My Beloved Other - the animated trailer
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My Beloved Other - the animated trailer
Go here to preorder the book!
If you were on the fence about preordering My Beloved Other, now is the time. Join the @barnesandnoble rewards program for FREE and get 25% off your copy with the promo code PREORDER25.
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@barnesandnoble is running a huge preorder sale! If you want to preorder MY BELOVED OTHER and get 25% off, join their free rewards program and use code PREORDER25 at checkout! The offer runs until January 1 2026, so be quick.
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The cover to my next book, co-written with my wife, Angela Watson.
Find out more here.
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I drew a star of peace to welcome 2026.
My Beloved Other - Publication Date and News
My Beloved Other - Publication Date and News
Announcing the title of our new book, and presenting the cover to My Beloved Other, by yours truly and my wife, Angela Watson. It is, as the sub-title says, a memoir of love, race and optimism in a time of denial.
This book was first commissioned in 2008 under the title Skin Trouble. It was, in reality, two separate projects— a book about the lives of Angela’s father and my father, and their different experiences when they came to the UK as immigrants in the late 1950s.
Anyone who knows me knows that I was also always talking about an “anecdotal book about racism and what it’s like being in a biracial or mixed race relationship.” Back in the early 2000s, this was almost a joke, a project to find a way of making light of the occasional “microaggressions” or biases we’d encounter, a kind of fun riff on “light racism.” That approach seems so naïve now.
Each project was essentially entirely separate, but at some point, in conversations with various agents and advisers, they became bound together and I found myself attempting to make the two stories work together as one.
That took far, far longer than I ever thought it would. After many abortive half-finished drafts over a decade, in 2019 I asked my editor (and founder and editorial director) at First Second, a very patient Mark Siegel, if I could bring on board my wife Angela as a co-writer, as I had an idea that a back-and-forth memoir structure would help me get around what had become something of a creative impasse. The plan was to just record us both talking to get a more “conversational” sensibility into the various family stories and observations on what was happening to societies across the world, the link throughout being us. (This also meant I’d have to put aside a lifetime’s disavowal of making myself into a comics character. Sometimes you just have to do the thing that takes you furthest from your creative comfort zone.)
Sixteen years in the making from conception to final art, this book is the result. It will be published in the USA by Macmillan’s 23rd Street Books imprint on August 8, 2026. You can read the official blurb here.
Please watch this space, and follow all our social media feeds for more news and inside stories on the making of the book. (I call it a book, because it’s not really a “graphic novel” as such. It’s a memoir that uses the language of comics to tell the story, and “graphic memoir” sounds a bit, well, inappropriate. Call it an anti-racist memoir in long comics format.)
I can be found here on BlueSky and here on Instagram, and there may be new, separate feeds for the book itself happening quite soon. I can’t wait to try TikTok (Hugo Tate face) and am already thinking up new ways to enrich our tech overlord fascist masters. You can also use the QR code below to find me on Instagram.
Anything you do, dear reader, to share and help the book be visible will be mightily appreciated.
Pre-orders really help us, so we’ll have links to all available online retailers soon (some are already up), and we’ll also have news of other, related ventures.
Please stay tuned!
Nick Abadzis
A Weekly Song: Episode 11 – Goldie Presents Metalheads (or is that Metalheadz?)
Goldie Presents Metalheads - Inner City Life
There were a lot of anthems in the air in the mid-90s. By anthem, I mean popular tracks that stuck around; that seemed to exemplify a movement, a state of mind… for want of a better term, an attitude. Examples: Soul II Soul’s Keep On Moving and Back II Life (However Do You Want Me), The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony, Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy, Pulp’s Common People.
Each heralded an aspect of British youth poking its head above the parapet of the relative safety of its own dedicated teenage bedroom audience and making serious inroads into mainstream culture. Pop was already embedded in TV shows, movie soundtracks, documentaries, but now more “marginal” sounds were becoming a part of mainstream culture, making their voices heard in clubs and on pirate stations but also represented on TV and public radio. The old hierarchies were breaking down, just a little.
Some context: at the end of the eighties, everything changed in British yoof culture. First you had acid house and the dance/rock crossover, a sort of cross-pollination of club culture and the indie scene that itself grew out of post-punk, electronica and a broader early eighties multiculturalism (remember that? It’s become a dirty word now, as if human beings haven’t always been multicultural, as if people mixing socially is somehow now unfashionable. If you visit the town in the next valley over, that’s being multicultural. So is visiting your next door neighbour. Your identity and traditions won’t be erased by doing so).
