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.
It was Ganesh Chaturthi on the 19th, so I spent it with family in Mumbai, as I do every year. I’m not a believer, but I enjoy the fact that the festival brings the whole family together, so I like participating.
I’m still dealing with my back problems – the meds have helped, but the pain hasn’t disappeared. I’d avoided travelling over the last year because my chronic pain gets exacerbated by sitting in a car for too long, but I couldn’t avoid it this time. It’s … better than it could’ve been, but also worse that I’d hoped for. I have a meeting with my orthopaedic doctor next week to see if we can lick this problem anytime soon.
I’d intended to go meet some friends while in Mumbai, but after the second day of Ganpati, the back pain came back with a vengeance, and I developed a fever, so I took it easy instead, spending time with my cousins and my absolutely adorable two-year-old nephew.
I watched variations of “The Wheels on the Bus” and “Baby Shark” so many times that I could see why parents of young children are always a bit cuckoo. The former in particular seems to have endless versions on YouTube with slightly different beats and different animation, and many families around the world have created their own clearly homemade videos in the hope that the algorithm will include them in Autoplay, a strategy that, in my experience, is working. Several of the cheaply computer-animated videos gave off eerie Channel Zero vibes, and I had some fun imagining a child-sized monster made out of teeth standing off-camera in each video while my nephew happily bounced to the music beside me.
Harley Quinn: Black + White + Redder #3 was released on the 19th, and the entire issue seems to be very well-received, with people calling Juni and my story “absolutely adorable”, which is a phrase that came up a few times during production as well. This makes me happy, because that’s exactly what we were trying to go for.
Since the story’s out now, and enough people have read it, I wanted to talk a little bit about how we worked on it, because the process was quite unusual for mainstream comics. If you haven’t read the story yet, and don’t want to be spoiled on it, please skip to the next section.
The key for us was to create a comic that would visually play to Juni’s strengths – cartoony, dynamic figures with great action – while being based very strongly in Harley’s character. Juni also wanted to draw Harley’s classic costume and the big hammer, so it made sense to set this some time in the past.
I find Harley a fascinating character, because she was in a toxic relationship where she was an afterthought compared to her partner, and she not only managed to escape that, she also managed to eventually find a healthy relationship with someone who genuinely cares about her, all without losing what makes her essentially herself.1
So we figured that this progression would have had some middle steps, where she’d repeat her patterns with someone other than the Joker, but find herself not only getting diminishing returns, but also realising that the things that she thought the Joker wanted aren’t what somebody else would be looking for.
But obviously, this would make a fairly dour story, so we decided to liven it up by enacting all of this with a cat instead of a person, and we pitched the story to Chris Conroy, our editor at DC, who signed off on it.
Usually at this point, the writer would go off and write a full script, detailing how each page will be broken down into panels, and what dialogue would appear in each panel, but since we wanted this story to be led by the art, we decided to go Marvel-style on this so that Juni could have full control on what he had to draw, and on how to pace each page.
I wrote a detailed treatment that broke the story down page-by-page, but I didn’t break it up into panels. I wrote rough stand-in dialogue that would let Juni know the emotion of the moment without being beholden to it. In some places, I also wrote multiple options for the funnier/more action-heavy sequences so Juni could choose what he might find more fun to draw.
Based on this, Juni sent back (seemingly the next day, given how fast he is) thumbnails for the whole thing. If I remember correctly, I gave him notes on two panels in total – one I thought could be funnier, and one addition because I thought we needed one more beat.
After this, Juni drew the whole thing, and since I’m also (occasionally) a letterer, I slapped our temp dialogue onto the page, and then I rewrote the whole thing as I lettered it to match what Juni had done.
Once we had the whole thing in front of us, both Juni and Chris gave me notes on the writing (which is back-to-front from how this usually goes), and I finalised the lettering.
All in all, it was a very fun way to work. I don’t suppose you could replicate this every single time, but I honestly think more comics should be produced like this.
I went off Twitter at some point in the week. I don’t remember precisely the moment I decided to do it, but I know I thought it should last for at least a month, so probably till the end of October.
I’ll have more to say on this in another blog post when my brain’s working better, but as I’ve gotten my attention back from the internet over the last few years, I felt there was a little bit left that I still had to tackle – the ability to just sit and be bored.
Right now, if I’m not doing anything, or going on a walk, I have a podcast or an audiobook playing. I planned it this way to avoid going on social media – instead of reaching for the Twitter button, reach for Audible or Pocket Casts. Similarly, I have a book in every room and every device, so I don’t go on social media. But if I’m not doing those things, I’m not able to sit still and just be, and let my mind wander. Those are the times I currently end up on Twitter.
