Welcome to the 3rd Voice Letter Column. Do you know what a Letter Column is? It’s something like that. I miss longer-format and less frantic interaction on the internet, so I’m giving it a try. Letters and responses below are in chronological order of my publishing them here. Some letters were received before 3rd Voice started publication on December 12, 2022, bear in mind.
If you’d like to engage in some possibly-published correspondence, please email 3RDVOICEMAIL@GMAIL.COM. This is mostly a space to talk around the comic, but don’t worry about it too much. If your email sucks I just won’t publish it! No one will ever have to know. Of course also don’t include anything in the body of the email that you don’t want published. How’s that sound to you?.
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I invented a time machine just to read 3rd Voice from the beginning. I was born after it finished, and it’s always been my dream to go back to 2022 and be a part of the grandest comic event since Tobey Maguire brought Spiderman to life.
With love from 2072! Vince * November 15, 2022
YOU HEAR THAT EVERYBODY!!!!!
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Hey Evan,
I’ve been a fan of your comics for a long time and I want to be very excited for 3rd Voice, but is it going to continue to have lots of flashy/flickery video stuff? I love the aesthetic but it’s kinda hurting my brain a little, I had to close my eyes for the trailer and I’m worried that if I look at the header images on your website for too long I might get a migraine.
Sorry for being a bummer! Kate * November 18, 2022
HmmMMM terribly sorry for discomfort; I went through a few iterations of that asterisk-header image to try to tone it down but maybe I’ll lower the frame rate a bit. EITHERWAY the gifs will only be a part of the site until the launch on 12/12. RE: the video material -- I’m going to try to tone down the flashier glitch material but I’m not sure exactly where the threshold is for everyone’s comfort. I’ll vet this stuff a little more in advance I think; maybe on the Discord which is recently taking off. thank u for input.
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Evan- I think there’s just one thing we’re all dying to know. Is 3V still in the same world as all of your other comics? A "Rice Boy Comic", as it were. Or is this a new venture? Riley * November 19, 2022
Will 3rd Voice be in the world of Overside? Or is it a new world? George WL * November 19, 2022
& many other such questions. I’m inclined to be even weirder and more evasive about answering this, tho maybe I have answered it somewhere before I can’t remember. I’m in the process last coupledays of getting together the "launch material" that will answer this question so I hope you’ll forgive me waiting until then; I think it is the best answer I can manage and god forbid I am ever redundant. (About the branding question though; I dunno what "a Rice Boy Comic" is I guess; it’s the title I’ve happened to stick with for years and it’s the website. The branding utility of having strong intertextual connective tissue between all the media produced by a person or company seems very clear tho doesn’t it. Am I the first person to think of this? I’m not sure if anyone else in comics has ever thought of this.) I am in all honestly thrilled that people are interested and excited about this sort of detail; thank you.
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Hey! Just wanted say I’m very excited for 3rd Voice, it looks like it’ll be a good one. No particular question, but for the record, the new site is looking good! I especially appreciate the updated links section, which is my primary method of discovering new online comics. Love it!
Anyways, thanks for all you do, sites like riceboy are islands of bliss in the ocean of chaos that is the internet.
PS - any plans to restart Ambiguity Program? No pressure of course, but watching those weird and fantastic cartoons Sunday nights has been one of my better memories of the past few years. Silly but true! Thanks again! Josh * November 25, 2022
Thank you I’d like to keep up with the links section; I have a few things to add to it. Being in independent-artist spaces on social media I have noticed a pronounced increase in Interest in such things, and in resentment at the inorganic modes of connection & discovery increasingly taking over the most of the internet... I am wondering a lot how much this sort of granular principled reaction is Worth, really, or what it amounts to, in the face of the enormous grinding weight of modern social media... but this is some small thing to do maybe. If anybody has an independent website of their own with interesting independent work on it I’ll always consider adding it do the list. / PS - I liked doing that show a lot and I got a lot out of it too. I guess I’m sort of acclimating to a new life-and-work structure in a few ways lately; I would like to get back into that only at exactly the moment that it seems exciting to me to do so.
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Hi there, fan of your comics and excited for the next. One thing that interests me is how each of your projects sort of vary format and style wise: Vattu is very cinematic, Island Book uses a square 3x3 grid, Harrowing of Hell utilizes only black, white and red, etc etc. I don’t think any two works have the same visual language! How do you come upon these ideas for a story’s "style", and how will 3rd voice play into that theme? srowe * December 6, 2022
I really haven’t heard hardly anybody mention the weird paneling constraint for the Island Books, I thought it was cute tho maybe became a little cumbersome later on in the process of that 900-odd page series. did anyone even read those books. I think this is maybe a common problem: I enter into a project with these tight specific notions of what its stylistic constraints are gonna be, and then when the project expands past a certain scale I lose sight of those constraints, or I forget why I’m doing it that way, or something. There is a feeling of struggling to balance the honest, immediate material of the thing with a bunch of nerdy formal things I, at that later point, feel pretty distant from. Anyway I’m not explaining this terribly well but I like thinking about format, I think I get fixated on containers, grammars, organizing logics an awful lot; I often get hit harder by the way a thing is said than what it actually is being said, etc. I have some "interesting formal aspects" in mind for 3V but in general with this project I’m trying to think of this in terms of opening up space instead of nailing down the borders of a perfect, concrete, finished product, as has maybe been my tendency in the past.
