I’ve been struggling with writing this blogpost for the last few weeks. I want to start properly posting on the blog again (sure, I’ve posted some topical posts, but it’s been nothing like my old routine), but I do want to catch folks up on what I’ve been up to, and that’s been … a whole lot of stuff.
But before 2024 ends, I want to wipe the slate clean here, bring the site up-to-date before we move into 2025, so it was time for me to steel myself and do it. I’ll be posting a reading/watching round-up sometime in the next few weeks as well, and we’ll see if 2025 will involve going back to my old Weeknotes, or some other format.
Like I said around the time my dad passed, I wanted this blog to be a space where I could think out loud, and it hasn’t really been that. Let’s see what we can do about that in 2025.
In the meantime, let’s take this one by one.
Work
Big news on the work front was, of course, the Tiny Onion Artists in Residence program. Details at the link, but we just wrapped month five, and it’s been a lovely experience. Writing-wise, SEASIDE – the comics mini-series I’ll be making with TO is progressing well. I got notes back on the first detailed outline, and I’m about to wrap up the second version of the outline before I start scripting. There’s been good news on the artist front too, but more later.
Most of the books I’ve been working on were either announced or in progress before August, but since then we’ve announced The City Beneath Her Feet, the first new book under the AiR program, and The Fables of Erlking Wood launched on Kickstarter and just wrapped up its successful campaign.
I’ve lettered two issues of a new book with my old collaborators Ram V and Anand Radhakrishnan for DC Comics which is yet to be announced, and the trade paperback for The One Hand & The Six Fingers – the two series in one that I worked on with Ram V, Laurence Campbell, Dan Watters, Sumit Kumar, Lee Loughridge and Tom Muller – releases at the end of December.
Let’s see what else …
I just wrapped up the lettering for Spectregraph in November, Robin: The Boy Wonder and Dawnrunner were wrapped up in July. The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos, The Department of Truth and w0rldtr33 continue apace, and I just got a new batch of pages for The Cutting Garden with Darcy van Poelgeest and Erin Connally.
New work for 2025 will largely be restricted to my Tiny Onion projects, with a few projects with Ram thrown in. Other than that, I’ll just be working on or finishing books that are already in production. My big project for 2025 will be writing SEASIDE.
Writing
Writing is currently restricted to the aforementioned SEASIDE and a few short horror comics and short stories I’ve been working on for a while now.
I’ve given myself till the middle of this month to finish up the current version of the outline for SEASIDE – it’s pretty clear in my head, just needs to be put down on paper and sent to the editor.
I’m hoping to have a rough draft of the complete script in the next three months, say by the end of March, to then revise it before the artist starts working on it.
Other Creative Stuff
This year, my drawing had stalled out while I dealt with chronic back pain (which finally receded in the second half of this year). Instead, I decided to pick up photography. I bought a new camera in July (a nifty Fujifilm x100vi, the successor to the internet’s favourite camera, the x100v), as a birthday/AiR gift to myself, and I was going to write a post about it, but that got derailed.
Before my dad passed, I’d seen an art residency advertised by Danny Guy (apologies if the link doesn’t work – Instagram tends to suspend Danny’s account on a regular basis), a self-portrait photographer and life model from Pune, that offered a three-day stay in Goa in late September with each day planned around both life drawing and photography sessions. I’d told Danny that I was interested, but of course, circumstances were going to dictate what I’d be doing in late September.
One of the first things I did once I’d dealt with most of the bureaucratic matters that accompany a parent’s death was to tell Danny that I wanted to attend, and I’d like to take part both in the drawing sessions and in photography. If there was one thing I was sure of after my dad died, it was that I wanted to devote as much of my life or more to creative pursuits than I had yet. This trying time had clarified what was important to me in life – spending time with my partner, my friends and family, and making things.
There’s a lot to say about the residency and why it has been important to me, but that’s a blogpost I should’ve written in October. I will say that I went into the residency drawing mostly digitally on my iPad, and I came out of it drawing on paper all the time. Part of this was the duration – over three days, you’re less fussed about getting things right immediately, you’re more open to mistakes and redoing things, because you have the time available, you can have multiple bashes at the same idea, and you’ve got more time with the same model, unlike most life drawing sessions that are one-time.
The other thing was that I came out of the residency completely in love with photography and the camera. I finally understood what everyone had been saying about light and form, and how photography is largely play between the two.
I’d been warned against something called GAS that tends to afflict photographers (Gear Acquisition Syndrome), and one of the reasons I’d bought a fixed-lens camera rather than an interchangeable lens one was that I wouldn’t be tempted to buy multiple lenses immediately. (The other was that I was a bit overwhelmed by everything that learning to work a camera involves – aperture, shutter speed, ISO and so on – and I didn’t want to buy a bunch of lenses and then regret them later, like my friend who got himself a manual focus 70-300mm zoom lens that he never uses.)
