After the eventful weather of last week, it’s been pleasant to have a week with not much incident. I had to stay home last weekend because of the weather, so I wrapped up my work for the week on Wednesday to spend time with K.
Work-wise, it’s been a light week.
I finally lettered the rest of Robin #4 (I’d had a creative block on a particular style that I managed to crack). Colours should be coming in next week, and that’ll be delivery time.
Revisions for a couple of books, including The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos #12.
I lettered the rest of the Mystery DC Project with Ram and Anand, and since both Ram’s and my schedule are a bit more human these days, we got to do something we used to do a lot when we’d both just started in comics – we got on a call, opened up the PDF, and noted the issue live, trying out lettering stuff to see if it worked, making edits in real-time. It’s one of my favourite ways to make comics, and I was very happy to do it again after a long time for both of us.
It’s also been a week of staring at my calendar, since my colleagues are setting up their projects for 2025, and I have to figure out which of them I can be a part of. As I said before, I want to continue landing at around 100-120 pages a month, so I have to be careful what I say yes to. Particularly since my writing projects are ramping up, and I want to give them the necessary time, rather than taking lettering gigs just because they pay.
No new releases this week, though you can find my typeface “Mighty Mouse” in use in The Whisper Queen: A Blacksand Tale #2 on release this week, lettered by my pal Hass.
There’s a roundabout announcement of my next project with Ram (after the DC one) through DSTLRY’s solicitation of Through Red Windows, written by Ram, drawn by Joëlle Jones, lettered by me, and designed by Tom Muller.
Writing-wise, I’ve heard back from most of my beta readers on CODENAME SEASIDE, and I have a call with my editor about this soon. I’m very happy that I sent it off to some trusted people for their opinions, because this was, from my perspective, the best version of the story, and they managed to point out some things I hadn’t thought about, particularly with respect to the first issue. They also, thankfully, confirmed that I have a good story on my hands, and all my work hasn’t gone to waste. More next week, I guess.
In the meantime, I’ve begun making rough notes for The Next Thing. It’s not solid enough yet that I need to have a codename for it – I’m still making notes on paper, sketching out characters and motivations. This is the fun bit – where everything you can possibly come up with could be a part of the story, when it’s a cocktail of characters, scenes and themes rather than a linear story. I’m going to keep doodling on this till it’s time to get back to SEASIDE.
Prose I read this week –
Fever House by Keith Rosson: I saw this recommended on BlueSky by both Joe Hill and his dad (Stephen King, if you’re unaware), and figured it was worth a try. This is excellent – from the first page, I was in.
Rosson’s writing is flavourful without being excessive – he knows how to craft a sentence, and he knows how to combine this with characterisation. The main characters are distinctive and fascinating, and one gets the sense that, unlike a lot of genre writers, Rosson knows how to write people who do bad things without being in awe of them or losing a sense of them as people.
In terms of genre, this is a crime book that gets invaded by a horror novel, and the success of this depends on managing the tone of the book – not losing a grounded feel even as things get stranger and less realistic. Rosson succeeds in this handily, and the result is a well-paced horror novel that would also appeal to fans of crime fiction (halfway through, I recommended it to K, who’s more of a crime fiction reader than I am). I have a small complaint about a patch of the book, say from 75% in to about 85%, where we’re juggling too many characters and they’re all at a static point, which leads to a slackening of pace compared to the tight density of the rest of the book, but the finale handily gets back into gear and runs headlong into a thrilling climax. I can’t wait for Book 2!
Comics –
Multiple Man by Matthew Rosenberg, Andy MacDonald & Tamra Bonvillain: Straightforward but enjoyable yarn that lets Andy MacDonald show off his character acting skills. I like the way this contrasts Peter David’s Madrox run by asking, How can we give Madrox the most X-Men story imaginable?
G.O.D.S. by Jonathan Hickman, Valerio Schiti & Marte Gracia: This was initially touted as Sandman for the Marvel Universe, and was highly anticipated (to the point where many books around its release contained a single page written by Hickman and drawn by Schiti to advertise G.O.D.S.), but presumably didn’t sell to Marvel’s satisfaction, since it was wrapped up at issue #8, which came out this week. I’d liked #1 when it came out, so I thought I might as well give the whole thing a read now that it’s done, and I feel this is a perfectly lovely book that was just sold badly. (I originally had that as “cancelled at #8”, but I was reminded on BlueSky that the deal was more “we’d like to keep going, but we’re prepared to end with #8.”)
You can see how it fits the shape made by “Sandman for the Marvel Universe”. For one, it’s a giant retcon to how the MU’s magical aspects function, by proposing shadowy presences behind it all. Second, it brings a flavour of mythology-flecked urban fantasy to the MU to reflect that of the DC Universe – it’s related but meaningfully distinct from the magical arena of Doctor Strange, illustrated by the secondary role he plays in this story. It’s also Sandman in that there’s a big story, and then there are several small stories that build out the universe and the characters.
