Strange Animals / 2023 / #2: A Cover and an Explanation
Let’s get right to this one, shall we? Unlike most instalments of this newsletter, I’ve got something to sell you. (Not something I avoid on purpose, mind you – I just don’t usually have anything to sell.) Our usual update comes after that, plus an essay – just a quickie this time, though.
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20th Century Men #6, the final issue of the comic book written by Deniz Camp, drawn by Saipan Morian and lettered by me, is out on February 22nd.
Unusually, this one features a variant cover by me!
As I’ve cut down on lettering work, I’ve been working on developing my other skills, such as lettering art, as I mentioned last time, and illustration. I got to combine both nascent skills into creating a book-cover style design for the final issue.
Here’s the front cover, which I posted on Twitter a couple of weeks ago:
To create this cover, I’ve drawn on imagery from the issue as well as across the series, while keeping the typography front and centre. What I hadn’t posted on Twitter yet was that cover is a wraparound, and here you can see it in its full glory:
The back cover text is currently redacted – a little extra you’ll have to buy the cover to read.
In addition to my cover (which is the “C” cover), the issue features the usual amazing Morian cover, plus a fantastic variant cover by Igor Kordey, who also did a variant for issue #1.
The FOC, or final order cut-off, for issue #6 is Monday, January 30, which is when retailers decide how many copies of each cover to order based on reader interest. You can ask your retailer to get you one of these covers by either naming the artist, or by using the following codes:
Cover A (Morian): NOV220193
Cover B (Kordey): NOV220194
Cover C (Bidikar): DEC228342
I can honestly say that we are very proud of this issue, and of 20th Century Men as a whole, and my thanks to Deniz and Saipan for letting me do this, and to my friends Ram and Hass for giving me valuable feedback when I was particularly nervous about what I was doing with this cover.
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It’s been a nice couple of weeks. I did some comics lettering again after a month and a half off, and had a curious realisation. A lot of this break has been about trying new things – writing, drawing, extending my design/lettering art muscles. And the flip side of trying new things is that they can be destabilising – venturing out into new territory can leave you unsure, a bit scared, or stressed. So after a month and a half of trying new things, coming back to comics lettering was … restful. It’s a space where I know I’m competent, and after venturing into strange lands, it’s nice to play in your comfort zone for a bit. It made me realise that my choice of having one or two books going instead of completely stopping lettering was a good one, at least for the moment.
Like I said in my previous newsletter, I’ve been fielding a few potential offers, and I’ve been wondering if it’s a good idea to take any of them on. On the other hand, a comics pal recently read and responded to my “retirement” newsletter, and I ended up rereading that edition, and it drove home why I needed that break, and why I continue to need rest.
So, yeah, I gotta find a way to take it easy and do some work that makes me feel good about my capabilities. A fine balance I’m looking forward to striking.
On my blog, I reposted an old lettering checklist, and talked about why it was useful, and updated it for 2023.
Apart from that, I’ve been hitting my workout target most weeks (I’m two sessions behind in total, which is not too bad since my target averages to 3.8 sessions per week). On the other hand, the physiotherapy is also going well, and my various pains are reducing/disappearing. This has led to this funny situation where I’ll wake up in the morning feeling sore, and I have to slowly begin moving to figure out if that’s muscle pain or soreness from yesterday’s workout. Getting old is fun!
Finally, writing-wise, I just had another short comic pitch greenlit by the editor, and I’m aiming to finish a rough draft of the script sometime next week. This one is a lark – an artist friend and I came up with the idea on a video call, and I’m scripting this Marvel-style for him to draw (more on the lines of the Fraction/Aja stuff at the bottom of that page than the Lee/Kirby stuff early on), after which I’ll be writing the final dialogue. It’s a simple but fun idea, and I can’t wait for you folks to read it (the art, if nothing else, will be gorgeous).
It’ll be out in the second half of the year, but we’ll see when we can give you some hints.
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Last, but not least – a moment to take responsibility for things I say online.
In early November, I wrote a short tweet thread that went like this:
Writers, instead of using newsletters like blogs, I recommend … a blog! You can post as much as you like and someone can subscribe to your feed or go to your site every few days and read the posts. And you can aggregate them in a newsletter every couple of weeks.
I’m posting this because it looks like newsletters are one of the platforms people escaping Twitter are heading to.
I feel blogs and newsletters work differently, and what many people actually want is a place they can be found at, not to be in people’s inboxes.
Imagine my surprise when it reappeared (insert me sowing, me reaping meme here) in writer/editor Steve Foxe’s newsletter, where he talks about wanting to resurrect his blog and using the newsletter more for … news.
