Writing this one from my parents’ home. My mother’s taking a well-deserved vacation, so I’m taking care of my father while she’s away. The nicest thing about this is, of course, the constant presence of my cat Loki, who is currently asleep in the chair next to mine, having first arranged my messenger bag into a little bed.1
No work this week, other than revisions on two books, which took an hour total. Instead, I’m doing that thing where I stare intently at next year’s worksheet – currently filled with both finalised and tentative project commitments – trying to figure out what I can drop. Like I’ve said before, it’s harder to say no when every book you’ve been offered is something you’d give your right arm to do.
At the moment, 2024 provisionally has 2,100 pages, which will likely end up at around 1,300 (I like to add probability buffers so I don’t overcommit), which is my 2023 total too. I wanted to get down to 1,000 pages next year, and I’m gonna see if I can figure this out. If not, 1,300 isn’t a bad total, because this year felt quite good.
It seems I have no new books out this week either, though my Department of Truth cohorts James and Martin put out Universal Monsters: Dracula #2 on Wednesday.
Oh wait, Aquaman: Andromeda from Black Label came out in hardcover this week. Really proud of this collaboration with Ram V, Christian Ward and editor Chris Conroy.
There’s this App Defaults thing going around the blogosphere. I got this off TDH’s blog and it looked like fun. Here’s my default apps at the moment. Goes for Mac, iPhone, and iPad unless noted otherwise.
📨 Mail Client: Mimestream (Mac), Gmail (iPad – I don’t have email on my phone anymore).
📮 Mail Server: Gmail (for both personal and work emails).
📝 Notes: Notes.
✅ To-Do: Reminders and Trello.
📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: Camera.
🟦 Photo Management: Google Photos.
📆 Calendar: Google Calendar + Calendars 5 (iOS)/Calendar (Mac).
📁 Cloud File Storage: Dropbox.
🙍🏻♂️ Contacts: Google Contacts (I used to switch between Android and iPhone for a few years before I settled on the latter).
🌐 Browser: Safari (iOS), Arc and Brave (Mac).
💬 Chat: WhatsApp.
🔖 Bookmarks: Brave.
📑 Read It Later: Pocket.
📜 Word Processing: Ulysses (for actual writing), Notes (for rough work).
📈 Spreadsheets: Google Sheets (I used to use Microsoft Excel, but eventually realised the benefit of having my worksheets on the cloud).
📊 Presentations: 🤷🏽♂️.
🛒 Shopping Lists: Reminders.
🍴 Meal Planning: Swiggy.
💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: Zoho (Invoicing), Buxfer.
📰 News: the India Cable, Rest of World, the Washington Post, the Comics Beat and assorted topical newsletters and RSS feeds.
🎵 Music: Spotify.
🎤 Podcasts: Pocket Casts.
🔐 Password Management: 1Password.
Some links for the week:
- I enjoyed this piece by Kate Kelleher about sea shanties.
- David Brothers, when he gets down to it, remains one of the most interesting people writing about comics. Here he is on Frank Miller’s thorny relationship with race in his comics.
- Desert Island Discworld just had its series finale, with unofficial Terry Pratchett biographer Marc Burrows interviewing host Al Kennedy about The Shepherd’s Crown. DID has been one of my favourite podcasts throughout its run – Al’s interviews are as interesting as the book discussions that follow them – and I look forward to the “specials” he intends to put out. I had the pleasure of being a guest in Season 4, talking about comics lettering and Going Postal.
- Inter has just released v4.0 – a major update that includes humanist italics. From fairly ramshackle beginnings, Inter has developed quite beautifully, with a host of OpenType features and alternate characters added over time. My favourite features are probably the open digits and the crossbar I.
- Ammar Azzouz writes about Gaza and the idea of Domicide.
- I knew Matthew Butterick for his Practical Typography website/book. I didn’t realise he’s also one of the people leading the court cases between creatives and AI companies.2
I haven’t had a chance to watch the new Doctor Who special, since I don’t have much spare time while I’m here. I’m not … excited about Tennant/Gatwa/Davies’s run, particularly – I don’t like creators looking backwards this blatantly – but I think I’ll enjoy it. I’ll get to watch it Monday or Wednesday (it’s playing on Hotstar in India). In the meantime, here’s my mandatory 60th anniversary reminiscence.