In the early nineties there was Madchester, then came shoegazing which begat a great many bands that later became household names via Britpop, a media-invented idea AKA Cool Britannia that grouped all manner of different bands and outfits under one cultural umbrella for easier export to the rest of the world. There was also British hip-hop (and trip-hop); you had techno and rave and its various sub-genres, there was bhangra, ragga, dark ‘ardkore which evolved into jungle and later, drum ‘n ‘bass. I remember first becoming really properly aware of it at the Notting Hill Festival in either 1993 or 1994 where I registered a sound system playing something that sounded like breakbeats and techno with dub or ragga inflections, something fast and new. It caught my ear and it got into my brain and burrowed right down into my digestive tract. I loved it. British youth culture was rapidly morphing into bountiful new shapes, a creative Hydra with many and ever more collaborative heads, each one abundant with new ideas and potentials.
Every year is the best year ever for music** because there’s always something new happening somewhere, but in retrospect (especially the middle-aged kind of hindsight) perhaps not every period is as fertile as others. There was a lot going on in the mid-nineties, and I, a music loving “underground cartoonist,” was in the middle of it.
That is, in early 1994, I had no idea what I was doing. I was recovering from an ill-advised and short-lived marriage plus a resultant nervous breakdown; I was skint, I was lonely and I was ambitious; I had big ideas of how I could so something different with comics and help make them into a communications and storytelling art form that would be as fluid and abstract as music. Little did I know, it was already doing that with or without me, but anyway, ah! …the hubris of youth. I was a ball of confusion, a knot of creativity with a burning need to put it somewhere. (I did, but that’s another story.) I wanted something to change, I wanted to be changed, but I didn’t know what or how.
It was around this time that I became aware of this. I forget when exactly I heard Inner City Life for the first time, but of all the anthems around, this one captivated me the most, made its way onto the internal tape loop in my mind. It sounded like it was from the future, but it seemed to coalesce from everything surrounding me.
Certainly I heard it in the DnB clubs that emerged around that time – maybe at the Mars Bar, to which me and my mate Caspar would trek from the western suburbs so we could experience the dizzy heights of happening central London nightlife. There were many drum ‘n’ bass anthems, for sure, but this one made it onto TV. Seeing the video on some late-night yoof show was cathartic somehow – it opened with a shot of a shopping trolley going over the balcony of a tower block not unlike the one my gran lived on.
“Come to me…”
Diane Charlemagne was familiar to audiences for her appearances with Urban Cookie Collective, who’d had a couple of chart hits, but this was something else. Suddenly she was a sepia-toned diva calling across the rooftops and the airwaves, acknowledging the loneliness and burden of pressures that living in the big city brings. She was joining dots as if all the different anthems were pins on the urban map of modern British music. The tower blocks and council estates were marked just as surely as the pennants atop the Houses of Parliament were.
“I need to be, I need to be…
Living free”
The track was credited to Goldie presents Metalheads (later Metalheadz), known to me for a track called Terminator, but Inner City Life was an entirely different beast, a kind of yearning mutant soul music fuelled by both paranoia and tenderness.
In mainstream terms, it wasn’t the huge hit that some of the other anthems mentioned at the top of this piece were, but for me it remains one of the definitive statements of 90s British music. It transcends all barriers, classes, backgrounds and yes, to my ears, it was a statement of the kind of hopeful (and multicultural) Cool Britannia a lot of other acts were being marketed as, but Inner City Life was the true dark horse, the outsider who found its way up from the streets.
Before finding its way onto Goldie’s sprawling debut album Timeless (as one movement in the opening title track), Inner City Life was remixed and re-released so many times, I lost count. I had the original 12” single and another pressing that featured mixes by other DnB luminaries, my favourite being Doc Scott’s version that showcased Charlemagne’s vocals.
I loved the way the music itself was so mutable and yet remained recognisable, no matter whose hands touched it. There was an egalitarianism to the way Goldie (and his partner-in-production Rob Playford) shared the track, allowing numerous interpretations. In fact, he’s still playing around with it – a new mix was made available last year for Record Store Day.
