Award Night

I’m writing this in an airplane over New Zealand, on the way back to Auckland from Queenstown. After a very hectic month and a half, I needed a break, and it felt like the right time to visit some old friends and wander around a country I’d heard so much about. (I’ve been walking 15,000 steps a day, on average, which I do very rarely in India, I can tell you.)

Turns out New Zealand is even more beautiful than I’d been told. We drove around both North Island and South Island a fair bit, and it feels like there’s a new and beautiful view at every turn, something stunning to make you stop and stare. It’s aided by the fact that the light here is some of the best I’ve ever seen. The sun is never too high, and the way it shines through the clouds, adding rim lighting to a whole lot of them – it’s something I’d never seen so consistently before. You’ll be standing at a random gas station, and you turn, and it’s the most beautiful sky you’ve seen in your life. It’s quite something.

Honestly, I could spend a year here just photographing clouds and how the sun interacts with them. I mean, look at that:

I have more to say about New Zealand and how much I loved it, but we’d be here all day, so let me move on to the more relevant part of this post. Here’s the view from my airplane window:

There was a bunch of big news this month.

First of all, “trAPPed”, the digital comic drawn by Anand RK, reported by Suparna Sharma and Natalie Obiko Pearson, lettered by me, won the Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary. Anand texted me the news the day it happened, and it was as surreal an experience as you can imagine it being.

You can read the whole comic for free in English and Hindi (both lettered by me). Here are a couple of articles about the announcement, one of which quotes me about what it’s like working with Anand.

Next, the Eisner Award nominations for this year were announced, and it feels like a whole fleet of my friends and collaborators were up for awards, along with a few books and stories I worked on.

• My pal Juni Ba was nominated for Best Writer/Artist for our book The Fables of Erlking Wood, and for Best Cover Artist for a host of covers. (FYI, he’s drawn the variant cover for In Your Skin #3, which isn’t part of his nomination, but might as well be, it’s so good.)
• The Fables of Erlking Wood itself was nominated for Best Graphic Album (New).
• The Department of Truth was nominated for Best Continuing Series.
• Everything Dead & Dying was nominated for Best Limited Series.
• Elsa Charretier was nominated for Best Penciller/Inker for The City Beneath Her Feet.
• Martin Simmonds was nominated for Best Painter/Multimedia Artist for The Department of Truth.
• DC Pride 2025 was nominated for Best Anthology.
• The aforementioned “trAPPed” was nominated for Best Short Story.
• Jordie Bellaire was nominated for Best Colouring.
• James Tynion IV and Deniz Camp were nominated for Best Writer.
• My friend Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou was, once again, nominated for Best Lettering, alongside Nate Piekos and Clayton Cowles, among others.

It’s a good time for one’s friends, and one likes to see it.

In other news, Som is about halfway through drawing In Your Skin #4, and it’s turning out beautifully. I can’t wait for you folks to see it.

In Your Skin #2 is out this Wednesday, 27th May. Shit gets even weirder than it did in issue 1. Stay tuned.

When I went on break, there was one item left on my plate – to write the backmatter for issue 3. A couple of days ago, I finished that, which means that I’m officially finished writing all of In Your Skin. I have finished writing my first book. It was a big day for me, and I celebrated by getting one of the finest cookies I’ve ever had, from Cookie Time in Queenstown.

The geography of New Zealand is strange and fascinating. It feels like every kind of landscape, environment and weather in the world is present in New Zealand. It even has fjords, for god’s sake (they just call them “fiords”, for some reason). There are many factors for this, prime among them its location and its shape. New Zealand’s Māori name is Aotearoa, which means “the land of the rolling white clouds”. We got to see those too, and some clouds that looked like UFOs.

It feels like the most beautiful place in the world now, so I can only imagine what this place was like when it was discovered – what it was like when the first Pacific Islanders landed here and it was just them and the nature. I can understand why that would create a deep, abiding love for nature.

On a cruise around Milford Sound (one of the aforementioned fiords), I mentioned to a friend that the only beautiful thing in nature I hadn’t seen in New Zealand were god beams (i.e. when the sun shines down between the clouds directly to the ground, creating solid-seeming beams of light. I theorised that it might be something to do with its latitude.

And I kid you not, literally 30 seconds later, the fucker shows us this: