2025 / #12: Wrapping Up
Final newsletter for 2025. It’s December, work is drawing to a close (I’ve got one delivery left, I believe), and many of my friends who stay outside India are in town for the next few weeks, so I think it’s unlikely that I’ll be writing a newsletter in my free time rather than hanging out with them.
Fair warning: This is a very long one – almost 5,000 words. Read it at leisure, or at least click on “View in browser” if you’re reading this in Gmail or any other client that cuts off an email after a point.
Since we last spoke, a fair number of books lettered by me came out. Here’s what I could find on the Internet – I might have missed a few:
- The Department of Truth #00 and #34, along with Volume 6: Twilight’s Last Gleaming.
- Everything Dead & Dying #2, #3 and #4.
- Red Book #1 and #2, which include True Weird backup stories lettered by me.
- w0rldtr33 #17.
- The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos: Children of the Night #4, which concludes this mini-series.
- The City Beneath Her Feet #2.
In non-mainstream comics news, my friend and constant colleague Anand RK illustrated a graphic non-fiction piece for Bloomberg about India’s Digital Arrests, and I lettered it. Here’s the English version, and the Hindi version.
Juuuuuuust as I was putting the finishing touches on this one, I got an email in my inbox announcing that Tiny Onion is now developing w0rldtr33 as animation at Netflix. Check that news out, along with the other animated stuff they’ve got cooking here in the Tiny Onion newsletter.
In remaining work news, I finished laying out my lettering slate for 2026.
I have two ongoings continuing on from this year – The Department of Truth and w0rldtr33 – but other than that, I’ve committed to working as little as I could without leaving scope for regret.
I’m finishing up Darren Aronofsky and co.’s Human Nature early next year, plus there are some stragglers from 2025, mostly short stories and one-shots. Those aside, the only new books I’m doing are things that I’ve been discussing with people for a while, and all of them either graphic novels or novellas.[1]
My total proposed page count for next year is finally down to less than 1000 pages (something I’ve wanted for the last five years), and the plan is to spend the rest of my time … more on that below, after the links.
Ideally the as-few-monthlies-as-possible schedule should also allow me to take a solid month off work once in a while (I haven’t taken a full month away from work since 2010). And once I’m used to that, I can maybe work up to taking a whole year off. We’ll see about that one.
In writing news, I scripted the final draft of SEASIDE (working title) Issue 2 in October, and the artist has a third of the way into it, after having wrapped covers for Issues 1 and 2.
We’ve also started getting variant covers from some very cool artists which I can’t wait to show you.
I will be scripting the next draft of Issue 3 in January. The original plan was to do the “final” drafts of issues 3 and 4 between November and December, but I decided to attend IFFI in Goa for the last week of November, so I moved Issue 4 to January. Then I realised that if I’m lettering the first issue this month so we can send it out to pros and retailers in January, I need to have the lettering font finished in the next week or so. So that’s going to be my priority – finishing up the custom font and lettering the first issue in December. So Issue 3 was moved to January as well, which I’m glad for, because I’d love to wrap up my December work by the 23rd and take the rest of the month off.
Issue 4 is the final issue, and I’m lining up what I’ll be writing after that. There’s the next long-form book I’d like to do after SEASIDE – a 5-issue mini-series that I’ll be talking about as PROJECT CATHEDRAL. There’s a series of themed short stories I’ve been thinking about for a while, which might make for a nice palette cleanser after carrying the intricacies of SEASIDE in my head for so long. The problem with something like that, of course, is how one might release it, so I’m having some conversations with my comics creator friends about what the industry looks like right now and what might make sense.
I’m deciding what makes sense to do as the next thing. Likely, there’ll be no writing news for a while after SEASIDE is done, but that’s some time away, in any case.
Links – there’s a bunch since we’ve been saving up for the last couple of months:
- Enjoyed this essay on the OG leftwing cosmism vs. silicon valley’s version of it. Made me want to read more about the history of cosmism.
- This video of Chinese astronauts becoming the first to grill wings in space was delightful.
- I enjoyed this article by Daniel Kolitz on “gooners”, though most of it is likely already out of date. If you don’t know what “gooning” is, you’re missing out on one of the ways in which present-day masculinity seems to be just … broken. The actual writing here is old-school Vice, but there was enough here I didn’t know for it to be illuminating.
