Hello, my beloved Internet! I intended only to skip one week while I was on my vacation, but I forgot that my vacation encompassed two weekends, and I had no intention to do anything resembling work while on holiday.
I hope everyone’s been well. I had a good time in Goa – my motivation for the vacation was to log off as much as possible. Rest … well, I’ve been resting for the last year and a half – I do some work, but most of the time I’m goofing off, so that’s not been a problem. But I wanted to take long walks on the beach without my phone, completely disconnected from everything, and be alone with my mind. I missed being able to think about something for a long time without looking at my phone or being distracted. Getting my attention back, so to speak, which has been my quest for the last few years. I’ll write about this separately, because I have Some Thoughts.
I’d intended to write a bit on vacation, but I also gave myself permission to simply think about stories without writing anything. That’s what I ended up doing, and I don’t regret a thing. So I wandered around the beach and the village, talked to strangers, watched a lot of people, and spent time with myself. It was a good time.
Since I got back from my vacation, I delivered the three short comics currently under NDA, after getting the most wonderful response a letterer can possibly get – “No notes!” I also sent in the lettered draft for a 22-page short comic for a cool project which I’ll talk about when it comes around.
In terms of releases, Detective Comics #1076 came out on October 31. I lettered a two-page backup for this, mainly because it was written and drawn (fully painted!) by Ram V. Here’s the whole first page, since it’s been posted often enough by now:
w0rldtree Volume 1 came out on November 7. We’re all very proud of this one. I’ve always wanted to be a part of a Vertigo-style long-running creator-owned series, and James and Fernando have managed to combine that with the structure of a Stephen King novel. Now that Volume 1 is out, I might do a process post on the lettering of this, since we did some fun stuff with it.
The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos #5 came out this week, where you get to know a ton of the background of the series. Next month’s issue concludes the first arc.
Finally, Dawnrunner was announced last week from Dark Horse Comics – the new book from Ram V, Evan Cagle, Dave Stewart and myself. From the solicit text:
A century ago, a portal opened over Central America and giant monsters known as the Tetza came through, changing our world. Now, the world puts all its effort into making the Iron Kings – giant mechs that are forever battling the Tetza for humanity’s continued survival in gladiatorial combat. Anita Marr is the greatest of the Iron King pilots, chosen to work with a new secret prototype named Dawnrunner. An Iron King that could change the tide in humanity’s favour.
Ram, Evan and I have been working on this one for a long time, and it’s going to be a very special book – I swear Evan might be actual magic. Out in March 2024.
In stuff I didn’t work on, The Deviant #1 came out this week, which I wrote about here, as did Lotus Land #1, which I wrote about here.
While I was on vacation, the “new” Beatles single “Now and Then” was released. I didn’t expect to get emotional listening to a fairly basic offcut developed from a John Lennon demo tape, but that’s exactly what happened – perhaps helped by the fact that I was sitting alone in a hotel room in the middle of the night, thinking about an old friend. Since then, I’ve been listening to Beatles albums and reading up on their history, just as I did when Get Back came out a couple of years ago.
You don’t want to read one more Beatles Nostalgia™ post here, so I’ll just point you to two pieces about the new song that I enjoyed:
- Comics writer Alex Segura wrote about being obsessed with the Beatles, and about the three “new” singles released since the ’90s. Other than that, he provides a very useful reading list about the Beatles. I read You Never Give Me Your Money on his recommendation, and it was a blast (more below), and I plan to read Dreaming the Beatles sometime this month or the next.
- Kieron linked to this great piece on Andrew Hickey’s Patreon where he unpicks different approaches to look at both the new song and Paul’s reigning obsession with “fixing” the past. (Sidenote: Andrew and I have been friendly for more than a decade – I’ve long admired his writing, which also introduced me both to Faction Paradox and to El Sandifer’s criticism – and I’m chuffed as hell to see the runaway success of his music podcast. You should particularly check out this interview with him by well-known music producer Rick Rubin.)
I watched only one film in these weeks. I was at a friend’s place in Goa for my first two days, and we watched it together. Once I got to my hotel near the beach, I opened up my laptop and loaded up a movie, and realised I didn’t want to watch anything on that small a screen, so decided to do a lot of reading instead.
