April 16, 2022

Strange Animals / 2022 / #5: Between a Quarter and a Third

I’ve got myself into this terrible habit of writing half a newsletter, and then coming back to it much later, and what I was trying to say is either already out of date, or feels like it needs more brainspace than I can give it at the moment.

I’m trying to be kind to myself, especially since the last few months have been A Lot, but I don’t like that I’m leaving things unfinished. Perhaps it’s time for another little restructuring of how this newsletter functions, while continuing to provide some value to the people reading it. I’m still working on getting the blog up and running, but once we’ve got that, I want to work on both these avenues working in tandem so that neither is too much work all at once.

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I think I’ve written about this before, but I started out on the internet as a blogger, and I used to, at the time, write a lot of personal stuff. This was when confessional blogging was a whole thing, and while I didn’t do that, it influenced how I wrote. Then I got on Twitter, and I continued in that vein, because at the time, Twitter was mainly a place to make new friends and overshare (this was, let’s remember, back when Twitter was considered trivial and mainly about your breakfast, and not … whatever it has become today). But after that, slowly, the virtues of keeping one’s private life private became clearer, and around the same time, Twitter became a professional networking site for me, given that I was just getting into comics, and everyone in comics was on Twitter. Sort of a LinkedIn but with more juvenile jokes.

For several years, I felt like I could handle the way modern social media bleeds your public and private presences into each other. My Instagram account, for example, mainly exists for my amusement rather than to promote anything, and even on Twitter, I will happily post random things that happen to me, or what I think about things happening in the world. (Sidebar: I have friends who are even now extremely offline, who find it quite strange that I post my political opinions in a place where prospective and current employers can see them. Not because they think my opinions are offensive, but because they believe revealing anything about your politics to someone who can affect the inflow of work is too risky.)

But now, partly because I like talking about my work, I am something of a public professional, in that my name constitutes a brand for what I do, and for a while now, my primary existence on Twitter has been as a professional (which occasionally gets bewildering for all the Indian people who still follow me from thirteen years ago). So I find myself in an odd place where I’m not always sure about what to share on social media, and what to keep to myself. If I suddenly want to write about something personal (beyond, you know, “I have to take a few days off because my dad is ill”), I get the sense that I might be saying something awkward at work.

I even went off Twitter for a few weeks when I felt like being on there wasn’t the best thing for me, and I came back extremely reluctantly, and I’m still wondering if there’s a point to being on Twitter any longer. (This was, to be clear, written before the recent Elon Musk-Twitter kerfuffle began.) It’s great to get to talk about comics with other people who love them. But is everything else worth it?

Anyway, just some random thoughts. I do wonder how those people who are constantly being looked at by millions handle this sort of thing. (I already know the answer to that of course—unevenly, because they’re just people.)

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I didn’t want to do an essay this week, because, like I said, I have half of one written and I don’t feel up to finishing it, but then the bit above just came out and I’ve deciding to press send on it anyway.

The rest of this is updates, because, since the last time I wrote to you, there have been quite a few.

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Since my last newsletter, I’ve had a few books released, including:

• Home Sick Pilots #13
• The Department of Truth #17, drawn by Jorge Fornés, in which I got to do a nice “Todd Klein on David Mazz” riff.
• The Swamp Thing #11 – Season 2 begins!
• Batman Beyond: Neo-Year #1
• Suicide Squad: Blaze #2
• Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #1, which has been a ball to letter, as you can see from the image below.

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Writing-wise, March also saw the release of The Silver Coin #10 by Michael Walsh, which features a backup prose story written by me called “Unrighteous Instruments”. As mentioned before, this is my second association with the world of the Silver Coin, after designing Michael’s hand-lettering-based font. I’m glad to say that the issue and the backup have both been well-received, and I got a few nice messages about it.

I sent Michael three pitches for this one—one detailed near-future story and two vague ideas that I could develop if he liked one of those instead. He liked the detailed story, but he felt that the world of that story was rich enough that I should use it to create something I owned rather than spending it on a two-page backup for someone else’s world, which was very kind of him. The second idea boiled down to “a cult based around the Silver Coin”, while the third was a bit too formally ambitious and wouldn’t have fit on a single double-page spread.