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3rd Voice launched on December 12, 2022
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Greetings and slututations;
Your works have been inspiring and compelling for many years now, and so there is a great deal of curiosity surrounding 3rd Voice and what exactly it will be. To that end, I’m writing to you to pose some questions inspired by your past work, and seeing how sexuality might play a part in this new work of yours.
A dynamic part of the human experience is sexuality, ranging from the simple biological certainties, to the much more robust and intricate complexities of social, cultural, and historic interactions and intersections. The Rice-Boy setting has had very little overt and direct discussions related to how sex affects the people and belief structures in the world of Overside, but there have been hints here and there. From the most recent examples of the Sisterhood and the gender-roles in the strictly organized systems of Sahtan culture in Vattu, to the historic implications of the Bottle Woman in Order of Tales, or the seemingly small thing of the naming of Rice Boy.
Will the upcoming 3rd Voice works explore sexuality in any pointed way? Perhaps as it relates to your works and the setting that has been constructed up to this point? Is there room and interest within your narrative works to further explore this incredibly vast topic? Will you express thoughts as to the oft-marginalized aspects of real world sexuality, such as non-normative identities or rare biological variances? Or is the subject of sex one which feels too risky for you to explore due to our real-world cultural suppression of it?
Whatever the case may be, all three of your major works have been deeply engrossing, and so I look forward to learning more about 3rd Voice, and the depths of your creative mind!
Thank you for all your incredible work, and for sharing it freely with the world!
Kind regards; a-longtime-fan * November 15, 2022
Ok I will answer this one a bit finally now that the Overside Question has been Put to Rest. My focus throughout most fantasy things I’ve made has been, past a certain point, on broad mythic & big-picture-historical ideas, and it’s felt inconsistent within that to drill too far into the sexual or the physical/bodily. It’s felt inconsistent also to get very far into any analytical, literalistic, or scientific framework... The logic has always been "I am not going to explain the situation with Vattu’s mouth" and "It doesn’t really matter that T-O-E is a robot," etc. I am I think broadly resistant to taking any too-biological, too-objective perspective on sexuality or "bodily reality" in general, in my work and frankly in my life also. But the LACK of bodily reality, let’s call it, in my work so far does at this point feel conspicuous to me. It doesn’t feel Risky to explore but it has felt aesthetically at odds with the little context I built for myself over the years. Sexuality is uhh "a thing I think about a lot" and it will be nice to work outside of some of the precedents I set for earlier comics in order to have the opportunity to think about it "out loud," but we will see exactly what that means.
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Hey Evan!! Watching the 3rd Voice launch video inspired a couple of questions: (1) You mentioned that you’re trying to devote your entire creative attention to one thing at a time. I’m curious how splitting your attention has shaped your previous works? And how do you think having all of it focused on one thing will affect what you do with 3rd Voice? (2) I’d love to hear more about the animation you made for this video!! What was that process like? I can’t remember if you’ve animated before. You’ve hosted Ambiguity Program for so long, did that experience play into it at all?
Thanks!! So excited for 3rd Voice to start!!!! --Brian * December 11, 2022
Hello Brian thank you. This was I think sent after I’d done the video premiere but before the first pages went up on the 12th.
1) I don’t know exactly how it’s affected previous work, but it has made me acutely aware of rhythms, and the difference between online front-to-back serialization and more formalized & systematic "graphic novel production." The biggest frustrating aspect of balancing these things has been the fact that making a book for a publisher requires huge spans of time just focusing on one aspect of a book, which always eventually becomes a slog, and necessarily removes me from engagement with the "whole picture." Coloring is the most pronounced aspect of this: it’s FUN to do in increments, it’s engaging and very problem-solvey, but it’s so different from the more physical, psychically-engaged, ink-on-paper parts of it that it ends up being pretty deadening if I’m just doing e.g. hundreds of pages of colors on end. And it’s hard, then, to switch between the grinding coloring work to more narratively-involved work in a another project. I don’t know if there’s any way around this, really. Getting back into Vattu towards the end really got me back in the headspace of serialization, and helped me see every part of the process as fully engaged with the big picture... coincident with a concerted effort I was making to understand different serialization modes in comics more generally, and unlearn a little bit my default mindset of "cohesive graphic novel is a more pure expression of the form."
2) I have done little bits of animation with no formal training and little understanding; most recently the bubble letter opener for ambigprog. It is exciting to work on but I am aware it could just suck me in for enormous periods of time if I start taking it too seriously, so I kept it pretty limited for the 3V video. I am uhh "geometrically competent" enough to keep things fairly believable in comics, but past a certain point I can’t imagine animating convincing motion. BUT for the 3V thing it’s just a few frames of Navi turning her head (difficult) and talking (with basically a 3-frame anime mouth flap), 8 frames of Spondule’s nose moving along a simple track, 4 frames of his leg going back and forth, and a 4-frame loop for the bike animation. All of these except the bike were drawn on paper with a lightbox.
