(I started writing this on 30th December, and wrote most of it by the 31st, before finishing it on 4th January, so we’re going to count this as a late 2024 newsletter rather than the first 2025 newsletter.)
Last one of the year. I’m writing this while on vacation with a few of my friends. We’ve been to Hyderabad and Santiniketan, and are now relaxing together in Kolkata, where I used to live in a different decade and a different life.
K is working at the desk in our Airbnb, on the laptop that I brought with us “just in case” any of my clients needed anything from me (they didn’t – and I never ended up using the laptop), and I’m writing this on my phone.
This year was great and difficult, for reasons I’ve elaborated in previous newsletters, so I won’t rehash them.
I’m excited about 2025, for two particular reasons: I’m finally working on my first full-length comics mini-series, which is incredibly exciting. The other is that I have a whole lot of photography ideas I can’t wait to execute over the next many months.
Both of these are things I’m doing for pure joy, and not for any external reasons of commerce or acclaim. After too many years of being influenced by others, I feel in touch with my own creative voice.
Work
December saw the release of The City Beneath Her Feet #1, by James Tynion IV, Elsa Charretier, Jordie Bellaire and myself. I’m very happy with the lettering style I came up with for this, and I’ve been raring to letter Elsa’s work again after our brief collaboration some years ago.
Also released was the collected edition of The One Hand & The Six Fingers, written by Ram V and Dan Watters, drawn by Laurence Campbell and Sumit Kumar, coloured by Lee Loughridge, lettered by me and designed by Tom Muller.
I lettered a total of 1494 pages in 2024. My worksheet tells me that my original estimate for the year was 2340 pages, which was a number meant to dissuade me from picking up more work, not a number I was meant to hit. A few projects were moved to 2025, and one was postponed indefinitely. I did also have to leave John Constantine: Hellblazer after issue 5 because of my chronic pain issues (it was a sad but much-needed decision).
I’m honestly really glad I was able to land on the number I did – I noticed at the beginning of the year that I was overworking again to the detriment of my health, and I needed to step back. I’m very happy to say that this is down from 2801 pages lettered in 2021 – I’ve managed to consistently do about half that number in the years after.
My current estimate for 2025 is 1800 pages. This doesn’t include SEASIDE (in case we begin lettering it in 2025), but it includes a few books that are on my docket for sometime in the future, which might not necessarily be 2025.
Most of my work for 2025 will be for Tiny Onion, under the Artist in Residence programme. There are 2-3 new projects with my frequent collaborator Ram V, one of which I’ve been working on for the last few months already. Other than that, I’ll be wrapping up two projects I’ve been working on since 2019. I don’t think I’m picking up any other projects this year. Well, not unless Alan Moore asks me to letter something, or the equivalent of that.
Writing
I’ve just wrapped up the next outline for SEASIDE. I’ll be reading it over once I’m back at my desk, and then sending it off to both the editor and the prospective artist.
I wrote a script for a short comic in December, and plan to write a few more of these in 2025 as exercises. If I like any of them enough, I’ll be approaching artists to produce them. There’s a theme connecting these, which might turn into a one-writer anthology if I play things right. No promises, but I do plan to write a lot more this year than I’ve been for a while. This includes a blogging project that I came up with on this vacation, and which I’m quite excited about. I’m not announcing this till I’ve beaten it into some kind of shape, though.
I also plan to restructure this blog/newsletter. I’m still figuring out quite in what way, but one of those things does include finally posting all those articles and essays I’ve been promising to publish here.
Reading/Watching
I caught up on my reading and watching from the last time I did one of these here. As mentioned there, this was more for me than for you, because I like to have a running total of what I read and watched in the year. This was also why I didn’t send it out as a newsletter, in case you thought you missed an email.
Here’s the remainder:
Prose –
Kamadeva: The God of Desire – Anuja Chandramouli: I’ve been reading a condensed but unexpurgated rendering of The Mahabharata for the last couple of months, and it was getting a bit heavy, so I read this as a palette cleanser. This is the myth of Kamadeva, the Vedic god of desire, and hoo boy, is it a doozy. A whole of sexual hijinks, inappropriate godly behaviour, high adventure, and even incest, all thrown into a great gumbo of myth.
