Strange Animals / 2022 / #1: Ways with Words
Hi! I hope your first week or so of 2022 has passed reasonably well. If it makes you feel better, everything happening in the world now has happened before and will again.* Mostly, we just know too much about it, more than the average brain can take. So, close Twitter for a while and go outside. Not too close to anyone else, though. Remember, Omicron.
* Except for climate change. That’s linear and seemingly inexorable. We’re fucked. Sorry.
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I try not to get my news from Twitter. Usually, I look at the site on Tweetdeck, with my “Home” timeline off and my “Lists” on and restricted to tweets with images. I spend more time with the Twitter app off my phone than on it. But.
It’s genuinely become difficult to get real news without being on there to some extent. I tried curated feeds, and Flipboard, and even signed up to some actual news-type newsletters, but something gets left out.
I need a decent mix of global news, Indian news, local news to my city, alongside some lengthy essays and opinions and a smattering of comics industry news. Whenever I try proper curation, I feel like I’m missing something, and if I add all the available feeds, it’s just too much.
So, I go back to Twitter, just for the news, and then … everything else is there as well.
Wasn’t there an app at one point that let you get only the links from your Twitter timeline? That needs to come back. I liked that.
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I’m not 100% sure what books I lettered were released recently. As you might know, direct market comics no longer works with a single distribution outlet, so tracking down released is a bit more complicated than before.
But in summation, my run on Detective Comics as the letterer for the lead story ended with #1046. I will be showing up again in #1050, lettering the World’s Finest backup, which leads into the ongoing World’s Finest series by Mark Waid and Dan Mora. Just look at some of Dan’s designs below!
We’re also continuing The Swamp Thing until #16, so look out for that – #11 is about to arrive at my desk. I like that this’ll be a nice clean three-volume story, with the two issues of Future State. I know some of what Ram and Mike have in store for the series, and I’m tremendously excited about it.
Arkham City; The Order of the World continues apace, and I think Dan and Dani are doing the work of their respective careers on it. I’m also having a lot of fun giving every Arkham character their own style. (Can you believe this book is canon? How the hell are they letting us get away with this stuff?)
Also, I don’t know if I mentioned this in previous newsletters – Suicide Squad: Blaze from DC Black Label was announced, uniting the entire Hellblazer team. You can check out a lettered preview here.
My journey with James’s Substack continues, with Chapter 6 of Blue Book: Betty & Barney Hill up now.
To close the lettering section, I was voted Multiversity’s Best Letterer of 2021, and they did an interview with me for that. (If I read a bit odd, that’s because this is transcribed from audio. I hadn’t realised I said “like” and “kinda” quite so much.)
And just as I was writing this bit, I found out that I’ve won the Broken Frontier Award for Best Letterer for the fifth time running. Quite a humbling feeling, that. Like I mentioned on Twitter, I like that I’ve been freelancing for six years now, and people have found my work interesting for at least five of those.
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My primary leisure activity in the last few weeks has been word games. Considering I love language and work with it for a majority of my time, I should’ve been playing crosswords and the like for my whole life, but somehow I never got into them. Particularly it’s the cryptic stuff – I have no idea how the clues work, and I’ve read up on it and still can’t figure it out.
But sometime last month, I figured this was shameful, and purchased a NYT crossword subscription and started playing. And then I mentioned it to my partner, who got interested, and then she roped several of her friends into it, and suddenly, it was a communal activity. And then I found a game that came with my subscription that I was far better at – the Spelling Bee!
I used to play this in newspapers as a kid, but the British version (that the Indian version was based on) was boring in that you weren’t allowed to repeat letters in the words you made. The NYT version is far more interesting. So it’s now a daily ritual for us to wait till it’s 1:30 pm (which is when the new Bee releases in India), and then first we play it separately, trying to get to the “Genius” level by ourselves, and then we compare our words and start working together to try and get the “Queen Bee”, which is when you get the entire allowed word-list. We’ve managed that once so far, but we get close quite a bit.
Here’s a nice but slightly self-congratulatory NYT article about why the Spelling Bee is so much fun, and here’s some tips and tricks to help if you’re starting out.
Some of my friends have noted that NYT crossword subscription offers different rates for iOS/Android apps and on the web, so you might want to look at all of them to find the cheapest subscription. And also, the app is great to use, but the web version has more games available that haven’t made it to the apps yet, like Letterboxed, which is also a fun word game, but probably better played on your own.
The other word game I’ve been enjoying is the one that everyone’s playing right now – Wordle. This is a daily word game where you’re supposed to guess a single five-letter word using the hints that the game gives you. There’s only one word every day, which is part of the fun, I think. I discovered this, like everyone else, by googling the term “Wordle” after I kept seeing this weird emoji grid on my Twitter timeline.
I like this game because it’s about words, of course, but also, as its creator says:
I think people kind of appreciate that there’s this thing online that’s just fun. It’s not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs. It’s just a game that’s fun. […] It’s something that encourages you to spend three minutes a day, and that’s it. Like, it doesn’t want any more of your time than that.
That quote is from this article, which explains why the game was created – as a gift for the creator’s girlfriend.
It’s a fun game, and several of my friends have made a meta-game out of trying to guess other people’s wrong guesses from the colours of the grid they post. Some people, I tell you, they’ve got too much time on their hands.
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I watched Titane a few days ago, and it’s already in the running to be my favourite movie of the year. It is gloriously well-made, visceral, funny, and deliriously imaginative. It’s classified as body horror, and while I can see why (there’s a lot of gory physicality both to the story and to its main performances), it feels to me more like a very intense fairy-tale. In fact, to me, it’s a cousin of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover – which was my favourite movie I watched last year. Both are stories of real, ugly emotions playing out in a stylised world, that we watch with a cold, almost hateful eye. Both have stunning, visceral set-pieces that leave you almost exhausted, and both deal with matters of the body – how the body relates to the mind and to the outer world. Body as conduit, sort of. Which is particularly exemplified by Agathe Rousselle’s incredible central performance that is probably the bravest work of acting – physical or emotional – I’ve seen in a while. Anyway, watch Titane, and preferably without reading about it beforehand.
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I am once again trying to do shorter but more frequent newsletters. Following that, you might see more stuff like this – fewer big essays, more little blogpost-y things. In fact, the reason for this is that I’m trying to properly resurrect my site as a blog – I’m currently working on the design – because I want to be able to post more small stuff, bigger than a tweet, smaller than something that needs to invade your email. Stay tuned.