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Howdy! I’m a big fan of your comics, and Vattu is probably one of my favorite comics ever. Since this setting is in a New World that isn’t Overside (and because I saw your twitter where you’re making a new Lexicon), I was wondering if communication will play a role in this next webcomic. Your story in the extras-- I don’t know the title, but the one about the alien planet and sound and all that, was really intriguing. I’ve always wondered how all the Overside folks can speak the same language.
Also, I was wondering if you had any kind of dictionary or grammar rules or anything in mind when drawing the written language of the Sahtans.
Anyways, I’m rambling, but I’m very excited for 3rd Voice. (also I love the new sound effects. skut) (also very excited for Mansion X/Last Delivery!!) - ellie! * December 24, 2022
I think a lot about language and I don’t think it’s taken seriously very often in secondary-world fiction, and I didn’t take it seriously all that much for the Overside stuff, mostly because I was interested in different things with those stories and it would’ve been an enormous fiddly distraction to pile on plausible language diversity on top of everything else, particularly with Vattu’s concerns. I am still trying to not prioritize any sort of historical or scientific "plausibility" above all else (richness/evocativeness being more the guiding principle I think), but I do at this point have a basically-functional constructed language pretty well concretized for 3rd Voice and I think I can work with that in an interesting & occasionally elegant way. Hopefully please people can bear in mind however that I’m making a comic book in the pulp garbage tradition here, however, and I don’t expect anyone to figure out every bit of background material I’m figuring out. Thank yOU
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In your answer to Brian’s letter this week you talked about: the difference between online front-to-back serialization and more formalized & systematic "graphic novel production."
This brings up another aspect of that difference I’m curious about: How do you keep a years-long serialized story coherent? When you’re on page
200 how do you deal with "that thing on page 20 that I really should have done this other way"? In a one-shot you can just revise page 20; with a serial that’s generally frowned upon. Do you have the whole story planned out from the beginning? To what level of detail? How often do you run into this problem? Thanks for all the years of great comics. Dirk * December 30, 2023
Some intertextuality in the letter column, I like to see it. I wonder if I should remind folks of or make more generally visible the letter column email address, as I am a little bit running out of these. Please send whatever you like to 3rdvoicemail@gmail.com, thank you.
I have thought about this a lot, can you believe it. I think there is a tendency within popculture to look at stories that are tightly-controlled, internally-consistent, and to-the-point as the best sorts of stories. An aspect of this, if I can go out on a limb, seems to be a kind of generalized discomfort with seeing media as a part of history, as an active thing in the culture, and as a thing made by people, using various processes, compromising in various ways, etc. There is a tendency towards technologization, which dictates that art is necessarily better if it is tightened up, made higher-fidelity, made more polished and less improvisational… Basically all of the ways in which technique IS a present force for good become knobs to just CRANK UP as much as possible until we arrive at the most perfect art ever. Technologization. I don’t mean to say that you are doing this, in asking these questions! But I’m trying to unpack some ideological shit here in my own head, at least.
Got off track. Comics by the nature of their making & their various industries seem to deeply rebel against this in a lot of ways. I have aimed at making “novelesque” planned-out stories, and to an extent I still am. But working through Vattu in particular got me very much in a headspace that’s more open to balancing that with improvisation. I am trying now to categorically shift the nature of my planning, in order to work better with serialized improvisation. You can get a feel for this if you read a lot of longform serialized manga or superhero comics I think (particularly from decades past when the latter could be a little more beholden to the particular interests of their writers & drawers). I will certainly run into things that I could’ve done differently a hundred pages back! But I feel comfortable with and pretty excited by a mode of planning that emphasizes making space for possible future connections, and opening up potentials without nailing down trajectories too firmly. I have done an enormous, REALLY ENORMOUS amount of preliminary writing for 3V, there is a way in which I know the end, but crucially I am trying to not box myself into too rigid a structure. It helps also to be overridingly driven by theme and big loose ideas that can be connected with at length as a sort of subliminal layer of continuity. Long rambling answer; thank you for writing.
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Hi Evan, Thanks for your comics! I love them and it’s exciting to have a new one starting. My question is about motivation and I guess to some extent about inspiration. Creative energy. You seem to have a LOT of creative energy and a schedule that works for you and at least from the outside you seem like a person who has a lot of ideas about your work, all the time, more than be contained probably. I am an artist also (mostly musician) and I’ve really struggled with motivation and having any ideas, especially over the last 3 years. The well has just been DRY. I know partially motivation comes from doing, instead of some thing that happens to a person out of thin air, and I know about putting in the time to make space for things to come up/out, daily pages etc to get the brain trash taken out, and also that taking a break can be part of the process, etc. but it’s rough missing that outlet. I guess partially I am curious about any tips you have, but more so I’m just interested in hearing about this aspect of your work/process because it seems so very different to how I am currently (in a positive way!). I really admire your work ethic and your passion for what you do. Okay thanks bye! Holly * January 9, 2023
To start with a lot of this comes down to material conditions honestly; this having been my job for some years has made it of course somewhat easier to stick to it and keep working on it. Let’s not forget that!! But yes I often operate as if it’s something driven entirely by my own interest; I fluctuate between different degrees of “feeling inspired” in a distinctly flighty & unprofessional manner sometimes, etc. MOTIVATION COMES FROM DOING is a good way of putting this; this is something that I think musicians have more habitually understood than people in other media. It is important to have raw unselfconscious improvisatory space and to mess around without holding a finished object too firmly in your head. Fuck Around And Find Out. Everything spins out of improvisation I think.
