Comics pal and frequent collaborator James Tynion IV recently sent over an advance PDF of his upcoming horror comic The Deviant, created with artist Joshua Hixson and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. Since, I’ve come to realise, this blog can be whatever I want it to be, I thought I’d use this place to shill what I think is an excellent comic.
(more…)-
-
Status Update / 2023 / Week 39
I’m writing this from my other favourite café – the one where I’m friends with the owners. One of them had just come back from a coffee conference, and gave me a packet of coffee to take home, and made me a delicious pourover of an as-yet-unlaunched coffee.
Pays to have a favourite café, I tell you.
(more…) -
Status Update / 2023 / Week 38
I’m running a bit sick this weekend, so as I start writing this, it’s intended to be shorter than usual. We’ll find out.
(more…) -
Status Update / 2023 / Week 37
When I last did one of these – sheesh, three months ago – I was writing them to figure out how I wanted to use the blog.
I feel closer to having it sorted out – it’s a good place to do series of posts about the same thought, for example, and post half-formed thoughts that you don’t particularly feel like following up on.
But once I stopped doing these updates, I realised they can fulfil a function other posts won’t. I don’t want to do dedicated posts with publishing updates – social media is better for that, since it’s far more “real time”, and a blog post on those lines would be instantly dated – and I have no place to self-indulgently talk about what I’ve been up to in life.
So that’s going to be the purpose of these going forward.
(more…) -
Immersive Non-Fiction
I’ve been reading more non-fiction these days, and I wanted to note a trend in the kind of books I’ve enjoyed most.
One is American Prometheus, the in-depth biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that formed the basis for Nolan’s recent film (which I thoroughly enjoyed). I’ve been listening to this one on audiobook on my evening walks.
The other one is Space Odyssey, a book by Michael Benson on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I finished reading last week in preparation for a rewatch of the movie.1 I expected this one to be 200-250 pages when I bought it on Kindle, and it turned out to be a hefty 600 pages – a good surprise.
(more…) -
Reincarnation
It is early afternoon. Not raining yet, but the air is moist and rapidly cooling.
I’m sitting at the neighbourhood café by myself. I came here to write, but I’m avoiding it, nibbling on a sandwich while hunched over my phone.
There are three men at the next table – old friends catching up, it looks like. There’s music playing in my earphones, but I hear snippets – talk of family, traffic in Pune, and something about emigration to the United States.
(more…) -
Gaps in Space
These are two drawings that I made on the iPad ten months apart – one in August 2022, the other this June.
Titas Mandal/Stephanie Fox Lawrence. I’ve always been fascinated by negative space in drawings. As a comics creator, I think negative space defines how we approach storytelling. It’s not just gaps in the art – how we draw the eye and where – negative space is fundamental to writing a comic too. Scott McCloud talks about this as closure – someone looking at the space between panels and filling in what happens there.
(more…) -
Is Writing Optional?
Due to many factors, including some physical ones, I’ve had to step away from doing much work in June – particularly in the back half.
In that time, I’ve been working on this outline for a comics mini-series (a four-issue horror story that I’ve codenamed SEASIDE). As I’ve written before, I finished around 80% of this before I stopped working on it, and only started back up in the last week of June.
In the meantime, I wrote two comics scripts and several blog posts and essays, so it’s not like I haven’t been writing. It’s more that I haven’t wanted to … take up space.
(more…) -
Status Update / 2023 / Week 27
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…) -
Status Update / 2023 / Week 26
(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?