Strange Animals / 2022 / #8: We Made a Comic!
Most likely the final newsletter of the year. I averaged one per month-and-a-half, which isn’t horrible, given the rollercoaster this year has been for me. And each edition, I seem to remember, had something to say. I’m comfortable with that.
Also, apparently this newsletter crossed 1,000 subscribers this year?! Wow, that’s a lot of you. You folks should write back more. There’s around five of you who respond regularly (you know who you are – hi!), but other than that, I have no idea what kind of people read this. I’d love to hear more from you folks. Tell me about yourself – who you are, how your year has been. Is there something you’ve always wanted to say to me, or ask me? (And if you’re comfortable with your words being reproduced, write OKAY TO PRINT somewhere in your email.)
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This will be a longish one, because I want to have our usual introductory chat, and then I want to write about something important to me (there’s a very subtle hint in the title).
The biggest gap between newsletters this year was between April and October, which is when I really felt beaten up by … well, everything – we don’t have to re-litigate that.
But since October, things have been looking up. I went on medication for diabetes, which made a massive difference, I started properly taking care of myself, both physically and mentally, and, most importantly, I announced my hiatus from work, which has been a huge factor in getting back control of my time and my bandwidth. I’ve been spending a lot more time outside the house – meeting friends and family, going on long walks, spending time in an environment I feel I’ve been away from for too long.
I don’t just mean being enclosed in the house. In 2020 and 2021, even when I did go outside, it didn’t feel like the city I grew up in. Something felt wrong, a little bit broken. Places I’ve known since childhood shut down and forlorn, all my haunts inaccessible, the desolation of empty streets.
We’ve still got problems, and of course, the pandemic hasn’t actually ended, but now, when I go outside, it feels like my home again. I’m sure a lot of that has to do with how I’m feeling in general, but some of it is just that the city had been holding its breath for so long, and it’s started to breathe again.
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I’ll probably go into this more on the blog at some point, but once I’d forced myself into semi-retirement, it became clear to me that my work had become an addiction – in the pandemic, I was so afraid of falling into other bad habits that I didn’t realise the “good” habit I was using as a bulwark against those was starting to eat into me.
But once I got out of that cycle, I could see how ridiculous some of the things I was doing were. We repeat it to each other – “we’re not saving lives here”, “real life is more important” – but we don’t act like it. We keep falling into the trap of thinking that arbitrary dates are so important that they can’t be moved, and we break our backs to hit those dates.
All of this to say – If this has been you, please be kinder to yourself, take a step back, and re-evaluate what you’re doing. It’s okay. Real life is more important.
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Speaking of re-evaluations – while my semi-retirement (I’m going to start saying that instead of hiatus, because it has been pointed out to me that a hiatus would involve no work, while I’m only at almost no work) kicked in around September, there were a few commitments to wind up, so I was still working 4-5 days per month.
December has been my first month with zero working days. No lettering, no revisions, no deliveries, nothing. This is what I’ve been looking forward to. I’ve been recovering from burnout, and I can feel myself slowly getting energised again, but I need this big swathe of time with nothing to accomplish, so that in January, I can look at the next few years of my life and decide what I want to do with those.
I’ve been having conversations with my creative pals about this – how to approach a creatively fulfilling life without it revolving around deadlines and goals – and I’ve been getting some exciting ideas to think about.
Key among these is the question – Will lettering be a part of this?
I’m working on answering that, and this break will be a big part of the process, but I’m putting together a list of criteria for what I want to accomplish with lettering if it remains a significant part of my creative life, and more importantly, why and how do I want to engage with it.
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On the blog, I wrote about two books I enjoyed:
Night Film by Marisha Pessl: This wasn’t exactly a monumental book, but I enjoyed a specific thing it was doing, and wrote about it.
Illuminations by Alan Moore: My favourite writer (or as close as I get to having one of those these days) has a new collection of short prose stories out – his first, in fact – and I was compelled to write a story-by-story write-up about it.
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Now for something with which I’m extremely pleased to close out my year in comics.
You’ve read in this newsletter over the last few years about my slow journey back into writing. I’ve had a few short stories published, as well as a short comic in Razorblades. All of those, while extremely enjoyable, were tentative dips into waters I didn’t know if I wanted to actually return to.
But this year, I have been gearing up to write more – a lot more – and this is the first step in that journey.
I am extremely proud to present to you, a short comic written and lettered by me, with art by my friend and constant colleague Anand RK:
“The Monkey Man of Delhi” – a True Weird tale, presented to you by James Tynion IV and edited by Greg Lockard.
Earlier this year, very soon after I’d agreed to letter the True Weird series of non-fiction short comics for James’s Substack, James asked me if I wanted to pitch him a story that I would also write.
I agreed to this in a flash, of course, and then began researching India’s strange ghost stories, rumours about statues drinking milk, motorcycles that are worshipped in Rajasthan, temples full of snakes and frogs, and all of its many, many local monsters.
The first idea I hit on, though – and the one I kept coming back to – was one that I had seen as it happened. I was sixteen at the time, and even then, I’d found it surreal and kind of hilarious.
This was the weird-as-hell story of the so-called Monkey Man that supposedly terrorised Delhi in 2001.
I kept a few ideas as back-ups, but decided to leap into properly researching the Monkey Man story, and what a rabbit hole it was! I disappeared into the internet for weeks, tracking down videos, articles, photos, academic reports. I even watched entire documentaries on and around the subject.
What I realised as I cycled through all of this material was that the Monkey Man himself wasn’t the story. The story was the story. And it was a uniquely Indian one.
We have our flaws, us Indians, but one of our most endearing qualities to me is our sincere desire to participate. If there is an event, we want to have been there. Or maybe two lanes away when it happened. Nobody here wants to say, “Oh, that? I don’t know anything about that.” It’s “Let me tell you how my uncle’s friend’s nephew was involved.”
So when I was scripting this comic, that’s what I wanted to capture – to condense the hundreds of accounts I’d read, and to convey this Indian desire to sidle into the frame of any camera that’s pointed even vaguely in our direction.
When we were finalising the script, we hoped that we could find an artist who could tackle the baffled complexity of Indian life, and to our immense fortune, Anand, my artist from Grafity’s Wall, Blue in Green and other books written by Ram V, had his schedule open at just the right time and was interested in taking this on.
I don’t think I could’ve dreamed of a better collaborator for this one. Anand has a flair for capturing character through his linework – he is an obsessive sketcher of people – and I knew we could rely on him to design the narrators and “act” with so many different walk-on parts.
He also managed to create some stunning images that I couldn’t stop staring at every time he sent me pages.
Many, many thanks to James for asking us to do this, to Greg for shepherding it through, Anand for gracing it with his art, and my friends for tolerating all of my “You won’t believe this …”s about the Monkey Man, and for reading it at various stages of completion.
I hope you enjoy the comic. We are very proud. Here’s the link again if you’re feeling too lazy to scroll back up.
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Hope your year ends well, folks. See you in the next one!