I feel a lot of the time like I don’t have a lot of ideas or like I am faking it; implying too much potential energy behind the things I make. But it is helpful and I think more human & honest to not look at it as a “well” that runs dry--switching metaphors--ideas/creative potential energy aren’t dry goods that you keep on shelves in your head. They are ways of working through ideas that distinctly belong to You, and they don’t get finished or packaged or concretized. You don’t get a perfect idea; you don’t arrive at a conclusion. It is deadening to think you can arrive at a conclusion. It is helpful to me to move through creative work with this in mind tho I’m not sure this qualifies as a “tip.”
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Hey Evan, I read Vattu for years. It’s incredible to me that you could follow it up so quickly with another long-form comic, to fill for me the Vattu-shaped hole. I have a question of much narrower scope than the ones people have been asking so far: how is Navichet pronounced? French-style silent T or no? Thanks for everything! Jeff * January 12, 2023
Breaking emergency glass to invoke Word of God Privileges and telling you that the T is pronounced, stress is on the first syllable, "a" as in "bat." Pronounced in the launch video. Hadn’t occurred to me it looks kind of French until I started hearing this from people ha
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Hi, riffing off of Dirks question, how did you get started developing characters and stories? And do you have any good suggestions for controlling the scope of a "first time" creative project, balancing perfectionism vs. putting in enough effort while learning? I just turned thirty and am thinking about starting to write short stories or small brechtian video essays to scratch a creative edge I neglected throughout my life so far and impostor syndrome is hitting me hard. Best, J.K. * January 9, 2023
Rice Boy was the first real comic I made that felt like I was onto something, and that was mostly an attempt to build a rambling narrative structure out of a bunch of disjointed visual ideas. I was I think working in a pretty open-ended improvised way with it that precluded a lot of worrying about perfectionism, which was helpful. If you’re an individual making something like that then it doesn’t make sense to hold yourself to the standards of bigger, more expensive, more technically "perfect" media. It does a disservice to what you can do as an individual. Impostor syndrome is a real feeling but it isn’t telling you anything real about the quality of what you’re making, or what you want to make, or the significance of what you Have To Say or whatever. If you want to make the stuff and if you’re excited about making it that is the only feeling you should take seriously I think. Also I used to think 30 was Old but now I think it is Young it is funny how that works huh
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Dear Evan, This isn’t really a 3rd Voice thing, but I’d like to get a message to fans of your work so I’m hoping that you’ll publish this in your letter column, which I’m sure many of your fans read. The message: I’m starting a group (probably on Discord) for close-reading the first Island Book. The idea is for people who are passionate about it to collaboratively explore it as a microcosm for ourselves and our world. Probably going to dig into identity, worldview, beliefs. Note that I have virtually no idea how to run something like this but am very excited to figure it how.
Some of my inspirations for this work: Molly Bang’s “Picture This” in terms of how images relate to the body, Maria Mison’s “HOW TO MAKE YOUR RPG/STORY GAME MORE HEALING/ THERAPEUTIC” and Vanessa Zoltan’s “Praying with Jane Eyre” in terms of how stories relate to identity and spirit. If you’ve got cool ideas about how to engage with stories, especially comics, bring them.
If you’re reading this and think it sounds cool, then I hope to see you there! Email me at islandexplorationgroup@gmail.com —Jay * January 20, 2023
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Previously in your letter column you wrote, "the LACK of bodily reality, let’s call it, in my work so far does at this point feel conspicuous to me." While I do follow your meaning, I think you need to give yourself more credit, because you made T-O-E very sexy. I had a big crush on him when I was a teenager reading Rice Boy for the first time. My question for you is, was this intentional? Do you put hotties in your stories on purpose? In a broader sense, when you’re thinking about character design, do you think about how visually appealing you want characters to be (erotically or non-erotically)? Or does it just sort of "happen", as an unconscious process? I know I’m not the only one who had (has?? [puzzled face emoji]) a thing for the TV head guy. Signed, Focused On the Big Picture * January 25, 2023
Have heard this about him a lot; I would say it’s a different thing from the sort of "bodily reality" I was trying to talk about in that previous letter, though. I wrote T-O-E as a very stereotyped cool self-possessed Guy; he is I think one of the most straightforward & least ironic main characters I’ve worked with, he has that standard stoic masculinity-underwritten-by-threat-of-violence thing which can be compelling or hot even, but that doesn’t seem in any way to deal with the actually Sexual or bodily. Does that distinction make sense? I do think about visual appeal for characters and it’s a fun challenge sometimes to balance that with a tendency to work with nonhuman characters. There is something interesting in working with "attractiveness" in conspicuously nonhuman characters but I haven’t thought too hard about it, as a fairly basic person who is mostly attracted to human people. I dunno; much to think about. I like that there are dimensions to things that I’ve made that I didn’t think to put in there but that other people see.