I discovered Doctor Who in the school library at age 12 – I wouldn’t discover the Internet for four more years. I was reading Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells at the time, mixed with Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and my friend Vineet – with whom I’d later connect on Douglas Adams and Monty Python as well – excitedly told me about this series of books about a man who keeps changing his face and has adventures in time and space. The clincher for me was his description of how the TARDIS’s “bigger on the inside” thing worked, accompanied by much giggling – if you take a big box and a small box, and move the big box farther away, it’s now small enough to put inside the small box. How delightfully alchemical. As an adult, I mentioned this to someone who sniffily responded that I needed to read about “transdimensional engineering”.
So Doctor Who, for me, was a series of books, and I didn’t know the order they went in – which mostly didn’t matter, except when it did. The school library had 50-odd Target novelisations, and we tried to piece together a rough chronology, but we got most of it wrong. We even used the dates mentioned in the copyright page, but we didn’t know that a lot of older episodes were novelised much later.
Speaking of episodes, I was aware from the title page that these stories were originally written for a tv show (one novel per episode was my assumption – such overpacked episodes, then), but since they were “by” and “copyright” the writer rather than the BBC, I made the now-charming assumption that you’d have an idea for a Doctor Who story and you sent it to the BBC and they made it for you. (While it has its flaws, the BBC’s copyright policy runs circles around American tv and comics.)
What I couldn’t figure out though was why – the meta-reason, I mean, not the fictional reason – his face kept changing. My best guess was that they had a rotating cast of actors for the main role and they reached out to whichever one was available, with regeneration being a cleverer, more sf way to handle the James Bond problem. Even so, having six actors play the same role in turns seemed like a lot. And did they regenerate each time they needed to hand off to one of the others? Towards the end I came across one of the multi-Doctor books, and that’s when I found out that one retired for the next one to take his place. It still didn’t occur to me that maybe regeneration was created as a way to replace the actor.
That’s my Doctor Who “origin story”, so to speak. Then I grew up and, in the British Council Library, found a DVD with the last three episodes of the Christopher Eccleston series, and things started falling into place.
I liked the tv show well enough, and would eventually go back and actually watch a bunch of the classic show, but for me, Doctor Who was a series of books that happened to be a tv show. Then, as I was exploring comics early on, Andrew Hickey’s Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! blog talked about Lawrence Miles’s Eighth Doctor novels and about Faction Paradox in connection with Grant Morrison’s DC work, and that was when I fell back in love (“time-travelling voodoo cult” being the clincher).
The tv show has been good, and occasionally great, but as an adult, I’ve found the most pleasure in these books – the Eighth Doctor novels first, then the New Adventures, some of the Bernice books, and definitely Faction Paradox – several of whom don’t even feature the Doctor or the TARDIS, and are Doctor Who in tone alone. (When Lawrence Miles derisively quoted series editor Justin Richards as saying that neither the Doctor nor the TARDIS were strictly speaking necessary, I saw nothing wrong with that – it was the style of science fiction that was essential.)
The best of these were looking at Doctor Who at a slant, and that’s the view I related to most. The thing is, if you watch it straight-on, it’s a janky kids’ show whose reach exceeds its grasp, but if you step away and let it grow in your mind, it can be the biggest, most expansive sf idea ever, and a lot of these novels, inspired by Alan Moore, Iain M. Banks, Michael Moorcock and Borges among others and written by Doctor Who fans who had grown up and discovered the world, showed what that could look like.
The new show owes a large debt to them – there are episodes which are straight adaptations (“Human Nature/The Family of Blood”), but tonally, both the Davies run and the Moffat run couldn’t exist without these books (quite apart from Moffat nicking/homaging/independently reaching several of Miles’s ideas).
My Who-related nerddom went strong for a while – I wrote two short stories for Obverse Books’s Faction Paradox anthologies, one for Iris Wildthyme, and recently wrote two Doctor Who stories featuring a possible/never-been Doctor in the first two volumes of Philip Purser-Hallard’s Forgotten Lives anthologies (loved ticking that off my bucket list).
I think now I’m satisfied being back in the casual viewer’s chair. Being a fan/nerd can be great, especially if you tend towards hyperfocus like me (and 99% of Doctor Who fans, I suppose), but it’s also exhausting to keep up with everything, and it’s nice to be done. So I’m fine no longer being a fan – certainly helped when I stopped watching the Chibnall run after three episodes. But Doctor Who will always be one of “my things”, and when something new and interesting comes along, I’ll be here, watching.
Here’s Bob Temuka with 101 reasons why Doctor Who is (still) the best tv show ever.
