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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 Evan, Been reading since way back, starting with Rice Boy... Jeeze, 2006 seems like a lifetime ago. I’ve lurked around your community for a while. Participated in the Vattu art zine (p.26). Made a little fan art now and then.

I also am a huge fan of Helvetica Blanc and as such have taken to learning her Wormrote language with help from her primer. With your most recent Intermission post that set of writing right in the middle [this one] immediately caught my attention.

Obviously there is some thought and reasoning behind the shapes, such that you can create these glyphs that you at least can read, correct? Do you have any sort of short hand or primer that helps you translate what you want into the language and text of their world? I had already been wondering this when reading Vattu, as her mark seemed to break down the two shapes into the two syllables of her name (at least that’s what I took from it). So is it sound based? Where sounds have their own shapes in the written language? Do you ever see yourself creating a set of rules that others might be able to follow? The amount of work to create these things is amazing, and I understand that these languages grow and evolve over time just as our own does. In anycase,your comics have always been a masterclass in how shape language can be used to convey so much meaning. With highest regards, Angela * January 27, 2025

Hello thank you! Language is interesting to me, and I’m trying to use it as a part of the larger project of making a believable alien environment and supporting a story with suggestive detail. I want to draw a distinction between a “script” and a “language,” however, as I think it often isn’t drawn clearly in discussion about this. (I’m only vaguely and distantly academic about this so maybe I use terms awkwardly). A SCRIPT is a thing like the latin alphabet we’re using, which can be used fairly agnostically to render all sorts of sounds and linguistic material. The LANGUAGE a script renders is a basically infinitely complicated structure, the thing we talk and think with.

SO for 3V I’ve actually made a constructed language AND a script, if that makes sense. The language is simple but has I think a pretty plausible skeletal structure to it that I can add to at need. The SCRIPT, a much tinier project, is basically a straightforward alphabet that you could write basically anything with, in the way you can write anything using latin letters (caveats but u get the idea). It’s phonetic like our alphabet: characters map pretty simply to latin letters. When text appears in the comic, I render it in world-internal language, and transliterate it into this alphabet. There are enough occasional clues to how it all works that folks in the discord have fully figured out the alphabet, and have made some headway in figuring out the language too I think.

I do think it’s important to keep in mind how readers actually interface with this stuff: the language itself is not something I expect people to “understand,” but it’s present as a textural thing, and the most immediate aspect for most readers is probably the invented script. So yes basically I wanted to make a plausible and aesthetically-contiguous set of characters that look alien but still intelligible as writing! I wanted one of the characters to look like the numeral 3! I am not inclined to publish any of my back-end material on the language or script, as I’m not inclined to present much of anything outside of how it’s being presented by the comic itself.

In Vattu I built a script for Sahtan writing but had no constructed language underneath it. I presented Vattu’s mark as syllabic as you identify kind of as just a way of suggesting a type of proto-writing? But that wasn’t really developed.

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