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Tēnā koe e Evan, In your prior comics I have often felt alongside the characters, not necessarily privy to their inner monologues but the next best thing. In 3rd Voice however I feel like an outside observer, not always able to read the motives or moods of the main characters. I get the impression that this same disconnect happens between the main characters at times too. It’s really cool. Has anyone else mentioned this? Is this intentional? Kā mihi, Giles * January 31, 2023
Interesting; I don’t know how much I can understand this exactly but certainly I’m writing this one differently. Characters are I think somewhat more modernist and Psychological than in previous comics, where they’ve often been broad epic-poem or fairy-tale sorts of characters. Also I’m definitely playing up the sense of disorientation that can be built into secondary-world fiction; I think there is a lot of possible utility and interest to that. I don’t know really but I’m trying to take character seriously more than I have in the past and they feel more psychologically real to me than I’m used to; maybe that’s something.
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Hi Evan, First off I wanted to respond to your rhetorical question from a previous letter column. "Did anyone even read those books (Island Book)?" And the answer is yes! They are very popular with the kids at the library where I work. Sorry this does not translate to more book sales, our copies are holding up pretty well. I think these books do a wonderful job exploring ideas around colonialism and alternatives to violent conflict resolution, while also being a fun read for fans of non-human centric fantasy like Bone.
Anyway, on to my question! In past books you have done a lot of in universe world building. For instance, Vattu had artwork and maps, that were supposed to be artifacts from that world and Order of Tales has pages from Koark’s book if I recall correctly. In contrast, 3rd Voice has the voice of an "editor" to reveal the meaning of certain symbols or indicate setting. For instance on the first page we get a dialogue box that says "At the edge of things. - ed." In some ways this seems to tie the comic to tropes of older traditionally published comics, much like this letter column. Could you talk a little about your decision to "narrate" the story this way? Loving the comic so far! Thank you, Mark * January 18, 2023
Thank you. I still think that embedding that sort of how-the-world-works stuff is done most elegantly when it’s IN the story and seen through the perspectives of characters, and I’m still prioritizing that. I have been thinking a lot about the way people are using the word "lore" lately, to refer to worldbuildy background material, world-internal history, etc. I of course have an obnoxious opinion about this. I think it ties into the tendency to separate these setting details from the story itself, to the detriment of the story and the believability & resonance of characters’ experience of the world.
The cardinal TENSION this implies to me is something that’s been at the heart of secondary-world genre fiction for decades (I think because the nerds did not read Tolkien smart enough), and which is probably more stark now than ever (what with videogames and all). The tension is between 1) the Story as an objective perspective, or a fully transparent window, through which we see an invented setting, or 2) the Story as a contingent cultural object, with its own ideological angles and arguments, and the setting, however Real it is implied to be, is a tool in the unrolling of that object. Analogous to the way we think about JOURNALISM: is journalism ideally OBJECTIVE? What political arguments are we making when we say that something is OBJECTIVE? It seems important to be aware that objectivity is basically a rhetorical cover for hegemonic ideology. RIGHT?? Something like that is what I’m thinking about. I am not going to unpack the --ed notes at this time but I appreciate you thinking about them.
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Hi Evan! I’ve been reading your work since around the end of Rice Boy or beginning of Order of Tales. I was very impressed with where Vattu went specifically and think about those last few pages often. I’m excited to see a new work from you from the beginning again! This new world is already very exciting and full of the kinds of fantasy works I am attracted to. Especially the concept of picking over old decayed infrastructure to pull out what’s useful (more and more a reality here on earth).
Granted, all of this is largely preamble to hide the fact this is mostly a technical issue letter to let you know the rss feed seems to be broken. Maybe having to do with the SSL cert not working as well? I love that you still produce an rss feed and find it the best way to keep up with comics, blogs, etc.
Looking forward to seeing where this story goes! Especially with the last few updates giving the impression that Navichet is more impulsive than initially let on! Thanks! Travis * February 8, 2023
thank you. WE’LL SEE. SO the RSS-generation website I was using for years developed some SSL issue several months ago, so apparently people haven’t been receiving updates since 3V started. I have SET UP A NEW RSS FEED, PLEASE FOLLOW THIS ONE IT SHOULD WORK.
I have never used RSS myself, but a lot of readers seem to still depend on it. It seems like one of those lightweight and humane organizing tools of the sort that most of the internet seems to be moving away from, but it still works!! I’ll be manually updating the XML file for it, so this one will keep running for as long as I’m able to do that. The big Lesson over uhh 16 years of having this website is "if you depend on an outside infrastructure for anything, it will collapse, so do it yourself." I regret leaving everybody who followed the old feed behind but hopefully they’ll remember to look for the new one. I figured out how to do this mostly from Everest Pipkin, whose approach generally to handbuilding websites has been helpful and I would almost say cathartic to learn about lately.
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Hey, Evan - You’ve talked about this in your response to Dirk’s letter, but I wanted to ask in more detail about what kind/degree of planning you’ve done for 3rd Voice. I guess I’m thinking about a lot of different types of planning. There’s story planning: it sounds like you’ve got a solid concept of the world and its inhabitants, but do you have more of a rough outline of the whole story you’re looking to tell (with relatively few scenes written out in full), or is it more a more-or-less complete "screenplay" with a lot of dialogue and character actions already written? There’s also the design, structure, and vocabulary of the language systems as well; it’s obviously taken a lot of thought to get to what we’re seeing now in the pages, but do you have the majority of the vocabulary and mechanics already established, or are you happy adding onto the systems you have as needed?
