Strange Animals / 2023 / #1: Wrap Up and Go Forth
Hello, my gentle people. I hope your new year is going well. Mine began on a nice note – surrounded by close friends and good vibes.
For one reason or another, a lot of my oldest and closest friends have been in the city for the last month, so there’s been a wonderful sense of belonging, especially since, having taken a long break from work, I’ve had the time to spend with them.
I’ve also felt more rested, less anxious about family, work and health. All in all, it feels like it’s time to get out of firefighting mode, and start looking at the new few years as a whole – see what I can play with.
I made a list of my near-future priorities over the last month, and everything flows from those (Cal Newport’s “buckets” metaphor comes to mind – don’t just see how you can fill up your time. See what you want your life to look like and work backwards from that.)
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2022 was the year of first slowing down my lettering work, and then bringing it to a near-stop. I recognised that I needed rest, and after arguing with myself for months, I let myself take it. October-November were about wrapping up, and December was entirely work-free. This was one of the best decisions I’ve taken in my professional life.
But that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t proud of the lettering work that I did do this year. At DC, I wrapped up The Swamp Thing with Ram V, Mike Perkins and Mike Spicer with #16, and rounded off my time at DC with Aquaman: Andromeda with Ram, Christian Ward and my first DC editor Chris Conroy. Batman Beyond: Neo-Year concluded this year, as did Suicide Squad: Blaze with my old Hellblazer team. After wrapping up my run on Detective Comics in 2021, it was a delight to work with Dan Mora again, joined by Mark Waid and Tamra Bonvillain, on Superman/Batman: World’s Finest. I continued to letter a few stories for DC Pride, one of which was Kevin Conroy’s moving “Finding Batman”. Since he passed away this year, I’ve grown to value that experience even more.
At Image, we finished Home Sick Pilots on a high, and serialised the queer heist fantasy comic Sins of the Black Flamingo. We also launched 20th Century Men, which will be wrapping up next month, and Two Graves, which is in the midst of serialisation.
At Comixology, we wrapped up .self and the second season of The All-Nighter. Also, one of my favourite projects for 2021 was lettering CD Projekt Red’s manga comic The Witcher: Ronin in four different languages. This was released in hardcover as well as manga-sized softcover this year.
With James Tynion IV and company, I’ve continued work on The Department of Truth, which remains as vital at #21 as it has ever been. We wrapped the first season of Blue Book, and are currently in the middle of The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos. I also lettered True Weird, written and drawn by a variety of comics luminaries (including, >koff< Anand and me), and we launched the preview of our upcoming comic w0rldtr33 in Image! The Anthology.
In all, I lettered 1600 pages in 2022, which is a piddling number compared to the 2800 pages of 2021. But the important thing to me is that 1200 of these were in the first half of the year, and the second half only saw me lettering 400 pages.
2023 looks like it’ll be 30 pages a month on average, but the actual work is likely to be 60 pages one month and no work the next, which suits me just fine. It’s mostly completing old commitments (and one thing I let a friend talk me into because it was just that exciting). I have a couple of offers late in the year that I’m still considering – they’re all great projects. What I need to see is what role lettering will continue to play in my life for the next couple of years.
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By that, of course, I mean comics lettering. As I’ve discussed here before, lettering comics can be hectic, plus the work hasn’t felt like as much of a challenge as I’d like.
But I remain completely in love with letters, typography, type design and everything related to text. I plan to do a lot more of what everyone outside of comics calls lettering – which is the art of drawing letters in an aesthetic manner. I did a few calligraphy courses before the pandemic, but my work schedule meant I couldn’t stay in touch with it. I plan to revisit that, and further explore lettering art.
I’ve also missed working on comic-book fonts. Before the pandemic, type design was a big part of my workday, but then lettering took over (and was, frankly, more lucrative at a time I wasn’t sure when work would be coming in next). I want to get back to making fonts. When I started out, I made 10 fonts in order to exercise various design muscles. My plan this year is to “remaster” the two fonts that feel salvageable from those. And then, I’d like to make two new fonts. If that ends up happening, then I might even set up a webstore and sell these. Fingers crossed!
I do, however, have two comics lettering-related challenges I’m very excited about this year.
One is something I’m working on right now – I was commissioned to do my first comics cover, which is going to involve some art, but mostly lettering. Here’s a little glimpse:
Next, I might be hand-lettering a couple of issues of comics. And by hand-lettering, in this case, I mean directly onto the page (“on the boards”, as it used to be called). My previous hand-lettering assignments were either executed digitally (Blue in Green) or lettered on separate pages and combined with the art digitally (Grafity’s Wall). This would be the real-deal old-school way of lettering a comic. If we end up doing this (we’re currently working out logistics), it’ll be pretty much my final bucket list item in terms of comics lettering. (The only other thing left would be lettering a comic written by Alan Moore, which looks like an impossibility at this moment.)