Most Hindu myths that continue to be retold in modern times focus on the later Puranic gods like Vishnu and Shiva, but the older Vedic gods are riotous – stylistically closer to their Greco-Roman cognates than to the cosmic deities that would later take over – though I can see why people of previous generations didn’t want us to grow up knowing these myths. The Vedic gods are fallible, libidinal, and function much more as cautionary tales than as moral exemplars.
Chandramouli’s telling smoothly combines the Vedic myths about Kamadeva as well as the Mahabharata story of his incarnation as Krishna’s son Pradyumna, and her research is very strong. What I would quibble with is the writing style of this book, which is far sloppier than the material deserves. The dialogue is rarely well-written, and the author goes off on far too many juvenile tangents about the relationship of the sexes. If it were better-written, this would’ve absolutely been a highlight of the year, but as it stands, it still thoroughly expanded my knowledge of the myths of my land.
Ascetic Games – Dhirendra Jha: A very well-written account of an aspect of Indian politics I only had a vague awareness of before – the saintly akhadas of north India and their political nexus with the Hindu political right wing. The author’s on-the-ground research is incredible – he interviews a large number of the people involved in these politics, tracks the feuds between them, the history of the akhadas and how they grew prominent, and traces the manner in which religion and politics are intricately woven together in India. It also happens to be very well-written and entertaining. It wasn’t quite the best non-fiction book of the year for me – that’s still Mumbai Fables – but I’d say that’s only the case because the latter falls squarely into a topic of interest for me while this one was more of an informational read.
However, it does contain the single most outrageous non-fiction anecdote I’ve read this year. For context, the “pattis” of Gyan Das and Dharam Das have a heated long-running rivalry, and when a local ascetic called Shukul Baba dies, the patti he belongs to – that of Gyan Das – refuses to allow naga (ascetic) from Dharam Das’s patti to take part in the funeral. Things come to a head as they are carrying him to the river on a tikhti (a ceremonial carrier made out of bamboo poles that the family of the deceased is supposed to put together for the funeral). Here’s the relevant account as narrated by Dharam Das’s nephew Ajit Das:
“Around eight that morning, while I was riding my horse (which he claimed to do without fail every morning), my guru summoned me,” recalled Ajit Das. “A young naga sent by my guru from Hanumangarhi told me that the body of Shukul Baba would soon be carried for immersion in the Sarayu and that we would have to be part of the funeral procession. When someone dies, the tradition in Hanumangarhi is that the nagas of all the pattis participate in the funeral procession. It is not exclusive to any patti.”
Ajit Das wasted no time and immediately steered his horse in the direction of Hanumangarhi. There he saw Dharam Das and his followers engaged in a verbal duel with Gyan Das, who was seated on the elevated veranda of his house. “As I jumped off my horse, I saw nearly a dozen of Gyan Das’s goons carrying rods and cycle chains rushing towards my guru and his supporters, who were unarmed. With lightning speed, my guru’s followers snatched the bamboo poles from the tikhti. By the time I got close to them, there were no bamboo poles left for me, and I had nothing to protect myself with. So I lifted the dead body and started swinging it with all the strength I had,” he recounted.
Breath-taking.
Comics –
Robin: Year One by Chuck Dixon, Scott Beatty, Javier Pulido & Marcos Martín (reread): I reread this one mostly because it’s collected along with_Batgirl: Year One_, which I wanted to read for the Marcos Martín art. This one’s certainly far more of a minor work, but even here, Pulido and Martín are doing a great storytelling job.
Batgirl: Year One by Chuck Dixon, Scott Beatty & Marcos Martín (reread): The writing is fine – though I still like it more than that of Robin: Year One – but Martín’s art is phenomenal. I remember the first time I read this, I wondered why Martín wasn’t, even at that time, one of the most popular comics artists in the world, because I could see that between his fluid style and cool-but-thoughtful storytelling, he was doing a whole lot of stuff most of his compatriots were not. In the intervening 20 years, of course, he has become a superstar. I reread this after I finished Friday, because I wanted to track his progress, and it still stands up. There are several incredible panels here, and in particular, I can see Martín doing these single page spreads that I can draw a line from down the years to the kind of stuff Dragotta did on East of West. A phenomenal book, mostly for the art.
