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October 20, 2025 3rd Voice is IN PRINT! The 1st book is now available at Topatoco.com.

ALSO, the complete 3rd Voice Soundtrack (so far!??!?) by my brother Lewis is available now on bandcamp if you would like to have a listen. Here is a couple of fantastic new tracks.

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Latest Letter Column

You can email me something at 3rdvoicemail@gmail.com and I will maybe get to it here.

Hey, good morning, Evan! I just got my copy of the 1st Passage print book in the mail - which looks incredible, by the way! - and it brings up something I’ve been curious about for a while.

In the end notes in the print book, you talk a lot about how the medium of serialization affects and sort of... reshapes? the work itself, or at least the ways in which the work can take shape and do what it’s trying to do, and this quote really caught my attention: "Publishing [Rice Boy / Order of Tales / Vattu] one page at a time [...] heavily, self-evidently prioritizes the eventual, ’finished’ version of the thing, in a way I didn’t want to do [for 3rd Voice]." Given this, I wanted to ask: do you feel like anything about your comics is lost (or gained!) when a reader isn’t forced to wait for a new "episode" and can read through the comic as quickly as they’d like? In a sense, this applies to webcomic archives, too: instead of waiting impatiently through moments like the ending of 1st Passage, where you’re forced to pause, and have the time to theorize and even group-discussion about what MIGHT happen, you can just turn/click the page and find out what DOES happen.

I guess what I’m asking is - do you consider the breaks between updates of the comic to have (intentional) value/meaning/purpose in a reader’s experience of the comic? Or do you see them more as just a necessary compromise to allow the work to be created in the first place, and you’d publish the entire work all at once if you could magically do so? (Is this part of why Order of Tales and Vattu released their conclusions as one large update, rather than as individual pages?)

Thank you again for making this awesome thing that has lived continuously in my head for three years now. Jackson * October 20, 2025

I have a lot of complicated and interlocking thoughts about this stuff! Thank you for good trains of thought. I guess I have been attempting to reckon with the idea of storytelling as a thing embedded in time and material circumstance. Throughout the history of comics this has mostly been about SERIALIZATION—our conventions spin out of the circumstances provided by cheap printing and various lineages of periodical distribution. I want to embrace this or be aware of this more fully, and it feels in retrospect like my privileging of the “graphic novel” as a discrete statement is kind of a less honest apprehension of the medium. Something like that broadly.

It does take a certain amount of time to make a big comic book, and no institution is paying me to make it or putting any promotional effort behind it. SO serializing it online as I draw it provides a broad, long-term space for self promotion, and turns the span of time spent working on the thing into something more productive than it would otherwise be. Theoretically every update becomes an opportunity for people to be reminded of it. It’s not a huge “promotional space” but it’s vastly more space than if I were to just put a big finished webcomic-graphic-novel on the internet at once.

SO in some ways I guess it is a compromise to publish it in this way, BUT doing it this way allows me more time & more productive time to figure out what I’m doing, and provides a lot more time to see what it looks like to people and to build it up in my head. From a reader perspective I understand there is some awkwardness in the halting format, but the value of reading a thing while it’s happening and being talked about in Some Small Way is significant, I think. And I am sometimes trying to be sensitive about scene breaks and use them to build tension in ways that would not be quite as intense if read later…

I guess implicit in the question “is it a compromise” is the assumption that it would even be possible to put it all out there at once, and I don’t think it would. I probably said this more intelligibly in the afterword but I am trying to not think of ideal forms of the work anymore! It only is what it is because it’s the only way it could be. OH but you say “would you publish the entire work all at once if you could MAGICALLY do so,” so we agree that it’s an impossibilty lol. Anyway the answer to that is “no.” thank u for letter

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