- My cohort Ram V did a sort-of exit interview for his superhero work with critic Ritesh Babu. If you’re interested in where comics is going, it’s useful to know what Ram’s been thinking about.
- Ganzeer (who, as it happens, just finished his comics opus The Solar Grid) shared his “Seven Rules for Artists”.
- From Ghanaian street signs to Google Fonts – David Abbey-Thompson talks about designing Ga Maamli.
- Martin Scorsese and Neeraj Ghaywan talking about Homebound.
- “Alien Minds” – KM Nelson writes about Nope’s fantastic antagonist “Jean Jacket” for the Heat Death newsletter.
- Presented without comment, Chet Hanks’s interview with Steve-O on having found God via AI.
- Apropos of nothing, the PlasticPills podcast on the Lacanian interpretation of ChatGPT psychosis.
- On Strange Matters, four stories by Selen Ozturk.
- Finally, I rather enjoyed Orogeny Vexrede’s two-part guide to pre-Tolkien fantasy – Part 1 & Part 2. I have noticed that more prominent sff YouTubers have suddenly been talking about this era of fantasy since this video came out, and I think it’s important to call attention to the person who did the work they’ve been using, particularly since this is a much smaller channel with just a few, deeply researched videos.
I did two important things in November.
One, we had a repeat of the art residency I’d attended last year, organised by Pune photographer Danny Guy (warning, his profile is mildly NSFW). Now, as last year, it was a much-needed emotional experience for me – taking a deliberate break from life, practicing art without the Internet (we didn’t have phone network, and the WiFi only worked in the café area), and taking stock of where I am and where I want to be, particularly now that I’ve turned 40. It was lovely to hang out with old friends and new, try new things, and discuss photography, drawing, and the creative life.[2]
Every year since I began freelancing, I have asked myself this question at the end of the year: Do I want to be this busy next year?
Till 2019, the answer was Yes, because I was finally in a career I loved, and I was driven by wanting to be good at it. But since the pandemic, the answer has generally been no (for reasons that have little do with work and much more with what I want out of life outside of work), and yet, I have not been able to follow that particular drive to my satisfaction.
At first, it was about money, then it was about the puritanical work ethic I’ve managed to be inculcated with, and during the pandemic, it was about avoiding a difficult situation in the world. The question comes up again now as my AiR contract with Tiny Onion ends, and this time, I find myself left with no excuse. If I want to be less busy in 2026, now is when I make that choice, and no one but me is responsible for how I make that choice.
During the three days of the residency, I found myself alone in nature much of the time, and I told myself, This is who I am, and this is where I am right now, and I asked, Where would I like to be going forward?
And the answer was surprisingly simple – Here. Outside.
I don’t know what form 2026 will take – I’ve spent about six months meditating on this, and it keeps slipping away from me – but I’ve realised now that I need 2026 to be something fluid, driven by simpler things like being outside and making things rather than by big plans and accomplishments.
I’ve spent almost my entire life since I turned 24 trying to get things done, learning how to be a functional worker, and to succeed enough of the time that the failures didn’t matter as much.
But I’m 40 now, and right now, I value discovery over achievement, interesting failures over predictable successes, and spontaneity over planning.
My 20-year-old self would be confused watching me make this decision – that was someone everyone thought was lazy, prone to constant failure, and unlikely to make something worthwhile of themselves.
But 20 years on, I’ve learned to do those things, and having done them, found that I was doing too many of them because they were expected of me, not because I wanted to do them.
For the last six months, as I mentioned up there, I tried to think about what I’d like to replace those ambitions with – would I want to dedicate my life to drawing or painting? To photography? Or go back to school and be a beginner again? Or something else? I tried it to nail it down so I wouldn’t feel adrift, but over time I realised that this attempt to nail things down – to know what I’d do next – was the thing I needed to get away from, at least for a while.
At the end of 2026, I might still end up choosing a big thing to do – for a moment there, I thought it would be going to art school and becoming a proper artist – but I need to allow myself that time of sitting back and discovering the thing(s) I love.
The other important thing I did in November was attend IFFI (the International Film Festival of India) in Goa with my friend Omkar.
I wasn’t supposed to go. I wanted to, but I had figured – I took four days off in November to go take photographs, I can’t justify taking a week off to go watch movies.