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Writing-wise, I wrote two comic scripts and three short stories in 2022, and had one of each published (“In the Land Beyond the River” in Forgotten Lives II and “The Monkey Man of Delhi” in the True Weird series of shorts).
In 2023, the four-issue mini-series I’m currently outlining is my big writing priority (PROJECT SEASIDE, as I’ve referred to it here). I’ve got 3.5 issues outlined out of 4 – I’m trying to find just the right way in and out of the climactic scene. The next couple of weeks will see me rewriting that outline, and then sending it to a few close friends before I start doing a very rough draft of the complete script, after which I’ll get an editor and an artist involved.
Other than that, I’m scripting a short comic in collaboration with one of my favourite artists, due in the next few weeks. I have two short prose stories planned that I want to finish this year, and there’s one story I wrote in 2021 that feels like it merits a second draft.
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For the last couple of years, I’ve maintained a Twitter thread with everything I read, and this year, I added a thread for films I watched, because I wanted to do more of that, and a running tally really helps.
In 2022, I read 56 prose books (which is just more than one a week, which was my goal), of which 32 were fiction (novels, novellas, short story collections), and 24 were non-fiction. I read around 60 graphic novels/full runs of comics, and I read one poetry collection and one play. My goal for 2023 is to, once again, read at least 52 prose books, but this time, also read at least 52 plays, and 15 poetry collections. I’d also like to have more novels in the mix.
I watched 78 films in 2022, of which 15 were rewatches. I wanted to hit 150, but I got quite thoroughly derailed. I’m going to pretend it was because I read a lot. In 2023, I would love to hit that 150 number. I’ll post my 2023 thread when I start it, and this time it’s going to include any full seasons of tv that I watch.
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Apart from these things, the biggest thing that I want to accomplish – and something I should’ve honestly put much more work into – is to work on my health. My diabetes is now under control, thanks to medication. My chronic pain has receded to around 10% of what it was for months, and will hopefully go down further with regular exercise. My diet has been pretty solid this year – I just need to cut down on the occasional treats.
So now, my goal for 2023 is to get into a good workout routine. Figure out how to want to exercise rather than tolerate it. One of the things I’m doing this month is getting a personal trainer to help me figure out what exercises work best for me. I have no specific goal for my body – I just want to be as healthy as I can be.
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Finally, I hope to continue drawing a lot. I have no goals with this – I like drawing, I want to do it more and more, I enjoy it each time I sit down to do it, and I think adding goals would just mess things up.
I am planning to draw less on the iPad, though, and move to paper and work with charcoals, pencils, inks and colours. I think I’m largely over the fear of making mistakes that kept me from working on paper in the first place, and I don’t want to get to a point where I can only draw digitally.
Digital was great when I started, because when I made mistakes of proportions, I didn’t feel like I had to erase everything and begin again – I could just resize as I went. But now, I find myself resizing less, and erasing more, because it keeps me in the groove, so I think it’s time to switch.
I got myself a couple of really nice sketchbooks, and I got charcoal sticks on an artist friend’s recommendation. Here’s the first drawing I did on paper. I’ll keep you posted on more.
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Before we wrap up, late last month – I’m not sure why – I felt like making some diary comics. I did four. It’s not something I’m planning to do regularly, but it’s been a lot of fun – takes about 20-30 minutes, and I’m not worried about how well I’m drawing. It’s a lark.
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Finally. This is what this newsletter has been building towards. Before the pandemic, I used to make a list of goals for each year. Like so:
I’d hand-letter them on a piece of paper, and stick them up on my studio wall. I’d never achieve all of them, but this helped me hit a few. And even when I didn’t finish anything, I wouldn’t be at zero.
2020 was derailed for obvious reasons, and I didn’t feel like doing any for 2021-2022 – I needed to be kind to myself, and “goals” would just add unneeded pressure.
But like I said, I feel ready to actually take things on again, and I’m old enough and adult enough to be kind on myself if I don’t finish them.
So I opened up my typewriter for the first time in months, and this time, instead of lettering them, I typed them out on my trusty Hermes Baby on a nice piece of paper:
With or without goals, I hope all of you have a great year ahead. You are a very cool bunch, and I continue to be grateful for your tolerant attention!