Thankfully, I was never tempted to buy more digital camera stuff, but what I did realise once I started getting a handle on my camera was that I really, really wanted to go back in time and learn how to shoot film. So I got a 35mm film camera on the cheap – a glorious Nikon F3 – and fell hard. I shot my first roll using the F3’s auto-metering mode, but when it came back and I started analysing what had gone wrong with the photos that didn’t come out properly, I realised that it would be far more interesting to me to actually learn manual metering1 and understand how to achieve the exposure I wanted. The modern digital camera is so good at making choices for you that it is only when faced with a camera that doesn’t make these choices that you realise how many controls you were ceding to the device.
It has been a lot of fun, and I signed up for Nick Carver’s fantastic Manual Metering for Film Photography course (more on his work in another post), and also borrowed a fully manual TLR from a friend which I’ve been having a ball playing with.
To that end, going forward, this blog will feature some of my photography, both digital and film. The reason I’m posting this in advance is that some of it will be on the fine art end and might contain nudity. I’ll be marking these in the title with an NSFW tag, and I won’t be sending those as newsletters – in fact, I’ll probably be keeping all my photography just to the blog, and link to it in the newsletter.
I should’ve also been posting my drawings to the blog, but honestly, I get lazy about these things. Maybe I’ll do some of that next year too.
Life Stuff
This is the difficult bit. You know, I thought I was ready for my dad’s passing – he’d been sick for a long time, and he deteriorated rapidly this year, and I thought I’d steeled myself for it. But no. Whatever age you might be, whatever your relationship with your parent might be, it changes your world completely. Like El Sandifer said, it’s a “ragged and bloody tear between before and after”.
And I don’t think I really got the time to grieve. There was too much to be done. There is such bureaucracy around death. My dad, in fact, had once told me that he thought they kept you busy so that you wouldn’t fall apart. But at some point you’re so busy you’re no longer looking at yourself.
I’m still trying to get my head around it. My father wasn’t exactly an authority figure, but that moment when I realised that I had no authority figures left, no one to cede responsibility to – it’s still sinking in. I guess this is what being an adult is like.
I’m only now coming out of that space, and I figure there will continue to be moments like this. There is a feeling of instability to it – like too many things are unknown in a way they weren’t before. As a child, you think your parents know everything, and you find comfort in their surety. Then you grow up, and you realise they were never sure – they were bullshitting their way through life just as you are. But I don’t think that feeling goes away – that the universe has order as long as your parents are around – until you lose a parent. At least that was the case with me.
My mother’s doing okay, but I see her becoming more religious by the day, finding that comfort, and I have no sense of whether that’s a good or bad thing. It is a human instinct to look for yourself in something bigger, and I guess everyone needs some of that.
During his final illness and for some weeks after, his remaining siblings came and stayed with my mother, and I got to hear stories of my father from before I was born, from before his marriage, from his childhood. There were stories there that even my mother had never heard. There was a joy to that, to hearing wonderful things about someone I had an ambivalent relationship with.
I loved my father, but I resented the way in which I saw myself in his failings. I tried to run away from our similarities, and I don’t regret that – it made me a very driven person at an age when I was about to dissipate into loucheness – but now I near forty, and I look back at his completed life, and I find that there’s so much of him in me anyway, and I have to deal with that all over again, but this time I don’t mind it so much.
The day before we took him to the hospital, I was showing him my new camera, and I took a photograph of him. This is the last photograph of my dad (other than one I had to take in the ICU for the insurance company, of him all wired up and barely conscious, which I sent them and never saved to my phone). It is also a photograph that my sister and I love deeply. The rest of the family doesn’t see what’s special about it, partly because they hadn’t seen him quite that emaciated before – they’d rather remember him through older photos. And I don’t expect strangers to find it interesting. But for me and my sister, this is the man we knew in his last days, and it’s a big reason I’m thankful I took up photography.
Goodbye, dad.
The year is nearly done. Work is slowly wrapping up, friends from outside India are about to visit, and I will be bringing in the new year with some of them. There will, most likely, be a few more posts here before the year is out, but we are marking time now.
In the meantime, I’ll be thinking about how to do the next year of this blog. There were several promises that I didn’t keep (reposting old articles being a big one), and most posts were put together last-minute. I have a lot of stuff that can go on here, I just have to put in the work of planning it a bit more.
See you in the next one!
- “Metering” in photography is, in simple terms, analysing the light in your scene and predicting how it will be recorded by your camera. The most evolved version of this is Ansel Adams’s Zone System, which is surprisingly similar to the way painters think about value. Most digital cameras do this automatically (it’s what’s happening when you use Auto Mode, which is why people will always recommend you go to Manual Mode if you want to learn better), but older cameras either use a much simpler version of it, or leave it entirely up to you, the photographer. ↩︎