What's Happening - November 2023

Hello, hello, hello, hello, and happy last week of November!

Welcome to my monthly newsletter, giving you updates on the things I’ve been lettering, reading and writing this month.

What am I lettering?

The month of November has had a couple of fun projects finishing up for me. I put the finishing touches on Red Sea Legends - The Manga which let me have some fun emulating a more “manga” style. What does that mean? Basically just that I used a bunch of the great manga style fonts from Sara Linsley rather than my usual stable of SFX fonts.

Outside of that, I’ve mostly been working on things that… I can’t talk about! Which is a bummer, but unfortunately a part of the lettering life. There are a few projects I’m going to be lettering currently in pre-launch on Kickstarter that you should check out though.

Sinner Takes All #1

The Exorcist Club #1

I’ll tell you a bit more about both of them once they’re live and I can show off some more stuff. But for now, sign up to my sure you’re ready once they go live.

Some Fun Lettering

What am I reading?

Kill Six Billion Demons

I was very, very sick for about 3 days this last weekend, with a fever and absolutely no motivation to do anything but sit on the couch covered in blankets. And my go to activity when I’m this sick is to pick a comic I’ve never read, that there’s a lot of, and just read as much of it as humanly possible. And hey, Tom Parkinson-Morgan has made a lot of Kill Six Billion Demons!

I can’t speak much to what actually happens in the first 2 volumes of this story, because I was out of my mind with a very bad fever. But! The art is just amazing. The depictions of otherworldly hells, demons and angels, are all just so cool. Will probably go back and read this sometime when my two brains cells aren’t as occupied with how much my head hurts and how snotty my nose is.

The City of Last Chances

I’m about halfway through this book by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and it’s been fantastic so far. Tchaikovsky is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. The Children of Time books are exactly the kind of sci-fi novels I really enjoy, lots of fun, but also asking big questions, looking at what it means to be sentient and how the physicality of a creatures body fundamentally changes that sentience. They rule!

They’re also not this book, which rules in a ton of other, separate ways. Big picture, the book takes place in a magical, fantasy city that has come under occupation by an empire based on empiricism. That by itself is a fun concept, but within that setting, we follow a huge cast of characters, all of whom fit into each others lives in small, strange ways. And the book only follows each of them for a chapter or so. It circles back around to some perspective characters, but it’s always adding new ones, always giving new perspectives on the city and the simmering conflict against its oppressors.

The rotating cast is my favorite part so far. Getting to see into mind of so many characters, how they fit into each others lives like strangely misshapen cogs, how each character things about all the other, is fascinating. From a writing craft level, keeping all those perspectives straight and all the plates spinning also makes my head spin. And yet, so far, it all works. That’s not even talking about all the truly weird and fundamentally strange magic that actually feels like magic, and I’ve really been enjoying my time with this book so far.

Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind

I got the beautiful slipcase set of the Nausicaa manga for by birthday back in September and am finally getting around to rereading it. There’s literally nothing I can say about Hayao Miyazaki that someone else hasn’t already said better some where else. The books as physical objects are gorgeous, and the art inside is even better. The pages are huge and dense, and the entire thing has a sense of scale and scope are missing from so many epic fantasy comics. Like I said, nothing I can say that other people haven’t already said better, but it’s a great book that I’ve been really enjoying getting the chance to revisit.

What am I writing?

Gonna keep this section pretty short this month. There’s some really, really exciting stuff I have planned for this newsletter coming in 2024. One of those things is a serialized, monthly fantasy comic that I’ve just started to really get the ball rolling on.

I’ve got an amazing artist currently working on the book, and I’m really happy with the structure of it. It going to be coming out through this newsletter in 5 to 10 page chunks, then heading over to Kickstarter once we’ve got enough for a full issue. The important part for you, person signed up for this newsletter, is you’ll be able to follow along with the book each month.

Once we’ve got enough of a backlog for me to start posting it, I’ll make a big post laying out some of the changes that are going to be coming to this newsletter, so you can get a better idea of what exactly you’ll be signed up for.

Hey, look at this logo! What could this be for?

That’s all?

Mhm. Bye!