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April 21, 2025 Hiii... Comic is back... I really did not get ahead at ALL over this break lol but the next 2 scenes are thumbnailed and I’m moving along with it. It is solidifying. Much of what I’ve been doing lately has been helping with the faculty unionization effort at SVA.

NEW VATTU EDITION, did you see?!!? You can preorder at Bookshop dot org. Thank you for reading.

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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 Mr. Dahm, I’ve been reading 3rd voice, and I love your worldbuilding. However, I know that you haven’t nor will you explain to the reader everything in the world. But I do want to know how you build your world in a way that:
1. You’re not overwhelmed
2. It seems so original
3. It’s beautiful to behold

And if you have a guide or questions you ask yourself before starting, that would be lovely to know. Best wishes, Anonymous * April 28, 2025

I can answer at least one of those pretty directly, but in general the solutions I’ve arrived at are around the idea of “working from wide to tight focus.” In terms of preliminary questions: ideally I begin with at least some sense of NARRATIVE: not “what the story will be exactly” but “what sort of things will the story work with” and try to build everything from that starting-point.

To not be overwhelmed, I try to maintain focus on the interests and moving-parts of characters in the story, and I try to treat setting-detail as supportive of the bigger ideas of the setting and the story. One big thing 3V is about is “looking backwards,” so the setting becomes a device to articulate that basic idea in a bunch of different ways, from a bunch of different perspectives, constantly. Having a guiding thematic throughline in place can help keep things ORGANIZED! You can still SIMULATE the immense, uselessly noisy detail of “reality,” but I think there’s diminishing returns on that. The details that stick are the ones that support the big ideas. For areas where the details are, in my estimation, worth keeping track of in specific, I keep a few different documents that I can refer back to. These get filled in spottily in advance, and I generally put stuff in bold when they’re locked-in publicly in the comic.

Don’t know what to say really about originality and beauty. I am frustrated by invented settings that are too rote. I am motivated by an interest in fantasy fiction before it got locked-in to its current uptight model. So much of this, I think, just comes down to being a little intentional with one’s interests: if you look outside of your immediate cultural surroundings, you get a bigger idea of what’s possible to imagine. Nothing comes from nowhere!!

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