2025 / #09: The Social Trap

Last week, I wrote a post about getting your attention back. I’ve had some very sweet replies to it. I always have some trepidation about posting what some of my friends call my “life coach” posts, but mostly I’m talking about problems I’ve faced myself, and I’m searching for something approaching a solution that works for me. It’s nice to know that some stuff I post ends up useful for people.

Work updates:

This week saw the release of The Department of Truth #33, by James Tynion IV, Letizia Cadonici, Jordie Bellaire, and me, which seems to be it since we last spoke.

I wrapped up the lettering on The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos: Children of the Night #4, which concludes this mini-series, and also delivered the Monsters in Love #4 backup.

Next month, I wrap up the last lettering project I said yes to before the pandemic. It’s an odd feeling. COVID derailed many projects for various reasons – some of these either stalled out or never ended up happening, some I had to decline when they did finally happen, and some were underway and just happened very slowly. This was one of those.

Of course, the pandemic also led to many of my collaborators making unpredictable choices which resulted in projects I’m incredibly proud of, and which have defined my career since.

It’ll be bittersweet to draw a line under all of that and move on. But six years is a long time to be doing one thing, and I’ll be relieved in equal measure.

Writing-wise, SEASIDE is proceeding apace. We’ve revised the layouts for the first issue as far as we can take them, and the artist is nine pages into inking. I ended up rewriting a big chunk of the script once all the layouts were in. (I’ve always understood that my secret weapon as a comics writer is that I am my own letterer, and I can revise myself to oblivion. Of course, the trick, then, is to know when to stop. I’m hoping my editor is able to pull me back when needed.)

I’m currently working on the second draft script for Issue 2. Hopefully this revision will be in decent enough shape that, after some polishes, it can go to the artist. This draft is where I’m diverging from my outline a fair bit (the first draft was very faithful to the outline). But the nice thing about having a draft of the whole thing done is that I’ve got a version of the story that I know works, and now I can play with it and elevate it to what I think it can be.

A book that has nothing to do with me but that I’d like to shout out is last week’s Superman: The Kryptonite Spectrum #1, from DC Black Label. Written by W. Maxwell Prince, drawn by my frequent colleague Martín Morazzo, and coloured by (also a frequent colleague) Chris O’Halloran, this is the Ice Cream Man team taking on a Big Two character.

I don’t read many superhero comics these days, but my friend Deniz mentioned this was coming out, and I had to take a look. Ice Cream Man #18 is one of my favourite single issues of a comic ever, and I knew this team would, at least, do something interesting in the superhero space, and they have.

The first issue is jam-packed, yet reads smoothly. There’s tonal as well as formal experimentation. And Prince and co. manage to combine the goofiness inherent in superhero comics (which has never been a negative, no matter what some superhero fans might think) with the existential dread they specialise in, while never compromising what a Superman comic should feel like. They’ve got a few issues to go till they’re done, but this is an auspicious beginning.

And if you are a superhero fan who ends up enjoying this comic, the same team continues to collaborate on the excellent Ice Cream Man ongoing series, and has also previously made Art Brut. You should check those comics out.

Links for the week. There’s a lot this edition – that’s what you get when you don’t spend time on social media and actually read and watch stuff.

• I’ve been watching a lot (a lot) of guitar videos on YouTube, and this video introduced me to two of my favourite YouTubers, but also happens to be a very well-presented history of how the guitar came to be.
• As you can see in that video, Rob Scallon picks up new instruments with an almost disturbing facility, and that led to me watching many of his videos on strange musical instruments. My absolute favourite was this one about a glass armonica, an instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin. This affirmed my love for and faith in sheer human nerdery, our desire to do strange and beautiful things, and that was before the artist played a Mozart piece written specifically for the armonica – that moment honestly made my heart feel full, just thinking of the human connection across centuries.
• Thomas Phinney talks about influence and similarity in font design (but I feel this applies to a lot of other things).
• Kieron reposted this great piece from his newsletter, which is made doubly relevant by the announcement of the Die comic’s return. RPGs are so cool.
• I enjoyed this very considered open letter by Alan Jacobs to his students who might be using chatbots to cheat on their work.
• Language Hat excerpts this rather beautifully written piece of autobiography about Scots-Yiddish.
• Nick Heer has a great piece about Patrick McGee’s book Apple in China.
• Oud player Avin Ahmadi performing the Iranian piece “Gar Tīgh Bārad”. I particularly enjoyed the rhythmic accompaniment created by the shuffling of her fingers on the strings. Took me a minute to recognise where the sound was coming from.
• Finally, I hope that RSS readers stage a comeback and we have something like a republic of blogs again. In anticipation, Here’s Nabil Maynard on how he uses it.