PS: In a move that involves too much work to be described merely as “charming”, RTD and Moffat adapted some of their episodes of the new show into novelisations modelled visually after the Target stuff. Rose is great, but The Day of the Doctor is an absolute banger. I didn’t know Rob Shearman had adapted his own Dalek into a novel (the third version of this story), and will be reading it soon.
PPS: I just looked these up, and turns out there are several more, one of which I read and memory-holed (Twice Upon a Time adapted by Paul Cornell). I’m not going to bother with most of these, but Rona Munro (The Eaters of Light) and Peter Harness (The Zygote Invasion) adapting their own stories looks interesting, as does Gatiss adapting his one good episode (The Crimson Horror).
I read a few books this week, and watched one tv show. My dad watches a lot of crappy Indian tv, and I have to wait for him to go to sleep to watch any myself, so I parcelled out two episodes a day of the new Scott Pilgrim cartoon on Netflix.
I have several mixed feelings about Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, and only one of them is whether it needed to exist at all. For context, I read the black-and-white Scott Pilgrim graphic novels in my early days of comics reading (so, a decade and a half ago), and thought they were fine. At the time, I felt they didn’t do enough with the metaphor of playing life like a videogame. I wasn’t a fan, basically.
The movie fixed all of that for me – it simplified and clarified the story, and it leaned into the visual metaphor, its casting was and remains immaculate, and Edgar Wright’s frantic but controlled pacing even now makes it one of my favourite film rewatches. Thinking of Edgar Wright films, I’d rate it just lower than Hot Fuzz – my favourite – and above Shaun of the Dead. I didn’t go back to the graphic novels thus far because I simply assumed they’d pale before the near-perfection of the film.
(SPOILERS FOR SCOTT PILGRIM TAKES OFF FROM HERE ON OUT.)
Continuity-wise, the new cartoon splits the difference between the comic and the movie – the comic “happened”, the movie was a streamlined version of that story, and this show follows the same track till the end of episode 1, where it decisively diverges. Theoretically, you could watch the show without being familiar with the original story, but ideally you’d have read the comic and watched the movie, because a lot of stuff would be baffling without that.
I liked a lot of the animation in the show – Science Saru (who made my favourite anime movie) are no slouches in the innovation department – the action is choreographed beautifully (though there’s far too much of it), and there’s lots of small touches that remind you of the graphic novel and the film without overtly re-creating either. They absolutely nailed what Bryan Lee O’Malley’s art should look like on screen. It’s smoothed out a lot, because you have to keep the models consistent, but it still feels like his work. The script is entertainingly written – tons of good lines, and some interesting character choices. But.
But but but. You can see me trying to thread the needle of praise without hitting the sides. The thing is, despite the amount of talent that’s gone into it, and despite several entertaining sequences, I don’t think I liked this show. At least, I came out far more frustrated than pleased.
The first thing is, it’s slow. Maybe I’ve been spoilt by the relentless pace of the movie, but I thought that every line of dialogue came just a split second too late. At first, I thought this was because the material in the first episode was so familiar, but this continued through all the episodes. It’s like nobody paced the scratch audio to match the way people actually talk – the way they interrupt each other, talk over the other person, speak a little too soon or too late. So one person speaks, then there’s a half-second pause, and the next person speaks, and … it … feels … so … slow. I even checked once to make sure I wasn’t accidentally playing the show at 0.75x speed.
Maybe it’s just me.
The other thing though, is the story, which is … I hate to say this about something that people have worked hard on … it’s just Stuff. There’s a lot of great material here, but structurally or character-wise, it’s not doing much. A meta-story like this should either comment on the original and give you a new angle on it, or tell its own story, and this one splits the difference and doesn’t land anywhere interesting. There’s a lot of subversion of the original, but it doesn’t tell you anything that feels retroactively essential.
The example that really sticks out to me is Ramona’s “arc”. She’s the main character of this show (I told you, spoilers) and she surprises herself when she doesn’t just move on from Scott when he “dies” and actually tries to figure out what happened to him while his friends go on with their lives. This decision leads her to confront her exes, learn from the experiences, which should leave her in a more mature place by the end of the story. And yet, when we get there, she’s still telling Scott that she has a tendency to run away when she falls for someone, which is the same way the comic ended.
I don’t see how you tell a whole different story and reach the same place. It’s that split-the-difference thing, and it shows through the whole series and many other characters. We need to do new stuff, but we have to defer to the original story. There’s so much material here that could’ve led to interesting, thorny storytelling, something new, but it’s either flattened out into a basic negative-to-positive arc, or it just goes … somewhere.