There’s also the art-design side of things: do you get characters and scenes fully-designed long before we see them "on screen", or do you design them as needed (maybe to keep things more spontaneous, or to keep yourself from being locked into a design from an outdated headspace or something like that)? Also, for stuff like the Secrets and other little bits of ancillary / "world detail" art - were you planning on making those the entire time, or was that a kind of thing where in the process of working on a page, you detoured to explore what something would look like in more detail, and decided to include it as bonus material?
I guess in general, what stuff do you feel like you need to have done and ready up front, and what stuff do you feel more comfortable doing (or redesigning / fixing) on the fly? Having a ton of fun reading, discovering, theorizing, and learning. Thank you for Making Cool Stuff! Jackson * February 3, 2023
This is interesting to talk about because 1) it’s a thing I spend a lot of time thinking about and it’s complicated and fun, and 2) because there is always some implication that there should be some kayfabe element-- that readers of particularly this type of fiction should Expect a greater degree of planning than I have ever been able to do, a more crystallized and fully-formed primordial image of the project than I at any phase actually have. I feel the need sometimes to almost perform a kind of MYSTERY about it, to kind of encourage (or kayfabely act out) the idea that it really is all nailed-down and I know exactly what I’m doing-- because the alternative is somewhat more complicated, less grandiose and intelligible, harder to have faith in, maybe. That alternative is, broadly: I have done an enormous amount of planning, but having done longform incremental projects like this in the past I’ve gotten a sense about what sorts of planning are "brittle" and what sorts allow for growth and modulation. I’m taking seriously more than I have before the possibility for improvising in different directions, while being guided by signal thematic ideas and Big Picture stuff. And I’m taking it as some sort of good sign that the central characters are very clear to me, and I should trust that taking them seriously and keeping them at the center will help.
(Sorry I’m not exactly point-by-pointing this response) I feel nervous even saying all this!! What if people feel like I don’t know what I’m DOING! What if people think the only way to know what you’re doing is if you’ve planned it all out in advance! I used to think that! But I think now that that doesn’t--can’t--apply to projects of this sort. That is, projects made by one person, front-to-back over a long period of time. Anyway I have tremendous & frantic faith in this story.
The world-internal language was broadly worked out before it appeared, and there’s enough space in it to develop it further at need. Likewise for character design-- I did a lot in advance, but most importantly I worked out a bunch of generalizable design "premises" that I can bounce off of in the future. What do I feel the need to have ready up front vs. working through on the fly: Some things are systemic and need some attention in advance. Many, many things depend on a broad aesthetic/thematic logic that should be reasonably clear up front. But having that aesthetic/thematic logic can help make the "working thru on the fly" part feel more contiguous & "planned" than it would. thank u for writing
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Dear 3rd Voice Letter Column, 3rd Voice (which is wonderful) gets published on a couple different platforms, where people are reading in a lot of different ways. Do you make considerations for the different platforms’ ways of displaying images when drawing pages? Like level of detail, size of lettering, colors, that sort of thing? Maybe even page aspect ratios or panel layouts? I’ve been posting a little comic on tumblr and lemme tell you I’m encountering a lot of those questions for the first time. Feels like a lot! Beautifully and uselessly, Gabo * January 19, 2023
Short answer "not really," though I’ve definitely tried to lean into a kind of clarity and visual simplicity that tends to scale pretty well and be readable in different formats. I think I do lettering at the size I do so that it can have that versatility. I think I’ve sort of gotten a sense of what density of detail is useful and can scale the best in that way. Hard to say. My paneling & storytelling is so blunt and straightforward that I don’t think it’s messed up by the webtoon scrolling thing. I do habitually make a lot of concessions for reproduction in print: I figured out a lot about scale and detail when seeing my stuff in print in the past. And whatever the trajectory for 3V in print in future, holding to those standards helps it feel more cohesive and readable and "professional" if u like. Also I try to not have things too saturated, and to not rely too much on blues and greens, which physical reproduction just can’t do nearly as well as screen displays.
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Hello Mr. Dahm, I have to say I have just read page 78 and it may be my single favorite page of any of your projects so far. I have admired your work for many years and consider you to be one of the greatest storytellers out there right now. I appreciate you making this world a little weirder, page by page.
