MIND KILLER

Fear is the mind killer and a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Did you know H.R. Giger made designs for Jodorowsky's adaptation of Herbert's Dune? I am a little sad everytime I ponder just how bonkers Jodorowsky's adaptation would have been. He had Giger working on the Harkonnen world and Jean "Moebius" Giraud designing the vehicles. If you thought the Lynch adaptation (which I adore) was a little left of strange, imagine what could have been.

Giger also designed a Harkonnen chair. You can buy them and sit on them. There is a Giger bar in Switzerland where people do just that.

This week:

I. Career moves

II. Resetting

III. Upcoming work

IV. Reading / Listening

Career moves:

I get itchy feet. About a decade ago I was a chemical engineer and I wasn't enjoying myself. So I did something drastic. I quit– no safety net, no fallback option. I dove in both feet into writing. I had written before. It was a hobby so I wasn't picking up blind but I had no idea how I was going to make a living off of it. 2016 I self-published my first graphic novel, Black Mumba.

Fast forward to 2025. I was in San Diego picking up an Eisner for The One Hand and Six Fingers with my co-creators. I was in the middle of putting together a writers room and had flown down for a whirlwind day. I returned home having had a moment to digest, I realized I was getting itchy feet again. It wasn't the writing. I love writing and story telling. But I do think, creatively, it's important to stay on your toes. The worst place a writer can end up is one where they are bored.

In the preceeding years, I'd written about 30 issues of comics, each year. A video game concept, two animation pilots and a feature script and I was bored. So, I began looking at my work load. My DC exclusive was coming to an end in July 2025 and it was a matter of contending with fears. The DC superhero work was steady, dependable work. I enjoyed working with the characters and DC trusted me even with my left-field takes. In 2025, I successfully launched two books for characters/properties that had not been published in their own books for decades. For those who understand superhero publishing, that is a privileged place to be.

As a freelancer, there is always fear in letting go of comfortable things. But there is also a fear of becoming complacent. And these two fears always battle each other in most choices a freelancer makes. But fear is a mind killer. You make bad choices for safety when you should be making them from a creative place. Some risks are worth taking and comfortable work is engineered to make you forget this.

I had a lovely call with DC. There was an offer to extend the exclusive but I told them I was taking a break from monthly superhero comics. From a creative standpoint, I needed room to breathe, to think, to make new things. I needed to get away from cyclical work where it had begun to feel like getting things done and out always took precedence over making good things. From a pragmatic standpoint, I had much better offers to do my own thing.

So, the spandex will have to wait. There are still characters I'd like to write. I've got a Green Lantern idea that I've been mulling over. I still have plans for New Gods arcs. And then there's Marvel where I have not done very much.

But I've also got creator owned things that have been waiting for my attention. I've been working on things in the film, tv, animation side. Some that look like they're going to fall apart. Some that look like they will build. I'm writing some prose. I'm illustrating quietly when I find time. I am reading. Listening. Playing music. Teaching my kid how to sing. My first award was for a horror story about Jazz. My most successful book is a story about a god of death learning to be human. My Eisner was for two books telling one story, only half of which was written by me. This place of creative tomfoolery is home and I find myself in a place where I can afford to make such choices.

So, be unafraid. Especially now in the age of nostalgia, old dressed as new, content creation, salesmen masquerading as creatives and artificial regurgitation, be unafraid and do new things. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Resetting:

Work routine nerd alert. I'm doing something new. In an effort to filter noise from my daily start, I am implementing a silent hour. These days, my work day starts around 10. My wife drops off our son at school and stays out to do some admin work and grab a coffee.

Meanwhile, I wake and spend an hour+ in silence, save for the occasional dog-talk from my 8 year old Jack Russel. No news, no podcasts, no internet, games, music...nothing. I make some coffee. I clean things. I walk into the wooded trail behind my house. Any source of noise I am in control of gets nixed. For someone who has always lived in crowded bustling cities and has always been connected and "logged in" for most of my life, I am beginning to value the ability to listen to gentle things you can only hear in the space made by quieting the noise.

Related - here's a lovely chat with Paul Harding and the value in doing things slowly.

Also, I've been using Brick and it has worked wonders for cutting out phone nonsense. I know some people use it as a way of locking out distractions. I've used it as a way to bring back a little dumbness to my "smart" phone.

Upcoming work:

I've got a few things out in shops soon, so let's go through them quickly.

The Eisner nominated Rare Flavours Deluxe Edition trade is out this week.

A reissue of the multi award winning Blue in Green from Image on its five year anniversary.

These Savage Shores comes out in December in an all-new compact TPB format from Vault.

The Resurrection Man Quantum Karma TPB was solicited this past week.

And The Swamp Thing Omnibus collecting my run on Swampy with artists Mike Perkins and John McCrea is being collected next year. Remember to pre-order!

And there's a new print run for The One Hand and The Six Fingers TPB, from Image, with a snazzy new "Eisner winner" badge.

These are all the big chunky things! There's New Gods out in stores for the Wednesday warriors soon and more upcoming things from DC to be announced in due course. Stay tuned to those New York Comic Con announcements.

Reading / Listening

Evenson is a fascinating author with a penchant for unashamed brutality. There is shock and awe of course. But Evenson's stories also have a way of quietly insinuating themselves under your skin. And of course, the stories start like this...

After I had killed Altmann, I stood near Altmann's corpse watching the steam of the mud rising around it, obscuring what had once been Altmann. Horst was whispering to me, "You must eat his tongue. If you eat his tongue, it will make you wise," Horst was whispering. "If you eat his tongue, it will make you speak the language of birds!" I knocked Horst down and pointed the rifle, and then, as if by accident, squeezed the trigger.

Japanese Jazz. Almost minimalist. Ryo Fukui was a Jazz pianist who played and later taught, for the most part, in Sapporo, at a Jazz club he and his wife owned. I'd never heard him before and I've loved Japanese Jazz since my late teens. You can see here and with Jiro Inagaki where the jazz influence of Japanese lo-fi trip hop (<3 Nujabes) came from.

The world online grows increasingly loud and shouty. Everyone, even the ideologues are just trying to sell you something. Turn it off. Make brave choices for good reasons. Take time for yourself and make choices about who or what you listen to; what you take in. There is a sanctity to the interior. It's okay to close the doors and sit with yourself for a while.

It's been a while since I dropped one of these. I intend to do it more often. If you're wondering why you're seeing this. You signed up to hear from me at some point.

I'm Ram V - a writer and ocassionally an artist.