Over the years, all sorts of superlatives have been heaped upon Timeless, which is certainly a great album and a defining document of that mid-to-late nineties era of extreme creativity in British music, but I’m not sure anything could ever match the feeling the initial release and the remixes generated in me.
And just to give you a sense of what a beautiful song it is, one that stands the test of being stripped to its basics, here’s a version featuring Jhelisa Anderson – yes, she of The Shamen fame and a formidable solo artist in her own right. Listen and enjoy.
Notes
Diane Charlemagne died in 2015 of kidney cancer at the terribly young age of 51. She was rightly celebrated by the DnB scene and beyond.
The cover version of Inner City Life featuring Jhelisa is by German Jazz outfit [Re:jazz] from their album Point of View and it also features on Goldie’s “Masterpiece” Ministry of Sound mix collection.
At the end of 2009 when I moved from the UK to the USA, the wrong box of vinyl was sent to a charity shop and I accidentally gave away both the original 12” single version of Inner City Life, several remixes, plus a whole load of other DnB vinyl I hadn’t intended to part with. Still kicking myself about that. Oh, well… someone found ‘em and enjoyed them and the money went to a good cause, so, good karma, eh? I still have the CD collection…
*Consider the similarity between the two videos of Bittersweet Symphony and Unfinished Sympathy. One has Richard Ashcroft walking down a British street in one single, unbroken shot, the other had fellow Brit Shara Nelson doing the same in east LA. Two people from two musical collectives walking towards each other, at opposite sides of the planet at different ends of western culture.
**To paraphrase David Stubbs. I think.
Not everybody loved Britpop.
Metalheadz - still going, listen more.
A Weekly Song: Episode 8 - Joe Hisaishi
A Weekly Song: Episode 8
Joe Hisaishi – Procession of the Gods
“When’s he going to do a movie composer?”
“He’s always going on about film soundtracks.”
It’s true, I am, I do. The reason is this – I listen to a hell of a lot of them. I’m an aficionado. When you’re writing and drawing all day and night, whether it’s writing articles for magazines or scripts for other artists, or just drawing your own comics and illustrations, you listen to a lot of music.
About five years ago, other than corporate work, I changed my professional emphasis from both writing and drawing to predominantly writing (largely because I make more money from writing than from doing both. Making comics and graphic novels is slow, hard work where you do about ten jobs for the price of one. Plus, anyone in comics publishing will tell you how little most artists make, but that is not the purpose of this essay so I’ll leave that story and observations on same for another time).
I’ve always found that I can’t listen to music with lyrics or indeed a human voice of any kind while writing – I find it distracting. This leaves instrumental music – Jazz and Classical, sure, Ambient definitely, but most often – soundtracks. Film and TV scores.
Perhaps the reason for this is that the part of my brain that I use to create stories and voices of characters is also the part that listens to and processes speech and singing. I don’t know that for sure, but whatever the reason, because most of my time is now spent writing, there’s much less time to listen to listen to podcasts, talk radio and the like.
When I was doing the more “automatic” tasks in the creation of a page of comics, like lettering, inking or colouring, I always found myself listening to something with a human voice – a play, a podcast, radio documentaries. My inking was actually better, both looser and slicker, if I was slightly distracted by listening to radio plays or discussion of some kind. (Hi, BBC Radio 4, NPR and Big Finish. I miss you.)
Correspondingly, my appetite for soundtracks has increased, but they’ve always been an important – nay, essential part of my creative process. They are both mood setters and emotional emollient, both starting points and helpful compositional markers in the creation of a story.
It goes something like this: you think of a scene, what the purpose of it is, how you want it to play, what the characters are saying and doing and you choose a piece of music that sets the temperature of that set of incidents. I think every book and every comic I’ve ever written has had a temp-track of sorts, a tracklisting that serves as a guide for the mood and atmosphere I’m looking for.
In many cases, this temp-track evolves and changes as the story does, with some pieces of music being dropped in favour of others as the shape of the narrative develops. I imagine it’s a similar process in an editing suite; as you revise and modify the focus of different elements of a story, the linguistic accompaniments necessarily change too. In film or TV, it might be the Foley sounds, a change of emphasis in lighting via colour grading; in comics it might be the layout, the way the guttering of a page affects the pace at which a reader scans it, and where their eye is led; the tempo at which it subtextually guides a reader to the turn of the page and an emotional turning point, all the while preserving a sense of immersion. Every small detail the author employs affects everything else, and everything has to be right and constantly rejigged to create the illusion of the real world within the story.