Crocodile Black by Phillip Kennedy Johnson & Som: A very effective pandemic-set horror comic with excellent art by Som and Patricio Delpeche. I haven’t read much by Johnson, but this certainly makes me want to read more. (I really should read his Action Comics run now that it’s done – multiple people have recommended it to me.)
Ribbon Queen by Garth Ennis & Jane Burrows: I mostly gave up on reading new Garth Ennis comics after The Boys disappointed me with its refusal to explore anything that was interesting about its concept, and its frequently terrible dialogue (which is usually the best thing about an Ennis comic). But I repeatedly heard, particularly from Comic Book Herald’s Dave Buesing, that Ribbon Queen was a departure, and a far better comic than one might expect from Garth Ennis writing about an Asian woman cop post-BLM. This turned out to be true – Ribbon Queen is Ennis’s best, most hard-hitting work in a good while (I haven’t read A Walk Through Hell, but the last Ennis horror thing I loved was Crossed, and while this doesn’t come close, it belongs on the same shelf), and he’s found an excellent partner in Jacen Burrows, who is unafraid to draw the most complex and gnarly gore to go with the melancholy, but not entirely hopeless, story Ennis is telling.
All-Star Section Eight by Garth Ennis & John McCrea: Since I’d had a good time with Ribbon Queen, I thought I’d give this a go, since Ennis’s Hitman used to be one of my favourite comics in my early reading. This one’s absolutely a trifle, and mostly a giggle, but the panel where Batman goes “I’m not a racist” is an absolute corker.
Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath: This seems to be one of the breakout books of the year – a cross between talking animals books and a serial killer comic – and it’s a fun one. There’s a pleasant dissonance between Horvath’s drawing and colouring style and the gore that he’s illustrating, and he manages a big cast of characters quite well. I’ll certainly look forward to whatever he does next.
Universal Monsters: Creature from the Black Lagoon Lives! by Dan Watters, Ram V and Matthew Roberts: This one’s written by two of my friends, but happily, they are also excellent writers. This was a joy to read. I love the original film, and while I think it’s far more overtly an erotic story than Ram seems to, Dan and Ram plumb a great vein in contrasting the unknowable but not necessarily malevolent Creature and the human but monstrous killer our protagonist is chasing.
We Called Them Giants by Kieron Gillen & Stephanie Hans: This one’s a short novella, almost a tone poem, about an ongoing post-apocalypse, and the idea of communication in an atomised world. It seems to draw on Ultraman and on kaiju iconography while using the visuals for its own concerns, as a backdrop for a far more personal, character-based story. Quite enjoyed this one.
Round-Up
From my notes, I see that I watched 112 films in 2024, and 17 seasons of tv (I watched quite a few British shows, so several of these were merely 4-6 episodes long). I read 15 prose novels, 14 non-fiction books, 39 graphic novels/comic book runs and 5 plays. None of these met my self-stated goal, which was to watch 200 films, read 52 prose books and 24 plays/screenplays. But I lost a whole lot of time both to life and to grief, and this isn’t something that bothers me. In fact, I feel a peculiar delight that my play-reading more than doubled, from two in 2023.
I have made a list of my goals for the year, not just for what I’d like to read and watch, but for other stuff too. But this time, I’m going to keep it private and track it myself. Being kind to myself has worked well for me for the last couple of years, this time I’d like to do that in public too, by not holding myself accountable for things like this. I might talk about this at the end of the year, if I get close enough to my goals for it to bear talking about.
Miscellaneous
There’s a few things that got left out over time that should’ve gone into the newsletter.
First, I was interviewed by Brant Lewis for The Ashcan Edition, Graphic Policy’s video podcast, which you can watch here.
Second, Shahaf at the League of Comic Geeks invited me to participate in an AMA, which was an absolutely delightful experience. You can read all my answers here, but I’ll also be posting some of these to my blog in the coming weeks.
I tend not to talk about the world or about politics on the blog or on social media, not because I don’t have strong opinions about it, but because I don’t know how useful talking about these things online is, particularly when you’re a mere spectator – I remember being very active about these things on social media for many years, and eventually it felt like you were screaming yourself hoarse and no one was listening.