The one film I did watch was When Evil Lurks, the new film by the director of the excellent Aterrados. When Evil Lurks is a breathtakingly bleak film, which is the best thing about it. I also enjoyed how it took its worldbuilding for granted and let you learn things about the world as you went. I did not enjoy some of the mechanics of how the horror element fits in with the world, but that’s a minor complaint. There are some great practical effects and very tense set pieces. The horror internet seems to be ecstatic about this movie. I wasn’t quite as enamoured, but it was an enjoyably chilling experience.
Once I got back, K and I started watching the anime adaptation of Pluto, possibly my favourite manga. She was a bit unsure about watching a sci-fi animated show about robots, but I told her to give it an episode, since I knew the North No. 2 section would be the deciding factor. Predictably, she was a mess by the end, and likes the idea of watching the rest. Urasawa, at his best, can wield sentimentality like no other creator – the man doesn’t see any use for irony when it comes to emotions. For myself, I think the anime does some things better than the comic and falters in other places, but we’re just one episode in, so I’m reserving judgment.
Like I said, I read a lot during this trip. I don’t want to overload you, so I’ll keep things short when I can.
I finally finished Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, the book – about the mirror world of QAnon, Trump, anti-vaxxers and how it relates to our liberal anxieties – starts out great and then turns into a slog in the middle because it turns near-liturgical in its repetition. It straightens out towards the end, and I enjoyed it in the main, but god did it need several portions to be excised. A valuable read, if too often a boring one.
One observation sticks with me: a big reason the right-wing mirror world is successful in its populism is that it takes as its own several causes that liberalism should be concerned with – corporate surveillance, big Pharma’s control over healthcare, poverty and other concerns of the working class – and yet, liberal politics (and liberals) have a tendency to drop these issues once people like Naomi Wolf, Steve Bannon or Trump pick them up. For example, the fact that Facebook, Google and other companies have vast amounts of data on us all is something that champions of democracy should be fighting, and yet it is the right that talks incessantly about this, warping it to be about microchips in vaccines.
Open Throat is a novella told from the point of view of a tiger in the hills of Los Angeles that doubles up as a satire on modernity and our alienation from nature. It’s not great, but it was an enjoyable read. It was striking for me because (SPOILER ALERT) I read it right after I read Minor Detail, and it was odd to be reading two novellas with first-person narrators that both end with the narrator being shot at the end.
On many of my long walks in Goa, I listened to Matthew Perry’s memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, having been reminded by his recent passing how obsessed I was with the show and particularly his character on it as a teenager. Like Pink Floyd (about whom I’m reading a book at the moment, having enjoyed the Beatles book), Friends formed so much of the texture of my life as a teenager and my struggle to fit in that it’s difficult to separate out specific memories of the experience. I’ve always had a tendency towards hyperfocus – being obsessed with something till it took up most of my waking time for months or even years and then totally disconnecting from it – and Floyd, Friends, and a bit later Monty Python were all ways for me to sink into something entirely and have those dopamine-inducing neurons fire at will. So a lot of “Oh yeah, that – hadn’t thought about it for decades” happens when I read material related to any of these.
In the context of his death, Perry’s memoir is undeniably affecting – how could it not be if you had any affection for him as an actor? – but it’s also a brutally honest account of what it feels like to be an addict. Tell-all memoirs are usually written from a place of sobriety, and the details of the addiction are already fuzzy by the time the author sits down to write about them. Perry on the other hand was writing from a place of continuing addiction, which makes the book continually sadder as you get to the end. There is some hope in the ending, but the context of reality complicates how you feel by the end.
If I had a criticism, it wouldn’t be of Perry’s writing – there are several sparkling passages, and the man clearly loved words – but of the editing. As with any first-time writer, Perry repeats himself often, returning to moments that stick with him, or phrases he finds effective. The job of an editor for a book like this would be to streamline the read and to excise this repetition. Perhaps the publisher was afraid to touch a famous person’s writing, or Perry himself pushed back, but after a few chapters, the repetitions get a bit much. This doesn’t reduce the power of the book in total, but it dulls the lustre just a titch.
Perry himself reads the audiobook. He doesn’t do a bang-up job – presumably his ill health and lifelong addiction to cigarettes played a part in that – but you very well couldn’t have had anybody else reading it, so it feels right nonetheless.1 Despite strange pauses for breath, and stumbling over clumsy bits of writing, Perry’s performance reminds you that he was a good actor, and an incredibly funny person to boot.