Omkar tried to entice me by talking about the films we’d be watching (getting to watch a Jafar Panahi movie on the big screen – what a dream!) and that life was about stealing time away from work to do something you love. I wasn’t convinced, but I certainly agreed with him and therefore regretted my decision not to go.
But then K made a good point – watching films is not just entertainment for me, and it certainly wouldn’t be so at a festival. She noted that the last time I attended a film festival – PIFF 2025 – I came back recharged and excited about telling stories, making comics – art. If you think about it, this is part of your work, she said.
And it made sense. I know we joke about writers “researching” by watching films and tv, but that’s a big way to engage with other art as a creator – particularly art that you’re not in competition with. I’m often jealous of a comic, or judgmental, but with films, I’m simply trying to soak in something made by someone, and letting it change me. As Omkar often says, Don’t tell me how the film was – tell me, how are you?
So I went ahead and booked my tickets and a place to stay in Goa (a far more expensive affair than if I’d just booked when I first thought of going), and went. I missed the first and last days due to bad planning – the first day only has one film (the festival opener), but the last day had some good films that I missed.
IFFI, I learnt a few days in, is in fact India’s official film festival, and wasn’t always held in Goa (PIFF, on the other hand, is only the Pune International Film Festival) – previously it was mobile, travelling between New Delhi and state capitals in India, till it settled in Panaji starting 2004.
I watched 22 films over the seven days I attended. It would’ve been more except for the fact that unlike other film festivals, where you stand in line for a film, IFFI has a ticket booking app, where you have to pre-book your attendance for a film two days in advance.[3] And that app happens to be buggy and unreliable as fuck. Ticket booking was supposed to open at 8am, except when it didn’t, and not everyone saw the listed films at once, which meant that much of the time, by 8:05, every film in a particular slot had been booked, starting with the “star” films. I knew about the app etc. because of Omkar, who’s been attending IFFI every single year since 2007 (the Panaji Inox, where IFFI happens, was right next to his college, as he explains in this reel), but over the festival, we met several people from out of town who had no idea about this, and had therefore missed most of the first two days of the festival. I understand the need for such a booking process – the festival was packed, and there was no way those many people could’ve stood in line for every movie in Goa’s heat – but there were a lot of things wrong with how it worked. As multiple people I met at IFFI told me on the first day – you’re going to end up loving the festival and hating the way it’s run.
A delightful aspect of the festival was the way filmmakers whom one wouldn’t consider mainstream are treated as absolute rockstars. We got tickets for Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident – which was our one we-can’t-miss-this film of the festival – but the queue, when we got there, was long enough to reach outside the venue. Fights broke out in the screening over people who had gotten in without permission. And a couple of days after the first screening, they had to organise a second screening because of how many people complained that they hadn’t gotten to watch it. Sentimental Value and Living the Land were fully booked out and I couldn’t get tickets, and most movies by known quantities – Fatih Akin, Jim Jarmusch, Park Chan-wook, Julia Ducournau – were absolutely packed.
Between films, we didn’t always have time to get a proper meal in, so we ate whatever we could find close to the venue, usually egg puffs and samosas, but sometimes we had long enough breaks that we could visit our favourite food spots in Panaji (one of my favourite Indian cities for food, along with Kolkata and Bangalore). We weren’t allowed to takes water bottles into the venue, so we quaffed vast quantities of Gatorade to keep ourselves hydrated (a questionably effective decision).
The films in the festival itself were a mixed batch, as one should expect from a festival. Usually these are new films, and some of them are being exhibited for the first time. Sometimes you have reviews from previous festivals to go on, or the director is reliable in terms of quality, but often, you want to take chances on unknown quantities, and that can be as depleting as it can be rewarding.
As with PIFF, there was a period around Days 3-4 – watching my third or fourth movie of the day, sometimes having slept badly because I had to finish work the night before – I started thinking, Okay, this is good, but come on, it’s just movies. Too many movies of fair-to-good quality can get me wondering if there is anything transcendental about the medium at all, or if every movie is in fact just a movie.
And then usually on Days 5-6, there is something that blows the doors wide open again, something that reminds me that no, there’s a reason this was the biggest narrative medium of the 20th century, there is a connection to be had here that nothing else can create, and if one has to wade through mere “fine”ness to get there, so be it. Sometimes it’s just one film, but if you’re lucky, it’s a few films in a row.
