As mentioned, there was no newsletter last week, since I was in Goa with some friends, and as much as I love you folks on the Internet, I had no desire to hole up in the Airbnb and type while my friends were out having fun.
It was a good weekend, much needed by all of us, and, after years of disliking cashew feni (a local Goan liquor) for its intense smell, I got to have one that I liked – a friend of a friend makes this brand called Moira which is, for now, only available in Goa.
I did catch a cold somewhere on the way, and came back home to a mild fever and bodyache, but I was fine by Friday.
Since this has to cover two weeks, I’ll do it in two parts. The first is this – the general and work update, some links and a short essay on novelistic comics based on two #1s I got to take an advance look at (which I wanted to post today, since one of them FOCs Monday). The second post, which I’ll either post on Tuesday or Wednesday, will cover the usual films, tv, books and comics.
A bunch of friends and I watched the T20 cricket World Cup final between India and South Africa on Saturday at a pub. It was a delightful experience watching it with people who actually care about the sport (which I don’t) and celebrating India’s win with an exuberant lot. (The experience was much improved from last November when I watched the ODI World Cup final with the same group of friends, and India lost. It was fascinating to watch an entire crowd get depressed over an hour or so.)
As we were coming back home around 1 a.m., people were swarming the streets celebrating, and I got a rather lovely reminder that we’re not always a sucky lot, and we can come together once in a while. Plus, as a night owl, I got to see people out and about at my hours, which usually only happens around the Ganesh festival or Durga Puja.
Work-wise, last week saw the release of:
- The One Hand #5 with Ram V, Laurence Campbell, Lee Loughridge and Tom Muller, the conclusion of this series, but the penultimate issue of the overall The One Hand/The Six Fingers story, a.k.a. Project Gemini. The Six Fingers #5 will conclude the whole story.
- The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos #10 with James Tynion IV, Tate Brombal, Isaac Goodhart and Miquel Muerto, as well as Volume 1 of the series, collecting #1-#6 by the same team.
- Spectregraph #2 with James Tynion IV and Christian Ward, bringing us to the halfway point.
- Dandelion, an original graphic novel with Sabir Pirzada (writer on tv shows like Ms. Marvel and Moon Knight, as well as co-writer of the current Ms. Marvel comic with Iman Vellani) and Martín Morazzo, Vanesa Del Rey and others. I lettered most of the stories in this, but designer Ben Didier and letterer Taylor Esposito handled some of the stories.
This week saw the release of:
- The Department of Truth #23 with James Tynion IV, Martin Simmonds and Dylan Todd, which sees this series return to a regular release schedule.
- w0rldtr33 #11 with James Tynion IV, Fernando Blanco, Jordie Bellaire and Dylan Todd.
- Blue Book: 1947 #5, the final issue of the second series, which contains a True Weird story by Josh Trujillo, Jack T. Cole and myself.
It was also announced that True Weird – the anthology of short stories curated by James Tynion IV and currently being published as backups in Blue Book – will get a collection in January 2025. I lettered all the stories in this, as well as writing one about “The Monkey Man of Delhi”, drawn by Anand RK.
Work has been light in the last couple of weeks – I lettered The Department of Truth #24, and did revisions on a couple of books. July looks to be busier. The big thing over the last month or so is that I finished setting up a company to do my lettering business through, and then had to move clients over to my new system and send all the pending invoices that had been due while I was taking care of this. That was, I can tell you, Not Fun, but my accountant tells me this’ll be good for me.
My friend Omkar took this photo of me doing my invoices, which I refer to as “Bidikar vs. Invoices”.
On the other hand, I had a meeting about a very exciting thing that I’ll be telling you about soon. I’ve been in a holding pattern for the last couple of years when it comes to work – I was dealing with a lot, and wanted to stop overworking, so it was more important to get control of what my life looked like – and I think I was ready to take a big step into the next phase, whatever that looks like, and I think this makes it official. As I said, more later.
Links for the week:
- A history of the blackletter style of lettering.
- Alpa Shah wrote a new book about the people arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case, and appeared on the Sandip Roy show to talk about it.
- I enjoyed Nathan Goldwag’s series of blog posts on how maps help us visualise the past – Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 and World War I. (This is the same blogger who wrote the excellent “Moral Economy of the Shire” that I linked to a few weeks ago.)
- I just started listening to Theory of Everything’s podcast mini-series about the CIA’s attempts to propagandise via art in the second half of the 20th century, and it’s great – check out “Not All Propaganda Is Art”.
- I just found out about the Rôti Sans Pareil (a turducken-style dish made of seventeen birds stuffed into each other), and it’s fascinating.
- Enjoyed this essay by Mike Duncan on why Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire makes for bad history but is worth reading anyway.
I was sent two #1s by comics colleagues in the last week, and I wanted to talk about them together.
The aforementioned James Tynion IV sent over The Nice House by the Sea #1, the first issue of the follow-up to the phenomenal series The Nice House on the Lake by James, Alvaro Martinez Bueno, Jordie Bellaire and Andworld Design, edited by Chris Conroy.
I don’t remember if I posted it in the newsletter, but TNHOTL was the first series in years that I read issue-by-issue, devouring each new one as it came out. Usually, I’m very happy to read comics in collected form, but once in a while there’s a story that works so well in the single issue format that you’re depriving yourself of a certain experience by not reading it like that. The last comic I did that with before TNHOTL was, if I remember correctly, Providence by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows.
TNHBTS manages to do something I talked about in my Nope review – it defamiliarises and thereby recontextualises the world of the first series, all while remaining faithful to it (in comics terms, it “Anatomy Lesson”s its own story) but also telling its own story. The characters of TNHOTL were some of the most grounded and real-feeling characters James has ever written, and this continues to be the case for TNHBTS.