This is the kind of constant balancing act common to all forms of visual storytelling. While comics don’t have the luxury of sound and motion, it is still a supremely nuanced and sophisticated language in its own right. What I always liked about comics as both art form and means of expression is how accessible they are and that they can be created relatively cheaply in comparison to film or TV. Anyone can make a comic; you really can be a sole creator, whereas film and TV are collaborative media. A graphic novel really can be one person’s creative vision, unlike a film, which although it may be steered by one overall captain, the authorship really is shared by many (despite what the director’s credit would have you believe: “A Film By…”)
I digress. The point is, one art form and means of cultural expression runs into the next; none of them stand alone. Everything influences everything else and in my case, I’d go so far as to say, these days, music probably influences me more in terms of the kinds of stories I like to tell than many other comics do. Storytelling is a free-flowing activity that inhabits every possible mode of human expression.
Obviously, all this means I have a lot of favourite soundtracks and film composers. How to pick one, and just one track from so many, for this week’s song?
Well, first time around, I’m gonna do the easy thing. I’m going straight to someone who supplies music for one of the greats in a related field: animation. The greatest living animator, in my humble opinion, is Hayao Miyazaki. One of Miyazaki’s constant and most consistent collaborators is Mamoru Fujisawa AKA Joe Hisaishi, who has composed scores for every Miyazaki movie but one. Not to compare Miyazaki to a Spielberg or a Lucas, but Hisashi is Miyazaki’s John Williams.
It’s really difficult to pick a favourite Miyazaki film, and equally difficult to pick a Hisaishi score. He is, predictably, a composer who can match the depth, vision and moods of Miyazaki, one who seems as comfortable with experimental electronica as he is with the orchestra.
My admiration for Hisaishi is a fairly usual reaction to his music; sometimes it’s interesting to look at exactly why a composer is beloved. His association with one of the best storytellers in the world is partially the reason, but composers are of course storytellers in their own right. There is a line of thinking that viewers shouldn’t really notice movie music – that it’s a subtextual support to the emotion and action of the story being told onscreen. While there’s an element of truth in that, there are just as many examples to the opposite. What I think a good film score should do is complement and highlight the story, help make it an immersive emotional experience; be textural as opposed to specific. It should help you, the viewer, get caught up in the characters and story without necessarily calling attention to itself, which calls for a lot of nuance and is a very neat balancing act. You can still notice it – I sometimes do, but what’s fascinating about it is that, when it’s working well, I often don’t do it consciously. The opposite is true also – I notice it when it’s intrusive or overly sentimental, signposting emotions rather than being an integral part of them.
Something that interests me is that Hisaishi is on record as thinking many modern Hollywood soundtracks don’t have enough “space” or silence in them – that quiet is as much a tool of the composer as loud is. This is a man whose comprehension of emotional colour and silence as a tone in his palette is second to none. I love his work in film and beyond it (which is why I’m also going to cheat a bit and also recommend his Minima Rhythm series, the first of which you can listen to here).
That’s not today’s pick though, which I agonised over. I almost went for the opening of Princes Mononoke, Attack of the Tatari-Gami, which is both great action music and one of the most sinister themes in animation history. In the end, I settled upon a piece from Spirited Away, which is possibly one of Hisaishi’s most sweeping, yearning scores.
Variously known as Procession of the Gods (on the US pressing of the soundtrack I have), Procession of the Spirits and The Procession of Celestial Beings, the cue is actually seriously truncated in the movie and not allowed to fully bloom the way it does on the soundtrack album. You’re going to have to take my word for that, because unfortunately there is no official Studio Ghibli channel that I can find on YouTube that showcases Hisaishi’s work, but you can do a search and find several cover versions that attempt to recapture its ominous majesty. Here’s a link to how it sounds in the film, but I’d encourage you to seek out the soundtrack album and listen to it in all its pomp,
The scene it accompanies is shortly after the main character, a ten-year old girl called Chihiro, finds herself stranded in a magical world. Her parents have turned into pigs (yes) and she attempts to find the tunnel that is a gateway back to her reality, only to find that she is now separated from it by a newly-appeared river. A boat begins crossing the water towards her and this music begins to play, all string-plucked notes and magical portent. There are no visible passengers until the boat hits the shore, where Chihiro stands watching. Doors open, the music swells, heralding the arrival of beings that no human child should witness. They appear as masks that float around head height and, floating above the deck, file off the boat one by one. As they disembark, cloaks flow from the masks, like paint tipped from a bucket, flowing down to describe the shapes of their intangible bodies…
…And Chihiro flees, the music fades. On the soundtrack album it reaches a magnificent crescendo and ends on a playful note, punctuated by human voices. It’s a scene that goes from a foreboding menace to awe and wonder, from fear to celebration and back again.