I’m now three weeks into the digital declutter (I have decided to stop capitalising it, because it make it look inescapably pretentious), and I’m enjoying it thoroughly. It feels like I have more time for everything I need to do now that every activity isn’t partly infused/interrupted by scrolling through apps. It’s not a big difference in actual time, but it feels big.

The funniest thing has been disconnecting from news, which wasn’t intentional – I just didn’t realise how much of my news I got from the socials. I’m subscribed to a couple of news-based email newsletters, but I haven’t checked in on them all month. The result has been that I get all my news from friends now – we have a weekly quiz get-together, and they’ll give me a nice digest of all the week’s news – and then I walk away and just live my life for a bit.

But I have now been thinking about how to proceed when this month-long declutter ends. I’ll definitely be returning to Letterboxd – that’s the one site I actually miss – and maybe to Reddit, because I never post on that, it’s more of a research/rabbithole app for me.

It’s social media I’m concerned about – Twitter, BlueSky and Instagram. I’ve enjoyed not being on these, and I think I can safely abandon Twitter at this point (I don’t think I have any reach left in the algorithmic timeline, and I don’t get to read/find anything interesting there, other than movie recommendations, which I can find elsewhere). But I’m wondering if I should get back to BlueSky and Instagram at all. I don’t want to, but do I need to?

A factor in my thinking is that being off social media has tanked the traffic to this blog, even though I’ve been more active on it. Which presents a bit of a problem:

This blog has three categories of readers. Around 10% percent read it directly on the blog, either by visiting it directly, or via RSS readers. Then I post this to social media, and that’s around 40% of visits – mostly via BlueSky and Instagram Stories. And then, either a few hours later, or the next day, I send the blogpost as a newsletter, and that’s 50% of the traffic. That middle 40% has completely disappeared.

Of course, the largest part of the audience reads this purely as a newsletter via email, so the actual missing traffic is about 10-15%. But that chunk consists of nearly all of my discoverability, i.e. new readers who might find my blog/newsletter. (The rest is either other people posting about it on social media, or other newsletters, usually Kieron, which I thoroughly appreciate.)

This isn’t a big problem at the moment. I’m all set in terms of work, I don’t need social media for networking or for promotion. And honestly, I like that everyone who reads what I write is here because they really want to be.

But I would like alternate ways for people to find this, particularly as I gear up to do something new and different, which could use all the social backing it could get. I would also like to sustain this current focus-driven lifestyle, and I don’t think being back on social media will help that.

I’ve got some time to figure this out, since we’re still early in the production of SEASIDE. I also don’t mind going back on the socials if I need to. But I’d like it all to lead back here, so people can get a comprehensive idea of both the project and myself, rather than the piecemeal activity that happens on the apps. A friend suggested hiring someone to do my social media for me, which is an option, but which seems a bit luxurious. We’ll see.

I might do some more thinking out loud on here, but at least I’ve got my problem statement down.

(I am also fully planning to shift this site to Ghost soon because Wordpress has become nearly unusable for me. When that happens, I might ask you folks to spread the word on this. I see that fellow newsletter-er Ganzeer has also been thinking about this, so perhaps it’s a shared problem rather than an isolated one.)

That’s it for the week. I will be posting some more, shorter posts on the blog in the coming week. Look out for those – I won’t be sending those as newsletters (though I will be linking them in the next newsletter).

Bide well, gang!

PS: As I underwent the constantly trying process of posting this to Wordpress, I finally got fed up and purchased a year’s worth of Ghost. (God, it’s pricy, but I’m treating it as an investment.) I’ll spend the next few weeks setting up the site and moving this there. Nothing should change for any readers/subscribers, including active links. Wish me luck!