This time it was the latter. You can see what films I watched, and how much I liked them, on my Letterboxd, but here are my favourites:
It Was Just an Accident by Jafar Panahi: This is the obvious one, the one everyone knew was going to be good. Panahi is getting Oscar buzz right now, and all I can say about that is, good for the Oscars for noticing one of the best filmmakers in the world 20 years late. This isn’t my favourite Panahi (that would be his last film No Bears), but it is very good. I suspected for a stretch that Panahi might be making a far more neoliberal and conciliatory film than I would’ve expected from as angry a filmmaker as him, but the rug-pull he executes in the climax fully exonerates him from any such claims.
Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino: This was a rewatch, but my first time watching a Tarantino film in a theatre. As Omkar said, this tells you why films are made to be watched in a dark room with hundreds of other people and not on your phone. I had a grin on my face for the first thirty minutes straight. I have a very low opinion of Tarantino as a personality, but by god, he knows what he’s doing when it comes to making a movie.
Amrum by Fatih Akin: The short review of this would be – What if Jojo Rabbit was good? Amrum is a story of a little Nazi boy towards the end of World War 2 discovering his connection to the land and the people around him, based on co-writer Hark Bohm’s own childhood. Playing deceptively simple on its surface, it finds great depth in lacunae and manages to be viciously critical of Nazi functioning while also imbuing the life it’s depicting with an apocalyptic, end-of-days feel. I’ve previously only liked Fatih Akin’s work, but since watching The Golden Glove earlier this year, I’ve understood him as a brave and ambitious filmmaker who is always worth watching. My one complaint about this film is that I felt it would’ve played far better if it had been shot on film and not digitally.
Sound of Falling by Mascha Schilinski: A vast, complex epic of mundanity, this tells the story of four generations of women living in the same house over the course of a century. The script is wondrous, fragments of lives building up to something big, and Schilinski and her team are exploring themes and symbols that I’ll be unpacking on rewatches. Highly recommended if you like the films of Céline Sciamma, and the two directors are particularly resonant in the way they are trying to build cinema that looks at women in a new way.[4]
Black Rabbit, White Rabbit by Shahram Mokri: Probably the most explosive filmic experience of the festival, this, along with Sound of Falling, is the film I’ll be rewatching to figure out precisely how it’s doing what it’s doing. Black Rabbit, White Rabbit – textually the story of a prop master trying to find a prop gun on set that might or might not be loaded with a real bullet – is filmmaking as a game, folding in on itself and pulling reality in as well. If I had to pin down what’s it’s “about”, I’d say it’s about objects in time and space, but that’s just the top layer of a very complex mechanic that forms a crystalline structure with ideas of repression (an Iranian director remaking an old Iranian tv show, but having to do it in Tajikistan), oppression (the role of women in film, behind the camera, and in society) and authority (who, precisely, is responsible for the condition of a gun on set and why is the director nowhere to be found). Black Rabbit, White Rabbit is the opposite of hermetic cinema – it takes as its starting point Chekhov’s Gun and Pirandello’s metatextual play and points to the future of film.
A film festival – being a series of films in each other’s orbits – also makes for interesting cumulative commentary on the present world situation. There were, for example, several films involving amputees or amputation, frequently juxtaposed with war. Many films were about the end of days in either literal terms or figurative. There were multiple plagues or plague-like situations, often nominally about AIDS but really about the COVID pandemic. There is a growing number of films – both in this festival and upcoming – that are about the same location across time. You can see these patterns better when you’re watching so many movies at once, all produced in the last year or so.
The first two, to me, betray an anxiety in the world about the possibility of World War 3. This is an emotion, of course, and not a diagnosis of a political situation, but it is clearly something the creative world is anticipating or, at least, is anxious about.
The stories about a single location over time, on the other hand, speaks to me of the Eternal Now we seem to live in, where influences from all periods collide in culture – 60s tailoring coexists with 90s hip-hop and synthwave. Culture is now a grab-bag across eras, enabled by the Internet allowing access to art from every time, all the time. I remember when I was a teenager and listening to the Beatles, I loved them, but they sounded distinctively old back then in a way they don’t anymore. Sound of Falling, particularly beautifully conveyed that feeling of being unstuck in time, a soul experiencing life nonlinearly.