If you’ve never seen the film, see it. It is far, far from being merely a children’s entertainment and occupies a place among the most visionary films ever made.
I have another version of Procession from the Spirited Away Image Album, which I think might be a demo rather than the more usual “song in character” pieces you get on those kinds of tie-ins (but I can’t read Japanese, so I might be completely wrong about that. Feel free to correct me if so via Twitter or email or if you have any further information about this particularly sumptuous film score).
To get a flavour of Joe Hisaishi’s imaginative brilliance, you can watch and listen to a whole concert here.
More info on Studio Ghibli (n English) available here.
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How to Write a Doctor Who Comic
Just fill in each page on one of these empty pagination sheets with nonsensical doodles that only you can understand – this is called a “plot.” Then join all the incidents together by writing a script. It’s easy! Why not try it at home?
... Seriously, the way these things work is as a rough visual guide to help plan and pace action and incident through a 22-page episode of Doctor Who.
The first, for Tenth Doctor #3.11 was originally intended for regular artist Giorgia Sposito when I thought we’d be working “Marvel method” with just a plot breakdown for each page which she’d illustrate and I’d dialogue later. Turned out we did it the usual method of me writing her a full script, though.
The other two were notes to self, essentially basic visual plots by way of which I work out the main beats and “page-turns” of a story. These were for specials that took place during 2017’s Lost Dimension crossover for Titan Comics, and there was a lot of story to cram into each issue.
Note the appearance of the RED TARDIS at the end there, just to remind myself what the gruesome cliffhanger was.
The final one is the first and only time I've written for the eleventh Doctor and his companion Alice, which was a sojourn from my usual spot as regular writer on the tenth Doctor comics. I love writing for Tennant's Doctor, but it was huge fun to take a break from him and find the cadences and vocal mannerisms for both Matt Smith and Patrick Troughton, whose second Doctor made a cameo in this story.
COMICS EXTRAVAGANZA: THE BLOG TOUR
Do you love comics? Or are you curious about comics and want to know more about them? Or are you irresistibly drawn to comics? Or are you and comics arch-nemeses? Then this is the blog tour for you! It is full of comics every day.
Follow along throughout the week for all-comics, all-the-time interviews and book recommendations from a selection of authors with books full of video games and space aliens and dimensional portals and murder and magic like Nick Abadzis, Landis Blair, Box Brown, Nidhi Chanani, Shannon Hale, Mike Lawrence, Molly Ostertag, MK Reed, Tillie Walden, Scott Westerfeld, and Alison Wilgus.
7/10 – YA Bibliophile interviews Shannon Hale
7/10 – Fiction Fare interviews Tillie Walden
7/11 – A Backwards Story interviews Landis Blair
7/11 – Bluestocking Thinking interviews Mike Lawrence
7/12 – Book Crushin interviews MK Reed
7/12 – Miss Print interviews Scott Westerfeld
7/12 – Ex Libris Kate interviews Box Brown
7/13 – Love Is Not a Triangle interviews Nick Abadzis
7/13 – I’d So Rather Be Reading interviews Alison Wilgus
7/14 – The Adventures of Cecelia Bedelia interviews Molly Ostertag
7/14 – Adventures of a Book Junkie interviews Nidhi Chanani
Happy reading!
Our first reviews are in! Pigs Might Fly got an excellent review from Publisher’s Weekly (top).
Another lovely one from imagination Soup too.
Want to pre-order a copy? See here.
Somewhen, somewhere on the E Train, NYC
Out right now - Part 2 of Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth
Diversity in DOCTOR WHO by Nick Abadzis
Part 1 - the show
Part 2 - comics, audios, literature
Words on the SPACE JOCKEY from ALIEN by Nick Abadzis at HeroCollector.com