To give you something to talk about in the column: One of the many things I appreciate about 3rd Voice is the update schedule. One scene a week feels perfect for the pacing of the story so far, and as a reader it keeps me much more in the flow of the story rather than the classic one page a day MWF that you and many others have traditionally done. I have tended to lose the thread of the narrative and often found myself rereading the past few pages in order to keep up, so this came as a welcome change. Was this the primary motivation for that update schedule change (i.e. the reader’s experience in real time) or were there more practical concerns about workflow, etc.? Have there been any considerations, either consciously at the time or now looking in retrospect, about how the experience differs between readers in real time versus readers of the complete work some years down the line? Yours, Derek W * March 7, 2023
Thank you. I like this update schedule too a lot; I like approaching scenes as cohesive objects, penciling and inking the whole thing in passes. There are a lot of technical aspects on my end that this approach helps with, but that isn’t the main part of it really. I talked about this in the intro videos a little-- I wanted to re-approach as much as possible about how I’ve been doing this, and in particular try to make the thing easier to engage with as a live, updating thing. Just seemed like it would make it easier to post multiple places, easier for people to drop into and get a sense that something is Happening... I dunno around the latter bit of Vattu I was feeling like I had hit some sort of wall, like I had connected with an audience that was Engaged but was not particularly likely to do much Growing, and I was locked into such a Way of Doing Things after 12 years of Vattu that it felt like maybe I was closing myself off or painting myself into a corner. That is the engine behind a lot of what I’m trying to do differently but the main thing is I want to just make really the best thing I can, really pay attention to the ways in which I Wasn’t making the best thing I can in the past, and take seriously that most people will encounter it in online serialization.
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I used to love the official wiki you hosted at wiki.rice-boy.com cause there was so much details of your process and the fan deciphering of your works on there. I know it got hacked a few years ago, were any of the files recoverable? And would you be up for making a new official wiki? GeorgeWL * March 13, 2023
Man I remember I had my friend Clark help me set that up when I was in college or only just out of it, LONG LONG ago... And it got overrun with automated nonsense posts pretty quick that I couldn’t figure out how to deal with. I don’t remember much about it, BUT I liked the community-oriented little spaces that would orbit the comics back then, on the old "koalawallop" forum and what have you. The Discord I set up for 3rd Voice feels like an almost too-good-to-be-true return to that sort of space. I have no intentions of putting up any Official reference materials for what that’s worth... (maybe a very simple character-reference page or something like that though, at most) ... I am trying to be really intentional with how "facts" about the setting are being conveyed in the text and I don’t intend to metatextually reveal things if I can help it. What readers do however is their business and it’s fun to see of course. thank u
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Hi Evan! I really liked Mickey Zacchilli’s voiceover work for Navichet in the 3rd Voice trailer- it sounds so slidey but rough, like sheets of paper over each other- and I’ve been enjoying imagining her voice for Navi’s lines as I’m reading the comic. I was wondering if you had ideas about voices you’d choose for other major characters (Spondule, Noc, ones we haven’t met yet...!). Thanks a bunch! Ghost * March 30, 2023
I don’t often have clear audible voices in my head! I struggle to clearly imagine sound things, tho I think I can get a clear image of a person’s verbal rhythm at least. Mickey had been talking about wanting to do more voice acting some years before and I thought her voice could be in line with how Navi seems to me. Navichet is extremely clear to me, like she is the one I think of as most a Person instead of riffing on an archetype or something. Other than that though nobody’s voice is very clear. Spondule I think I’d know it if I heard it; it would be easy for a voice to him to stray too far into performative bounciness... I would like to make more audio-video material for the comic soon but I have currently not enough time to do it. Lewis is working on another song however... I should put up those first two tracks he made for 3V somewhere probably also huh.
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There hasn’t been a letter column for a while maybe because we are all so engrossed in the comic that we forgot it existed. Very much enjoying 3rd Voice so far. With Yorel and Kanner we now have five named characters, I think. Maybe more, don’t remember. Do you have an approach for naming characters? Naming characters seems hard; do you find it challenging? Do names come first and then designs, or vice versa? Do you have any OPINIONS about the tendency for fantasy names to be A LITTLE TOO MUCH SOMETIMES?
Relatedly: do you have thoughts about the idea of a CAST or CHARACTERS page on webcomics sites? I know Vattu had one. I find them helpful sometimes to remind me of character names, especially when a comic runs for many years and characters may reappear after a long time. But also I imagine they are hard to keep up to date! All the best, Alex * May 12, 2023
Hello Alex thank you. Yes the lettercol inbox is a little dry lately; this is a weird little nostalgic experiment of the sort that probably isn’t too sustainable but happy to just leave it open. // Naming characters can be hard; lately I’m really trying to keep a similar approach to naming as I do to visual design-- overriding faith in the raw "impression" of the thing, like trusting my initial semiconscious idea of what something should be like and working to nail it down while keeping that loose image in mind. Explained that clumsily. Anyway I had impressions of Spondule and Navichet as two names with a certain rhythm between them, and certain contrasting languidness and choppiness, and just played around with the sounds until it felt like something suitably specific and plausible. I now have the supportive structure of "an invented language," but building names solely from that premise probably won’t result in names that have the same raw suggestive vibe so I’ll probably generally avoid that (however "Ransallet" in today’s update...)(Oh and an etymology for Spondule’s name has been thought of, though I dunno if it’ll ever be textualized)
A characters overview page was particularly helpful for the sort of story that Vattu is but somewhat less so for 3V. But maybe; it would be neat to design one. I am very extremely cagey however about how things get revealed-- imagine someone looking at the characters overview BEFORE reading the comic, for example... or imagine details about the characters being confirmed within the characters overview iNSTEAD of within the text itself... Simply distasteful.
