A male personalities Hickman tends to favour. This is a pity, since it could’ve been more.
Where SHIELD truly stands out, though, is in the artwork. Dustin Weaver is a successor of the Jim Lee/Marc Silvestri school of art, but he combines that with a profound love for structure and architecture, and a readiness to draw the ever-living fuck out of every single panel. The result is a book where you could stare at almost every page and continue to get something out of it, or just gaze in awe at the fact that someone thought of all those things and decided to spend all their time drawing them. Worth it just for the art, I tell you.
Death of X by Jeff Lemire, Charles Soule & Aaron Kuder: This was part of Marvel’s misguided attempt to Make the Inhumans Happen, but I read it because it bridged the gap between Bendis’s X-Men era and the next one, spearheaded by Lemire and others. The story is … fine. There’s a lot going on, for sure, and though for a while you think they’re wrecking the character of Cyclops, it’s a bait-and-switch, and they kind of wreck Emma Frost instead.
But the story’s the sideshow. This book made me finally realise why people rate Aaron Kuder so highly as an artist. Along with Morry Hollowell, Kuder gives a masterclass of how to construct pages and how to use rendering for storytelling (and Hollowell is right alongside him with some very innovative use of colour holds). I could frame and mount half the pages in this book. I’ve read a few of Kuder’s recent books and not been quite as impressed, but this era of his work is absolutely undeniable. I need to seek out more stuff he did around this time.
All-New X-Men: Inevitable by Dennis Hopeless and Mark Bagley: This continues the “original X-Men stuck in the present” storyline initiated by Bendis. You remember how I criticised some of Bendis’s storytelling choices in that one? Well, this perfectly competent run made me appreciate how much juggling Bendis was able to do with his massive cast of characters across multiple series. He kept things happening for everyone, rarely forgot to give even minor characters a panel or two to shine, had snappy dialogue which felt right for everyone, and made you wonder what would happen next. This one has far fewer characters and only one series, yet feels much slacker and much simpler than what Bendis was doing. This isn’t bad, mind you, it’s just nothing special. Bagley is a very competent storyteller, and things rarely get confusing, and there are some very good pages into the bargain, but he’s also workman-like and content to simply present the story rather than doing anything special with it.
Phoenix: Resurrection by Matthew Rosenberg, Leinil You, Carlos Pacheco, Joe Bennett & Ramon Rosanas: This is from a little later than the previous X-Men stories, but I wanted to see how they brought the OG Jean Grey back. Honestly, I don’t have much to say about this book. It was an entertaining read, but I have trouble justifying why it needed to be this long, and the multiple artists end up pulling it in too many different directions. It doesn’t quite feel like one thing, and seems to be created to fill a gap. Rosenberg’s recent stuff is far more impressive.
Movies this week –
Bones and All: I watched this before I watched Challengers, but forgot to write it up. This is an interesting idea, but the problems begin right as the film actually reveals its premise – that its main characters aren’t cannibals, as they appear to be, but supranatural beings called ghouls who need to eat human flesh. Beyond this, it suffers the same problems as other prestige horror films such as Only Lovers Left Alive, which is that they need extreme tonal control, because if that control slips, your treatment of the concept can fall from eerie to goofy, which is exactly what happens in the last third of this movie.
Mind you, there’s much to enjoy in its first two-thirds – Maren’s encounter with her mother being a highlight – and Mark Rylance does a lot with his inconsistent role. It just doesn’t come together as well as I’d have liked.
Creature from the Black Lagoon: I watched this chiefly because my friends Dan and Ram are working on a sequel comic to this, and I wanted to know what I was in for. This is a delight – short and precise, it is very aware of what it is about – and you can see why it inspired everything from Abe Sapien to The Shape of Water. The black-and-white underwater photography is breathtaking, and they wisely make it the centrepiece of the experience.
Session 9: I’d meant to watch this for a long time, but I was pushed to give this a look since it came up multiple times in the above-mentioned Scott Wampler remembrance as one of his favourite horror films. I am, I must admit, conflicted.
The first 70 minutes are brilliant – the characters are instantly riveting, and the cinematography and sound design ooze atmosphere. The “what happens next” drive of this movie is such that when I paused to get a drink of water after what I thought was 20 minutes or so, I found that I was more than an hour in.
But that frames the problem neatly – till most of the way through the film, it feels like we’re just beginning. Structurally, this is more like a short story, turning on a single event towards the end of the film. The demand of such a structure, then, is that the turn should feel suitably pivotal, with a heft that makes the wait feel worth it.
Looking online, I see that there are many viewers who did find the ending appropriately climactic, and there are in fact others who love the ending but thought the rest of the movie was a bit of a slog. I find myself in the opposite camp – I loved everything about this except for the ending.
The characters are wonderfully drawn pictures of messed-up masculinity of various stripes. The setting is one of a kind, and treated with appropriate awe. There’s a Lynchian attention to the surroundings, non-sequitur shots adding to the oppression of the mood. The ending, though, felt a bit too twist-in-the-tail, pulled from somewhere outside of where the rest of the film resides. A bit too simple.
Gulaal (rewatch): Probably my favourite Anurag Kashyap film, I started rewatching this with some friends, and then finished it up back home. Centred around a fictitious secessionist movement in Rajasthan, this is a fiery political drama made with a film nerd’s eye for mise-en-scène, cultural quotations and love for emotive faces. There are long shots that have no need to move because the actors are animated enough that it would be superfluous and showoffy. Sadly, Kashyap would collect exactly such bad habits later in his career, and these days he also seems to have lost his incredible ear for dialogue.
But it’s all present here, in characters that range from ambitious student politicians to self-satisfied former princes and angry, entitled upper-class men who have felt sidelined for too long. Even the female characters are well-drawn, though one wishes some of them had bigger roles to play alongside the messy men.
If I had a complaint – a minor one, that too – it is that the tight, dense first half makes the perfectly respectable back half feel slack by comparison, a bit errant in pace, but even that back half contains the best set piece in the film, so this complaint might be ignored safely.
All this fire and creative vision is ably aided by the monumental soundtrack by Piyush Mishra, gathering songs written from all over his theatre career and thematically strewn through the film. Fifteen years on, still one of my favourite Bollywood soundtracks.
Television –
Blackadder Series 2-4: Started rewatching this to show K some favourite episodes, and ended up watching all of Series 2-4. This has, surprisingly, aged better than much of Monty Python, mainly because so much of it is character-based humour. But it isn’t – mostly – the wordy, consciously clever bits I loved as a teenager that have aged well, it’s the sight gags and pratfalls and goofy “Who’s on first”-style misunderstandings that are still funny.
The thing about humour is that you can’t step into the same river twice, especially not twenty years on. If I don’t find the same things funny at 38 that I did at 18, it is ridiculous to expect the culture at large to continue finding the same things funny, as comedians like Seinfeld and John Cleese seem to. It is far better to realise that shibboleths and dogmas change over time, and humour at large changes in reaction to them. What was funny in 1989 won’t necessarily be funny in 2009 which might be outdated by 2029. The fact that Seinfeld and Monty Python still have as many fans as they do (of which the former has actually aged incredibly well, which I suppose is down to people other than Seinfeld himself) should be considered a blessing and counted as such.
Yes, Prime Minister Series 2: There isn’t much to say about this – I enjoyed it as much as Series 1. More of the same, pretty much.
I’ve been posting these later than I’d like – the aim is to post them each Sunday, but they keep sliding to Tuesday. I’d rather be enjoying my time with K and friends over the weekend, and I always fail in my intention to write this in bits and pieces over the entire week.
Ah well. We strive to fail as much as to succeed.