I went with the cult idea, since no one had added that particular wrinkle to the Silver Coin universe yet, and I tried to create a structure and format that would allow me some elegant infodumping, a couple of complications, and a climax, all in under 2,000 words. I also found myself interested in the era in which I became an internet native, when it was rich and alluring, and you were just starting to trust that people on the other side were who they said they were. Funnily enough, I probably spent more days worrying about the title of the story than about the story itself. I needed just the right Biblical quote to steal from, and I think I probably annoyed my friends a lot that week. (“What do you think about this? Here’s the full Biblical context for reference, so you know what this actually means.”)

I reread this on the day of release, and I’d say I’m reasonably happy with it. Here’s how it starts:

Interview Transcript. Recorded 17th Sept. 2007
Subject: Sgt. Harry Bicks
Interviewer: Special Agent Severian
Eyes Only

S.A. Severian: Thanks for sticking around, Sergeant. I appreciate this might be a difficult conversation, but we thought it best to get the facts down as quickly as—

Sgt. Bicks: Yeah, no problem. It’s my—well, it’s the least I can do. (Coughs.)

Can we start as far back as possible? And, if you could, speak into the—

I know, I know. I’ve done a million of these. Yeah, so, this was—we were already investigating this Silver Coin business. A couple of local kids had gone missing, and it seemed like … they were all frequenting these forums online—

You mean bulletin boards?

Whatever they’re called, yeah. So there’s a bunch of people discussing how there’s this coin you find, and it—people have been tracking it for years. Centuries, they said. They had this whole fucking—sorry. They had this mythology worked out. The coin, it passes from owner to owner and … it’s been all over the world, and it does … well, it does something for you, but you gotta … give to it.

If you found that intriguing, please check out The Silver Coin #10, because this is most likely the only appearance of this story.

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Miscellany

In December, while lettering my final issue of Detective Comics, I did a screen recording while lettering the title card on the last page, just for kicks. I’d forgotten about this entirely, until a couple of weeks ago, when I posted it online to, let’s say, entirely unexpected minor virality.

(If the embed below doesn’t work, click here.)

I appeared on the excellent podcast Comics, Inebriated, hosted by Matt Emmons and Liana Kangas, to talk (slightly drunkenly) about the convoluted legal history of the classic character Miracleman. Funnily enough, I can date the recording of this to early December, because a week afterwards, Marvel’s Timeless #1 came out, which has a cameo by the Miracleman logo, and I immediately wished we could’ve gotten that into the podcast.

Robots from Tomorrow’s Greg Matiasevich invited me to talk about lettering alongside the legendary John Workman, and … well, I don’t know about the listeners, but I personally had a great time. Greg’s a great interviewer, and I got to ask John a ton of questions I’d had about his work, and I got to listen to one of my lettering heroes talk about his process. Part 1 is available here. Part 2 will be out next week, I believe.

Finally, this week saw the announcement of the lineup for DC’s Pride 2022 anthology, put together by star editors Andrea Shea, Jessica Chen, and Amedeo Turturro, and I’ve got a few stories in there:

All of these have been a delight to work on—I got to letter my Euthanauts cohort Nick Robles, and my long-time editor Greg Lockard, plus I got to letter some amazing people I’d never worked with, like Devin Grayson (whose Gotham Knights series was an early favourite) and Zoe Thorogood, who is one of the most talented new artists I’ve seen in a while.

On a personal level, it’s also been a thrill to get to letter Kevin Conroy, who is … well, he’s my Batman. My introduction to superheroes as a kid were the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons that my dad rented on VHS, and Batman: the Animated Series, and its followup Batman Beyond. Superman was just cooler, because he could deflect bullets and actually fly, and wasn’t just a rich guy beating people up (I guess you could see right there that I was going to be an sff guy later, rather than a crime guy, given everyone else seems to think Batman is cooler), but the Batman stories were just so great. There was atmosphere, pathos, action, all grounded by the magnificent voice of Mr. Conroy. Nobody quite stacked up after that, in cartoon or live-action form. And I’m delighted to be working with him and J. Bone, who draws what might just be my platonic ideal style for comics.

I’ve been a part of DC’s Pride books for two years now. As a teenager, I was the only queer person I knew. So I’ve been staring at this credits page, and letting it sink in that I’m now part of an industry and a project that has so many incredibly talented queer folks in it and that wants to celebrate them.

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I started this newsletter on a note of misery, so it’s only right that I end it on a good one. Have a good week/month/however long it is till I send the next one!