I’m a small person, insignificant in the larger scheme of things, much as social media might us feel like micro-celebrities, so I decided to stick to the small things. To practise what I felt in my own life, do what I could as an individual, and to be clear and honest with the people I encounter in the real world – the kind of change I can touch. I admire people who continually talk about these things – those who have the energy to do so.
But I can’t let 2024 go fully without commenting on what has been going on for the last year and change, even though the last twenty-odd years should’ve taught us to expect things like this. I even wrote a whole essay about this, but I didn’t post it because it felt like it was more for my benefit than for anyone else, something I needed to articulate but that isn’t going to change anyone’s mind.
When I was a kid, and I learnt about the Holocaust, I figured it was a uniquely evil thing, something that could only have done before mass media proliferated in the second half of the 20th century, because if people could’ve seen what was happening, they would’ve stopped it before it got so bad.
But the unfolding genocide in Gaza shows us that not only can it happen in plain view, you will also find normal people, people who should know better, finding ways to justify it, and talking about the people suffering as if they weren’t human, without facing any repercussions – not from their own conscience or morality, and not from other people. That supposedly liberal, supposedly civilised countries would not only not object, but would actively defend and support Israel and the US in this crime against humanity.
It was particularly galling to watch supposed progressives treat genocide – something I thought we’d all agreed was the worst thing that could happen to people, to a region, to a culture – as just one issue of many, and an optional one at that.
There has been a worrying rise of conservatism around the globe, including in my country, and I knew worrying times were to come, but I didn’t think they’d come so quickly, and that we’d be watching Western civilisation lose all credibility in realtime. But then, this is what the last twenty years should’ve taught us. But going further back, the last few centuries.
In this interview with Tricycle Talks, Vajra Chandrasekera, who has quickly become one of my favourite modern writers, makes the case that we are already living in a post-apocalyptic world.
I mean, obviously, apocalypse is such a huge part of speculative fiction. It’s practically a genre in its own right, and it’s been done by many great authors. Personally, I like to think of apocalypse as something that happened a long time ago, and we are all living in a post-apocalyptic world, whether you like to think of the apocalypse itself as something that happened in the centuries of global carnage and pillage that we now genteelly refer to as the colonial era. For me, that was the world’s great apocalypse, and we are all living in its aftermath and picking up the pieces.
As I heard this, it felt self-evidently correct. Something I’d known on some level, that I was merely waiting to hear articulated. It makes sense of the strangest bit of political hypocrisy in my life – that the nations who had committed some of the worst atrocities in history could do so under the guise of civilisation, and then stay in control and purport to teach civilisation to the rest of us.
The world at this moment feels hopeless, like there is no way forward – none that I know of, at least. To live in a world which is mutely watching a genocide, not to mention that waves of regression and rising fascism elsewhere. I know history will continually repeat itself, that everything that is happening now has happened before, but I was also told that we were living in a better, kinder world, a world in which we would “never forget” the atrocities that had been committed and therefore, I assumed, never allow them to happen again.
I don’t have anything useful to say, so I’m going to stop saying things, and get on with everything else. I’ve always thought hope is a delusion, but that it is a useful one, so I’m going to continue to cling to that. As Vajra continues to say in his interview:
So for me, the really important thing is that you have to keep picking up the pieces and that we have to keep picking up each other in this post-apocalyptic world because that may be all that you can do. In many situations, you do not have the power to make change at the level that you might wish to, and you should try obviously because at some point, somebody will be able to do that, and maybe it’ll be you. But even if you cannot make change at the level that you most deeply desire to, I think it’s the effort of doing it anyway is what matters. I don’t think the sense of defeat or loss that apocalypse, quote unquote, apocalypse suggests this sense of great loss and defeat and mourning, and while I do think there is an appropriate response to history and the world, I don’t think it precludes searching for the revolution in every incarnation that you have.
Let’s end with that.
Like I said above, the structure of this blog/newsletter will change in 2025, though I’m still working out what it will look like. Except more frequent posts, but shorter ones. I’m still contemplating whether I should keep the “Weeknotes” format or switch to something else. Feel free to let me know what you think, either as a comment or in reply to the newsletter.
Until then, bide well, and I wish you a great 2025.