And now that I realise that words that I threw fairly lightly into the ether actually changed someone’s behaviour, I thought I should elaborate, since I still agree with what I said up there.
So – I’ve had this newsletter, on various platforms, for … Jesus … nearly six years now. I’ve never been clockwork regular on this, but I’ve never felt like stopping it altogether – it’s a lovely experience for me to have this thing to download what’s on my mind, and to have all of you read it and respond.
But I’ve been a newsletter reader for much longer. I think it started a little after I got a Gmail account, which I’ve had for 16-17 bloody years now. Over that time, the newsletter as a medium has gone through changes, and each time, it’s because of the new hot thing.
At first, the newsletter was self-contained – mainly personal or professional updates, an occasional essay, or a linkdump, or all or none of the above. If it led outwards, it was usually to other people’s work, via links. Then, as blogs came to prominence, it became a way to promote the blog, or to test out essays to reproduce on the blog, which would be the permanent home for those essays. There were even several newsletters that were entirely dedicated to copy-pasting interesting blogposts or articles and circulating them.
I don’t think there were many dedicated platforms for these either – there was listserv, and email newsgroups, but mostly you just had a list of people you’d send a batch email to. Before this newsletter, I had a smaller newsletter where I’d send over two mp3s weekly from artists I had discovered. It didn’t have a name or anything.
Then when Twitter came, the links and updates moved there, and the newsletter field lay fallow for a while, before people realised that not everything they wanted to say could fit in 140-280 letters, and they wanted space to stretch their thoughts and hold people’s attentions, so the newsletter came back. And then Twitter turned even more chaotic than it had been, and more people realised the value of that.
Anyway, nostalgic ramble aside, the primary purpose of a newsletter is to be read as an email – that’s the thing. Its home is not between the other emails the creator has sent, but between the other emails the receiver has lying in their inbox.
And this is what frustrates me about many newsletters in the recent resurgence of newsletters. And I believe I know the reason for this. For a lot of these creators, the newsletter isn’t their native platform – it’s something they’re escaping to, usually from Twitter. So they’re still adjusting to the way this thing works.
Which means you can open your inbox to find several emails from a single creator, and they’ll be referring to each other, and you have to hunt through your inbox to follow a thread. Or, more likely, you just ignore or archive them and move on to the ones you’ve been looking forward to actually reading.
And I feel like this is something that’s being implicitly encouraged by Substack, which has gained ground as the simplest newsletter service to set up. But increasingly, it looks like Substack doesn’t want to be a newsletter platform, really. It wants to be the new Medium. For Substack, your posts have value when seen in context of your other posts, like a blog, or seen in the app, which is like a newsreader. You can even turn off the emails and still read all your Substack subscriptions, which just confirms the idea that that’s not what Substack wants to be. (Other than, uh, the fact that they’ve said as much.)
My problem with this is – we used to have things to serve both those functions, and still do. They’re called blogs and newsreaders. That’s where your reader can either see your posts in context of everything else you’ve written (the blog), or get updates from you as and when you want to send them, because they get to choose when they have their coffee and look at what’s new (the feedreader).
And I feel like the email newsletter experience is being degraded to serve a conflicting purpose.
This is not meant as a rant, but as a piece of advice from someone with the credentials stated above. The thing is – newsletters aren’t going away anytime soon, because email isn’t. As long as email exists, people will want to send cool things to each other, and they’ll want to hear from the people whose work they like.
I think you’d make for a better experience for them if you stop thinking of each edition of your newsletter as just a piece of a whole, and think of it as a hermetic experience.
That’s not to say you should never refer to other editions of your newsletter, but that your readers shouldn’t need to hunt down something else to read this one. You’ve commandeered their attention – make sure you deserve it.
Hence the advice in my tweets – if you want to post several updates a week, get a blog, and post away. Because the blog is a voluntary platform – it’s where they come to read you. And there’s nothing to stop you from aggregating these in your newsletter whenever you send one, and they get to read your message between all the other messages they’re reading that morning.
To counter the negativity of this post (I feel like an old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn after it’s been ravaged by climate change), here’s a list of a few people that I think do it just right – add to this my pal Steve up there. This is not everyone (I’m signed on to about a hundred newsletters, and the majority of them are great), but it’s a good bunch to read and be inspired by till you find your own feet.
One of my very favourites – Shift Happens – seems to have died with the death of Revue, but I hope it’ll be resurrected in another form, because, and this is the cool thing about newsletters, no one can take your email list away from you.
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“Just a quickie,” he said. “Let’s get right to it,” he said. It’s 3:15 a.m., and I just wrapped this up at 2,100 words, so I guess we’ve had us a full newsletter experience, and I shall see you in another few weeks.
Bide well, gang!