The difference is partly in Hickman’s tendency to systematise things – rather than having the fluid structure of mythology where things meld and separate on whim, his mythology is based on intense logic. The other difference is that these stories are almost slice-of-life. Each issue stands on its own, and while it builds to something bigger, the story in each issue is mundane and relatively unconcerned with the epic scope of what is being built.
The comics this reminds me of most are the post-Sandman/post-Vertigo attempts to bring a similar flavour to the DC universe – books like Chronos, Resurrection Man and Breach. All of these existed to the side of the central universe, and in doing so, they commented on the epic nature of superhero storytelling and how it differs from ordinariness. Most of these were cancelled within ten issues, and none of them sold well.
The problem with G.O.D.S. is that it is spiritually this kind of book – off to the side, doing its own thing, and, most importantly, minor enough to be ignored – but it’s being written by Jonathan Hickman, with everything that implies. It can’t be left alone, because a Hickman book is Important.
Kevin Smith once talked about how you can get trapped by success. You direct a successful independent movie, and then you go up in the world, and eventually, you become worth so much as a director that they can’t let you make the kind of movie you’re good at making, because your salary reflects the budget of the film, and the only films to be made at that budget are blockbusters. You’ve priced yourself out of the market you belong in.
I think that’s the trap this book fell into. This is something that should’ve had a small budget and been allowed to run for 20-30 issues, where it’d be a perennial seller over the years, something like a Ms. Marvel or a Squirrel Girl. But because it costs a ton to pay Hickman and Schiti and Gracia to make a book, it needed to be sold as an event, which it absolutely isn’t. The bigness forced on it failed what is otherwise a very enjoyable book.
Coffin Bound by Dan Watters, Dani & Brad Simpson (and me!): My first read of this since we made it. I have always contended that Dan writes books geared towards me, and this book is the clearest specimen of that. The first volume of this is also (to my mind) the best thing Dan’s written yet.
There are many comics that pull from film, tv and literature, but there are very few comics that pull from theatre, despite it being a sister medium in many ways. Most people you see pulling from theatre in comics are artists – Mike Mignola and Frank Miller are the clearest examples. Dan is a writer who draws from theatre, and that’s not surprising, since he started as a playwright and studied plays as an academic.
He puts this to fine use in Coffin Bound – the dialogue, the mise-en-scène and even the narrative logic are pulled from influences like Beckett and Pinter (and probably many more I’m not aware of), and the result is a dreamlike, surreal book that is nevertheless grounded in its characters and its philosophical conceits. The writing is precise as a scalpel, but constantly shifts the ground under your feet.
Dani is the perfect partner for this book – I’ve rarely seen a case of an artist more suited to a book. Her art is a descendant of Mignola and Miller, but with a verve of its own. She commands how space works on the page, lines signify exactly what she wants them to, and she melds this impressionistic abstraction with some very solid anatomy to create a style that can shift between moods and levels of abstraction.
If you have never read Coffin Bound, one thing I can assure you is that you’ve never read a comic like this, and it’s a bit of a pity that there haven’t been any more comics like this.
Hit Man: K and I watched this on Friday because we thought it’d be an interesting cocktail of flavours – an erotic comedy thriller directed by Richard Linklater – but in practice, it’s thunkingly mediocre. The script hasn’t been worked on enough – it’s a very rough first draft peppered with extremely basic philosophy quotes spelling out the theme in far too much detail. Glen Powell and Adria Arjona are both terrible, hamming up their performances to the point where you wonder if there was any continuity work done on how the characters were supposed to progress from beginning to end – the acting is that erratic. Finally, it’s shot like it was made for Netflix. I don’t think there’s a single interesting shot in the film, and anyone who watched this in the cinema wasted their time. It’s a pity, because there’s a great concept here, and the structure is mostly in place – it’s just that there are three movies in here, any of which would’ve been fine, but nobody cared to decide between them or write any of them well. Linklater is known for this sort of narrative mishmash, but usually he does better. Like I said in my one-word Letterboxd review: “Eh.”
I actually got this written up on Saturday and I’m sending this on the weekend, which is a pleasant surprise for me. I guess the big reason is that I didn’t actually read or watch much this week. (I didn’t write up any new tv, but I’ve been watching Apple TV’s Shining Girls after K told me she was watching it and I accidentally spoiled the SF twist for her because I knew it from the novel. It’s very good, by the way.)
Next week looks to be a bit busy – lots of calls about work and writing on top of work, and I’m taking a few days off the week after, so I have to plan work accordingly.
I might skip the next newsletter if I’m in the middle of my days off, but I’ll make it up to you once I’m back.