Conspirituality is a book version of the podcast of the same name. It functions as a compendium of what the podcast is interested in – all at the intersection of wellness culture and conspiracy thinking. If you like the podcast, you’ll like the book. I listened to this one as well, since it was narrated by one of the hosts, and it felt like an extended version of the podcast (as I remember the Book of the Years by the No Such Thing As a Fish team feeling as well).
I’ve wanted to read more plays for a while, since I’m writing a comic and I want to (a) engage with dialogue-driven media, and (b) pick up some lessons on staging from theatre. To that end, I read the award-winning play Serial Black Face about a real-life serial killer who abducted and murdered Black children in Atlanta around 1980. A tragic story that manages to eschew a tragic ending, Serial Black Face is about relationships in traumatised family, the alienation that comes from being of an oppressed race, and the lengths one can go to just to find a meagre of value in the world. Expect to see more plays mentioned here.
Michael Chabon is a favourite prose writer for me, mainly for his facility for mixing genre subjects with literary concerns. So far, I’ve parcelled out his books because I don’t want to have finished all of them too soon. So, given I’ve been reading a lot about the history of Israel and Palestine, I figured it was time to read The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
I’d assumed the divergence from reality for this alternate-universe story was that the Jewish state was established in Alaska, but that’s not quite it. Instead, the United States decides to implement the 1940 Slattery Report, providing a temporary refugee settlement for European Jews escaping the Nazis, centred around the town of Sitka, which is now a big city. The novel is set a few months before the sixty-year mark from this settlement, when the land is to revert to the US, throwing the citizenship status of Jewish people in Alaska into question.
For one, the book is an excellent work of worldbuilding and speculative fiction – Chabon is unafraid to immerse the plot fully in Jewish concerns, and uses a panoply of Yiddish words (there’s a glossary at the end, but I only encountered it once I finished the book, and I doubt that affected my read adversely). I thoroughly enjoyed the confidence with which Chabon expects the reader to keep up.
In terms of writing, this isn’t as strong a book as Wonder Boys or Kavalier and Clay, but it’s still complex, and does its best to take its characters on their terms. The book this reminded me of most was The Mirage by Matt Ruff – an alternate history novel in which the United Arab States are attacked on November 9 by a terrorist group called the World Christian Alliance. But where that book made a joke of most of its worldbuilding, refusing to disconnect from our reality, Chabon dives fully into his alternate world, and comes up with a genuinely emotionally affecting story about how religion is used for oppression and how Jewish people have alternately been oppressed and used throughout history. It’s a far superior work.
I was also delighted to find that my exploration of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish myths over the last couple of years allowed me to predict early on what the driving plot of the book would be, and I was impressed with how Chabon balanced that with the fate of his main characters.
It’s not a perfect book – there are some chapters in the middle where Chabon tries for an action-oriented plotline, and they almost made me put the book down (I’m glad I persisted), and I would’ve like to read more about the political repercussions of the climactic events, but that was a clear matter of authorial choice and not a deficiency in the writing.
Finally, as I mentioned above, I read Peter Doggett’s You Never Give Me Your Money on Alex Segura’s recommendation. It’s not a biography of the Beatles, but an account of their breakup and after. It starts with John Lennon’s death, and goes back to chart their last few years as a group, with the understanding that far more than Yoko or creative conflicts, it was money that was the driving force behind their breakup. It makes a good case for its thesis, but much more than that, it’s a well-researched and entertaining book about four fascinating and flawed personalities whose lives were entirely warped by fame. (For example, I’m following this up with Mark Blake’s Comfortably Numb, about Pink Floyd, and while that’s a band that was closer to my heart than the Beatles – see above – I had a much better time reading this one, because the Beatles’ friendships and conflicts are more interesting, and the sheer immensity of their fame and music historians’ attention to the minutiae of their lives makes them more interesting as characters.)
That’s it for now. I contemplated splitting this one into two, because I wanted to write about attention, as well as the role of saying no in your professional life, but I figured I’d keep it to the essentials, despite which this is nudging the 3,000-word mark.
The next one should be shorter, at least partly because I intend to write up the Pink Floyd book as a separate post. Bide well, gang!
- The one memoir where I felt someone other than the author still felt “right” was David Milch’s Life’s Work, read by Michael Harney, who played Steve in Milch’s Deadwood. Harney, having known Milch personally, did a pitch-perfect imitation of Milch’s accent, to the point I’d often forget Milch wasn’t reading it himself. ↩︎