Alvaro’s art in the first series was a revelation to me, and he continues to go from strength to strength here. The design of the new house is amazing, and Alvaro’s sense of storytelling, character design and rendering is second-to-none right now.
The final order cut-off for The Nice House by the Sea #1 (i.e. the last day to tell your local retailer you want to read this book so they can order more copies) is Monday July 1st. You can hear James talk about this and other projects on SKTCHD here.
Friend of the blog Kieron Gillen sent over The Power Fantasy #1, which is his new ongoing series after his recent stint at Marvel with The Eternals and the Krakoa era of the X-Men. The Power Fantasy, written by Kieron, is drawn and coloured by my colleague from Home Sick Pilots Caspar Wijngaard, lettered by Clayton Cowles and designed by Rian Hughes.
I mentioned on BlueSky that what came through in TPF #1 for me was a quiet confidence exuded by Kieron’s writing, but it’s worth teasing out what I mean by that. Kieron’s last (indefinitely) ongoing creator-owned series was The Wicked + the Divine with Jamie McKelvie and Matt Wilson, which began with a toothy brashness – a call for attention, look-at-us-here-we-are. This, on the other hand, begins with an understanding of the power Kieron holds – that he knows how good he is at this, and he knows that the audience will give him the time to breathe.
It’s often considered a given with the first issue of a comic that it has to convince the audience to stay. Kieron here (and James in TNHBTS and in w0rldtr33, more on which below) has the luxury of a sizeable audience that will stick around for a bit, so he can stretch and take up space. There’s an assurance to a #1 that is formatted the way this is (I’m being oblique here, but that’s because I don’t want to spoil your reading experience).
And yet, a lot is established here. You get ideas of the history of this world, of these people, glimpses of how their gravity has distorted everything around them. I can’t wait for these to be drawn out in detail, and to see where the story goes.
Caspar has long been one of my favourite artists to work with, and one of the best to use colours and shapes in his work. With TPF, his ascension to comics godhood continues apace. His people look sexy as hell, even as they look filled out and lived in. Casper’s pages are effortlessly cool while always being story-forward, and I know most comics artists would kill to have created a character design like present-day Etienne Lux.
FOC (see above for what that means) for The Power Fantasy #1 is next Monday July 8th. You can listen to Kieron and Casp talk about the series on the ComicsXF podcast.
Reading these two issues back-to-back, though, got me thinking about what it means to do a “novel in comics”, which is what I think The Power Fantasy, The Nice House series and w0rldtr33 are all trying to do.
It’s not like long comics haven’t existed before – you have the traditional DC/Marvel long comics run, which is either intertwining soap-operatic stories (e.g. Chris Claremont, Peter David) or early-Bendis-style stories written for the collection (Daredevil, Alias etc.). These aren’t trying to do one story but several stories, discrete or connected. Then you have the Vertigo-style run of creator-owned comics, usually consisting of multi-issue arcs followed by single-issue stories (e.g. Y: the Last Man, Preacher – WicDiv falls under this aegis, I feel). Then you have the single lengthy story told over a sizeable-but-finite number of issues (Drifter and Die read like this, as does Ram’s current Detective run).
What we’ve rarely had, and what I think we’re seeing more of these days, is the “novel in comics”. I think this is partly down to both creators and audiences being more used to the pacing and length of manga (20th Century Boys being an example of a “novel in manga”), as well as the growing understanding that if you as a creator have a certain amount of goodwill, you don’t have to depend on the first issue (or each individual issue, even) to hook the audience. If you’ve got a proven track record of both sticking the landing and making the experience worth it for the reader, you’ve got some leeway.
The final factor, and the one unique to comics, is co-authorship with the artist – I don’t think you can have a “novel in comics” with rotating artists, partly because you don’t have the same hands making it, thereby reducing the specificity and eccentricity of single vision, and partly because a multi-artist run automatically needs structural planning.
But let’s look at what a “novel” means in this context. There are several definitions of the term, and these days we understand every work of fiction that is more than, say, 40,000 words to be a novel. But the word “novelistic” still means something. For me, the key characteristics of a novel come from intimacy with characters, a certain awareness of perspective (per James Wood) and the key aspect in our context – a sense of the novel being about more than just the story.
If I may be glib, a novel is something that acquires “aboutness” as it goes, rather than, like a short story, being “about something”. Elif Batuman in particular talks about the novel as a catch-all genre, something that isn’t limited by its spine. In a novel, you can digress to the point of leaving the story entirely, yet anything can belong in a novel by the simple nature of you having chosen to put it in there. The juxtaposition is in itself the pattern. The ideal novel, Borges-like, would be a novel that contained everything.
This is what makes a novel different from other forms of literature (you can trace this back to Flaubert, of course, and from him forward to modernists like Joyce via Hawthorne and Melville, but let’s face it, this was the disease of the form all the way back to Sterne and Cervantes before him), and why you can have non-fiction novels. Reading Sebald, Tokarczuk’s Flights, or even Labatut’s recent breakout book When We Cease to Understand the World, you can see this at work. There is no one thing these books are about, yet by putting these things next to each other, a pattern forms, and a unity emerges.
And this is what I find new about comics like the Nice House series and about w0rldtr33 (in fact, early on in the production of that book, James and I had a chat about the way he and Fernando have been using the luxury of the long-form series for long, mundane dialogue scenes that accrete to great effect). With The Power Fantasy, I know less of the process and intention behind it, but it seems to me to fall in squarely with these books.
And I for one love this, and would like more comics like this, please.