The comic justifies the existence of every scene in the story. Even the most frivolous-seeming interaction tells you something that deepens the story, or comes into play later. With the show, you can tell the creators are having a lot of fun, but you could excise vast swathes of the show without affecting the show negatively or at all.
This makes it sound like I hated the show, but I honestly didn’t. I enjoyed it well enough, the frustration comes from constantly imagining what it could’ve been, and wondering why it existed when the comic did such a great job of being the story.3
And why am I referring to the comic so much if I last read it more than a decade ago, and thought it was just fine? Well, I reread it right after watching the show, duh.
In books, then, I reread the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels, this time with magnificent Nathan Fairbairn colours.
And you know, I was wrong the first time I read this. This isn’t just fine, this is great. Not only is it great cartooning, it’s really good long-form storytelling. And for being about young people, it’s remarkably clear-eyed about how young people behave, and how even the best young people aren’t always very nice.
I think in my last read, I was focussing on the plot device of the evil exes, and paying attention to those bits as “important”, but, as I realised this time around, it’s everything around them that’s important. The “boss fights” are simply markers of character development (or the lack thereof), and I made a huge mistake by trying to get to those as quickly as I could.
O’Malley’s great with dialogue, but he’s always a master of structuring a scene – everyone gets their little bit to do, and like I said above, each scene tells you something you’ll need to know for later. He’s also very willing to let you fill in gaps, and sometimes he leaves his story open to those gaps being filled in ways he might not agree with – that takes tremendous confidence.
And coming back to his cartooning – O’Malley’s rendering of body language, and of bodies in general, is both awe-inspiring, and just plain inspiring.
This time around, then, I fucking loved this book.
Since we’ve chewed through our wordcount by now, I’ll keep the rest short.
I also read Rick Remender and André Lima Araujo’s A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance. I enjoy my occasional Remender read because he’s good at doing this one thing I wished more writers did, which is to take what looks like the climax of the story and move it earlier in the game, so both the creator and the reader have to take a leap into the unknown rather than just hitting the rote beats of three-act structure or whatever. And then you do that two or three more times, and you get something great or you get a noble failure. Araujo’s wonderful at rendering environments, obviously, and he’s equally adept at human bodies. I gotta say though – I don’t know why the main character looks exactly like Benedict Wong. Was there supposed to be a movie or something? Does he know about this? Is this a The Boys situation?
I finished reading Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd by Mark Blake. It’s a great book, charting the story of the band from their beginnings till their reunion at Live 8, keeping track of former members throughout the timeline, and generally filled with great anecdotes from the best and worst times of Floyd. I want to write more about my relationship with Pink Floyd and how this book refreshed it for me, but the salient note is here is that Roger Waters seems to be what you get when a kid with a committed socialist upbringing grows up to be a megalomaniac.
Since it came up in the bibliography of that book, I finally read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. It is as good as everyone has been saying, and I wish I’d read it much earlier when Cal Newport mentioned it as essential reading in the context of both Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. It’s more of a work of philosophy than I expected, but it’s also an easy read, and so much of what Postman says about tv can be applied to the Internet as well. On this, more later. (If I’m smart, I’ll add a link here when I do write that post.)
Postman’s primary development over McLuhan is not just that the medium is the message, but that the medium is the world – tv, and now the Internet, govern how we perceive reality, and our attention spans and our connection with our surroundings have been irrevocably changed by the invention of fragmentary media that can traverse space at the speed of electricity and light rather than at the speed of human travel. That we have become a “global village”, but it has broken us.
It’s a fascinating insight, and it’s not simply about attention, but about perception as well. Worth reading.
Is that long? That feels long.
Tell me, is this fun, or did you prefer when these were shorter? I should ideally push some of these bits into posts of their own, but honestly, it’s easier to take a few hours and write this over a weekend than it would be to write six short blog posts.
You’re just lucky I didn’t write everything I meant to write about those last two books, or we would’ve been here all day.
- Ironically, the writing of this post was interrupted by a day-long cat-dander-induced allergy attack, which is why this is going out today rather than on Saturday as it was meant to. ↩︎
- Reading this, I feel the most likely outcome of the copyright angle of AI is going to be similar to music sampling and streaming – large licensing deals between megacorporations and AI companies in which artists continue to get screwed. Such is life. ↩︎
- I do reserve the right to rewatch it years from now and completely change my mind about it. ↩︎