My attitude to film is also evolving. If you’d asked me a few years ago, I would’ve told you that I think of film as a very effective storytelling medium, particularly since it can use real people in service of its spectacle, but a mere storytelling medium nonetheless. But the last couple of years of watching films and discussing them with people who understand far more about the medium than I do has led me to understand that not only is storytelling possible outside of narrative, the medium of film is far bigger than storytelling or narrative, though these are certainly more palatable ways of, shall we say, communing with reality through film.
In short, I regret to have to admit that in these two years, I have come to believe that yes, film is in fact a medium like none else, and cinema is magic.
It is also an incredibly brave medium if used well, and part of this has to do with how easy it is to watch a film compared to, say, reading a novel.[5] I had to go outside American film (where a variety of speech is allowed, as long as it makes money) and Indian film (where censorship dictates what the public can watch) to understand this.
In Room 666, which was coincidentally the first film I watched on Omkar’s recommendation soon after we met, Wim Wenders leaves various film directors in a room with one reel of 16mm film and a question written on a piece of paper, “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?”
All the directors have their views, some sardonic, some hopeful, some pessimistic. All familiar from comics, where people have been predicting the death of the medium since approximately a week after Rodolphe Töpffer started drawing. In the last section, however, instead of Yılmaz Güney, the director supposed to appear in the section, Wim Wenders stands in the room, in his peak Goth-era outfit, and regretfully informs us that Güney cannot himself appear as he has been placed under house arrest in his native country for making his last film. He then pastes a photograph of Güney on the shitty CRT tv in the room, plays an audio recording Güney has managed to send, and leaves us with it.
It is a shocking moment – bracing in how reality intrudes onto the film. Here we have been watching all these people pontificating on the matter, intellectually masturbating about the form, and here’s a man who his country because of a film he made. Is cinema dying? How could it possibly be dying if you can still get arrested for making a movie? I think there’s a reason filmmakers and poets are the first to get arrested by an oppressive regime.
Since then, I am more and more convinced of cinema as a living, thriving art. Jafar Panahi, for me, is the poster-boy of this kind of cinema – a man who’s turned his government’s disapproval of him into a game. But there is Asghar Farhadi, Mohammad Rasoulof, whose recent The Seed of the Sacred Fig caused a firestorm in his country. There’s Jia Zhangke, who speaks through documentary-style stock footage what he can’t say out loud. There’s Shahram Mokri, mentioned above, or Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, not to speak of No Other Land, the Palestinian co-directors of which were attacked by settlers after the film’s release.
Of course, that is not all film is for – that’s what’s wonderful about it. There’s film that is brave, but there’s film that is formally innovative, that is emotionally truthful, that tells you about parts of the world you didn’t know about, that creates an ethereal human connection. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, it’s all the same film.
Anyway, that’s 2025 from me. It was a big, exciting, confusing year for me. I turned 40 and had to decide how to have a midlife crisis that makes my life interesting without sacrificing what I’ve worked for so far.
I’ll let you know next year how it’s going.
Till then, bide well, and enjoy your holidays.
In all this, I’d forgotten that I’d be lettering my own book as well, so that’s been duly added to the slate. Just because it’s for me doesn’t mean it isn’t work. ↩︎
Among other things, I shot on medium format with a Fujica GL690 that a friend lent me, which now absolutely has me hankering to do large format photography. To clarify why this camera is special – the negative this produces is more than four times as big as 35mm film, 60x90mm as opposed to 36x24mm, while keeping the same ratio. ↩︎
I’ve since learned that Cannes does this as well, and will therefore withdraw any objections I might have voiced. ↩︎
It’d be inaccurate to call this the “female gaze” as some do, but that’s handy in trying to understand the way these directors are attempting to imagine something that has never existed, unlike, say, Carolie Fargeat and Julia Ducournau who are more interested in subverting the male gaze to their purposes. In this imaginative leap, they remind me of feminist sf pioneers like Joanna Russ. ↩︎
We can go into hot and cool mediums here, or more simply active or passive mediums, but film’s passivity makes it a more audience-friendly medium, for our current purposes. ↩︎