So I wanted to relearn both how to be bored, and stare into space and let my mind wander. So … no Twitter for a bit.
Unlike the previous times I quit Twitter, this time I don’t miss it yet. But then, it’s only been 3-4 days. We’ll see how this goes.
Over the last two weeks, I read Last Days by Adam Nevill.
I’d Googled “found footage” horror novels, and this one came highly recommended, but then I opened it and … I think the internet’s definition of found footage and mine differ drastically. I meant the term as a catch-all superset of “epistolary” – i.e. a novel made up of in-universe documents – while the internet assumed it meant books about or involving film footage, “found” or not.
So I wanted something like Dark Matter or The Plant or Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, while the internet thought I meant Night Film or Experimental Film.2
An understandable mistake, now that I think about it. So while I was mildly disappointed that Last Days is a perfectly traditionally narrated prose novel, I decided to soldier on because I’d really enjoyed The Ritual – a movie based on the novel of the same name by Nevill.
Last Days is about a documentary filmmaker being commissioned to make a film about a long-dead cult whose ritual mass suicide might have let something horrible into the world. The first third of the book is suitably eerie – with strange shadows glimpsed in the margins of film footage, unexplainable images etched into walls, sounds and presences not easily accounted for.
In fact, some of the imagery is suggestive enough that I would read the book only during the day or when K was staying over – I found myself slightly freaked out if I read the book alone at night, looking over my shoulder to make sure nothing similar was happening in my own house.
Consequently, the first half was slow going. But then I spent all of last week with family, so there was always someone around – in the house, if not in the room. I took the opportunity to plough through the rest of the book.
Unfortunately, after an assured beginning, and an effective second third, the final part of the book is … just goofy. It makes no sense tonally with the rest of the book, dumps around 20 pages of new exposition on you that doesn’t follow from most of the rest of the book. To make things worse, it’s written badly, with cartoonish dialogue the likes of which I last heard on Behind the Bastards’s episodes on the novels of Ben Shapiro and Scott Adams. The final nail in the coffin is that it overexplains the horror to the point of rendering it not just ineffective but nonsensical. The drop in competence from Part 1 to Part 3 is baffling. I’d absolutely believe you if you told me that Nevill rushed through the last third of the book, but my response would be – why did this need to be 550 pages anyway?
It’s a squandered opportunity, and I’m astonished this got past early readers and editors. I have a feeling this is because Nevill has reached a basic level of success, so people around him find it harder to call out these issues. (Stephen Graham Jones, another extremely talented horror writer, has a similar problem where the middle 50% of any book of his needed to be half as long, or just not there.)
Anyway, quite disappointing.
Other than that, I’ve started reading The Books of Blood in order, from beginning to (hopefully) end. This was a formative collection for me, but I’ve never read it all the way through. I picked up Volume 4 first (because of the famous Stephen King pull quote, “I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker” – I was a big King fan at the time, a Constant Reader) and then Volume 1 in my early teenage, and then someone gifted me an omnibus of Volumes 1-3.
I found Barker’s visions quite thrilling and eye-opening as a teen, but looking back, I don’t think I appreciated the delicacy of his language, how carefully he layered his imagery and characterisation, and his facility with getting the structure of his stories so right you never noticed it was there. I’ve reread old favourites since – “The Midnight Meat Train”, “Jacqueline Ess”, “The Age of Desire” and, of course, “In the Hills, the Cities”3 – but never in order, and I haven’t touched Volumes 5-6.
I’ve been intending to finally read the whole thing for a while now, so when I was in Mumbai, lying in bed to rest my back, I bought Kindle editions of the two omnibi, and got to it. I’m most of the way through Volume 1 now, and I’ll let you know next week how I’ve been getting along.
Finally, to cleanse my palette from the debacle of Last Days, I started reading The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock today, and thank god, because this book is absolutely crackling with energy and moves like a viper in the bush.
No movies this week, since I’ve been either busy or travelling, and no tv either.
It’s now 3 a.m. on Monday, and I’ll be posting this sometime in the day before I start my work after a week off. Cheers!
- You can see that her being a villain or an anti-hero isn’t particularly relevant here, because the good-and-evil stuff has rarely interested me in superhero comics. ↩︎
- The one result that is the intersection of both circles of this Venn diagram is, I guess, Episode Thirteen – a “found footage” novel about film-making. ↩︎
- I remember scoffing at Ramsey Campbell’s claim in the introduction that the story was a true original and then having to sheepishly admit to myself that he was absolutely right. ↩︎