Happy (very belated) New Year, everyone. I hope your holidays were filled with good people, even better food, and just the right amount of cheesy Hallmark Christmas movies.

The biggest news I have to share is that Work-Life Balance is available internationally again, but now, through our publisher’s new distributor. That means that, for the first time in a while, Ben and I are actually sure we’ll receive residuals when anyone anywhere around the world buys our book.

(Curious about what happened with our publisher’s previous distributor? Well, here’s a rabbit hole down which you can lose yourself.)

If you still don’t have a copy of Work-Life Balance sitting pretty on your shelf, now’s a great time to fix that. You can ask your local bookstore or comic shop to order it through their regular Ingram or Consortium sales reps, or purchase it through one of the links on my site.

Buy Work-Life Balance now

I took part in The Beat’s 2025 - 2026 Creators’ Survey, in which I talk about How Are You Feeling?, as well as Nadia, Abs, and my short story in DELAY, and give a shout-out to the three comic shops in Singapore where I spend the most money.

My two big resolutions for 2026 are to finish writing my novel and get published in a comic for the American market.

I’ll speak more about those as the year goes on, but a smaller resolution I have is to read at least four books per month. Which might not seem like a lot to some, but I’m a slow reader, so four’s a huge leap forward for me. The plan is that I’ll do three fiction titles (one that was released after I was born, one that was released before, and one that’s by a non-white author based in Southeast Asia or Australia) and a non-fiction title.

I’ve made it through two in January, so not an ideal start, but I think I can catch up eventually. I’ll be chronicling whatever I’m reading here. No reviews, but maybe I’ll talk about how I found out about each book. If you wanna check out what’s graduated from my to-read pile, I’ll add purchase links too.

1. The Faceless Thing We Adore by Hester Steel
   Wen-Yi Lee told me about this. She said it had been described as, “Eat, Pray, Lovecraft,” which sold me on it immediately. Also, that cover is fucking gorgeous.

2. A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing by Jessie Tu
   This one’s long overdue. Jessie and I were on a panel together a little over a year ago, along with Siang Lu and Bora Chung. Again, slow reader here.

I’ve just started Walter Arnold Kaufmann’s translation of Goethe’s Faust. Yes, I too cannot believe that I haven’t read this even though Mephistopheles was a pretty prominent character in Work-Life Balance.

After that, it’s The Art of Thai Comics: A Century of Strips and Stripes by Nicolas Verstappen, which I picked up in Bangkok last year. (I’ve mentioned before, but it’s awfully kismet-y that later in 2025, Verstappen also wrote the introduction for How Are You Feeling?.)

I was going to send this out earlier—but then Sal Buscema died.

“Our Pal” Sal’s time on Spectacular Spider-Man with J.M. DeMatteis was a formative comic run for me when I was a kid. Even though I only had a handful of their issues growing up, they were enough to leave a lasting impression, informing the way I would tell my own comic stories decades later.

Eventually, I would get a copy of their legendary two hundredth issue, the last couple of pages of which remain a comic masterclass, a wordless finale that not only didn’t need any dialogue or captions, but would have been hampered by them.

Buscema was one of the first creators to show me that an artist in comics is as much, and sometimes much more of a storyteller than the writer.

Clearly, he could tell emotionally-driven stories, but man, could he do a solid superhero action scene too. Hell, there’s a particular type of punch that’s became synonymous with him.

When I think of superhero comics, The Sal Buscema Punch is one of the first things that comes to mind, so much so that when I was scripting the superhero portion for Worlds Apart, I absolutely insisted that this homage make it in.

I recently read his Balder the Brave mini-series with Walt Simonson, a comic that predates his Spectacular Spider-Man run—yet still feels just as fresh.

And that’s a perfect metaphor for what Buscema meant to me: a creator whose work reverberates through the decades—from being wowed by it as a kid to being inspired by it as an adult.

Catherine O’Hara also died. I’m not going to write a whole thing about her too, but instead direct you to an interview I did with her ages ago.

Two things are apparent from that interview, the same two things that people who knew her personally have been saying since her passing:

1. She was very sweet. She answered my questions with care and thoughtfulness, even though she didn’t have to. I was pretty inexperienced with interviews back then, and my questions were all fairly basic. But I appreciate the kindness with which she approached them.

2. Just based on that last answer alone, she was hella funny.

That’s it for now.

Before we go, of course, here’s a photo of famed vet terroriser, Luca Gerard Rée.

See you when I see you, folks. In the meantime, take care of yourselves.