Aditya Bidikar is a comic-book letterer and occasional writer based in India.
First week of July.
I have a habit of thinking back on my life twice a year – towards the end of the year, and in July, around my birthday. These are both arbitrary times to do this – I suppose ideally one should be thinking deeply about one’s life all the time – but it’s good to have mile markers where you can check if you’re headed in the right direction and if you need to make any adjustments.
(more…)That’s half the year done! Wow, we made it.
It’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m on my second cup of coffee. I usually drink only two cups of coffee a day – at noon and 6 p.m. – because historically, my body has had a low tolerance for caffeine, but I just like coffee so much that I decided to experiment with adding one more cup at 3 p.m. Doing this might turn me into a jittery, overemotional mess, but we’ll get through it together, won’t we?
So.
Here’s what I’m trying to do.
I’ve said many times over that I want to use my blog more, so I want to start doing that. All the stuff that I naturally post on Twitter? Let’s see if it can go here. I want to live here again, if I can.
Right before the title drop in Across the Spider-Verse, Spider-Gwen leaves her house and swings out into the sky – does her Spidey thing. It’s a great visual sequence, and I was struck by a fleeting moment where she nearly disappears into the white sky, only standing out by the black and red of her costume.
I wanted to draw that moment, and I wanted to draw it from memory, before I watched the movie for a second time.
Last week, I wrote a fairly detailed newsletter on how intentional failure is a big part of learning how to do something. Trying, failing and integrating the failure into your process is how one learns to do anything as an adult.
Writing that essay got me thinking about things other than drawing, and I realised that while I’ve been able to fail purposefully in drawing, there was another creative venture that had stalled out because I was – it was becoming obvious as I thought about this – afraid to fail.
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Some of my nerdier friends don’t like it when I refer to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story as “the only good Star War”. It’s mostly a joke, but the fact is – that’s the only Star Wars film I’ve been able to watch more than once, and it’s the only one that I feel has something to say politically. Now that we’ve got Andor, though, Rogue One feels mostly superseded – its dialogue and politics are cartoonish in comparison to the, y’know, actually good tv show.
(more…)A couple of weeks ago, I posted my old lettering checklist on Twitter.
I’ve been working on an essay about learning new things as an adult, and I pulled this up as an example of something that I absolutely needed to have at hand when I was starting out, but which I don’t need much anymore.
When I started out, there were too many lettering guidelines for me to just keep in my head, and I’d end up forgetting one thing or the other, so every time I finished lettering an issue, I’d go through the whole issue with this checklist next to it and fix my work one item at a time.
(more…)If you’ve been following me on Twitter or through my newsletter, you might know that I’ve been writing a lot more these days, and particularly trying my hand at writing my own comics.
In that vein, I am extremely proud to present to you, a short comic written and lettered by me, with art by my friend and constant colleague Anand RK:
“The Monkey Man of Delhi” – a True Weird tale, presented to you by James Tynion IV and edited by Greg Lockard. (You need a paid subscription to read this.)
Late December, I’m not quite sure why, I felt moved to make some diary comics. I’d had a few conversations with artist friends, one of whom recommended that a good way to improve my drawing fast would be to make comics (these are not those, though). But mainly, I’d just finished making our “Monkey Man” comic, and wanted to continue marinating in comics thinking.
Anyway, I made four. I’m not sure I’ll be making more, but they were rather fun to make. Each took 20-30 minutes, and I got to improvise making comics – that subtle chemistry of text and image. Here you go:
Alan Moore is one of the three writers I feel have affected me and my writing the most, at least as an adult – the others being Nick Cave and David Milch. For all three, this is partly through their work, and partly through how they think and speak about their work. Each of these creators has a deliberateness about their work that comes through in interviews and talks, and I’m indebted to all of them for the way I think about my writing.
With Moore, Watchmen, From Hell and Providence are the comics I reread the most, but they’re a small fraction of all of his books that I love. If those three didn’t exist, then Miracleman, Top Ten, Tom Strong, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Halo Jones and Promethea would be enough for a writer to qualify as a favourite. And that’s not even counting Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem, the latter of which is, for my money, one of the best novels of the 21st century thus far.
So you might say I have been waiting quite a long time for Illuminations to be published. Moore’s first prose short story collection – this is an event for me.
Rather than simply barreling through it, I thought I’d read one story at a time (in one day or longer, since some of these go on a bit – there’s a whole mid-length novel stuffed into this), and note down my thoughts as I get done with each one, starting with the first story on the day of release.
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