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Hello, hope all is well. I have 2 questions for you: 1) 3rd Voice is fairly different in tone from Vattu; I think you once described Vattu as cinematic and it had a very serious, straightforward atmosphere, while 3V has a bit more playfulness and camp. Was this an intentional choice, and what has the transition been like from two very different stories? 2) Where does Navichet get her tiny little shoes? Best, SR * May 29, 2023
It was feeling pretty claustrophobic to be working within such a straight-faced Fantasy mindset for so long. I think when I started Vattu I had a lot more self-consciousness about working in a pulp medium... I have interests that are a little outside of what comics have mostly been used for, and I think I understood that as a kind of at-odds-ness to the medium and its habits themselves. So nothing too flashy, dialogue all very restrained and fantasy-serious, no sound effects, etc. It is what it is and that’s how that comic works, I would not and could not change it. BUT I am thirty five years old now and I’ve been doing this stuff for a while and I’ve distanced myself from a lot of old introspective anxieties-- it feels useless and exhausting to keep that stuff up after a while. And those anxieties were keeping me from a full understanding of my medium and its history! I am fortunate to have the dramatic "clean break" of finishing Vattu to allow me to reconfigure my thinking about this stuff. BUT ANYWAY on the back end 3V is about OPENING UP SPACE for myself to work in, and that includes tonal space too. I do not know where Navichet’s shoes come from. Probably somewhere East.
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Howdy! I’ve noticed a sort of slapstickiness in 3rd Voice, often centered around Spondule but in other spots as well. Your comics have always had funny-awkward moments* but this seems a little different to me, often with the characters put in painful, pitiable, ridiculous positions. How intentionally-written-in is this, or is more of an emergent thing as you’re drawing scenes? Have you noticed it?
*dreaming of the world where I can load up THIRD VOICE FUNNY MOMENTS COMPILATION on youtube
(Also, wrt previous letters, I think you’re already ’exploring the body’ more in 3rd Voice. Readers should note all of the soft cloth clothing, physical comedy-tragedy, and especially the iconic scene where Spondule gets asked what else he can do with his trunk)--for28 * June 18, 2023
All this is as intentional as I can manage; another thing in the category of ways in which I’ve been trying to loosen up and rebuild my approach after years within one fairly limited narrative register. I have always struggled with "trying to be funny" in storytelling; like it is something that some people seem so intensely good at in ways I don’t understand. But I am enjoying having it be more tonally possible for this comic to some extent!! The danger is getting too sucked in to momentous fantasy-metaphysics stuff and it helps me keep that in perspective I think. Also it’s kind of a more relatable and automatically funny framework for these characters I think-- just maladapted young people with fraught relationships to everything around them in the midst of an enormous world that hates them (Ransallet sequence qualifiedly notwithstanding). This is hilarious to me. Also I read all of Dragon Ball a couple years ago and it has permanently changed my understanding of the medium. (& I appreciate the embodiment note; I am thinking about this a lot idk) thankyou.
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Hello Evan. How long do you expect 3rd voice to be/take? I ask as someone who, probably 7 years ago, first read rice boy and loved it, but never started Vattu because it was not finished. Well I just read it all in the previous hours to this and I absolutely loved it (of course), but feel a similar way. I apologize if you answered this, I didn’t read the other voicemails because I didn’t want spoilers (which makes me think that I’ll probably just read it like tomorrow anyways). Thank you for making such interesting, enthralling, wonderful art. Have a wonderful time when possible! Nick * July 24, 2023
This probably isn’t exactly what you mean, but I’m putting no spoilers for unpublished parts of the comic anywhere; I’m trying to be careful about not revealing things extratextually. I don’t think I’ve said much publicly about the possible length of this comic; I know the first "passage" will take probably around a year (that is, I loosely and unaccountably estimate, it could be done late 2023). And there is going to be a somewhat more segmented, book-by-book structure to it than Vattu. The whole thing is very large; I don’t know exactly how large. I appreciate you reading it in any way you like of course, but I’m trying to take it more seriously as a live serialized thing, and putting it together with that framework very much in mind. Articulated that somewhat more in the 2nd launch video last year. I dunno I just feel excited and extremely fortunate to be able to have some Career trajectory doing this stuff, so I want to do it really big and loudly; I want to like fully and enormously occupy the space of online serialization. I really appreciate the kind words thank you.
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Hello Evan! I just wanted to write in and tell you how much I love your work. I’ve been reading your comics online since RiceBoy, and followed all through Vattu from the beginning. Your art is some of the most interesting and beautiful I’ve ever seen - you have such a knack for conveying emotion, which really is quite something given how inhuman your characters are in design. I absolutely love the work you’ve done on 3rd Voice so far, I think the writing is some of your best. Not just from a story/lore perspective (you’ve always excelled at this) but from a character perspective as well. Even though we’ve spent relatively little time with Spondule and Navichet, I feel very much like I know them as people, and there have been moments between the two of them that have been heartbreaking. I don’t really have a question for you, I just thought I would take the opportunity to tell you how much your work means to someone considers themself a long-time fan. Thank you for sharing your talent with us, and I look forward to reading more for years to come. Carly * August 15, 2023
Hello thank you for the kind words. I’ve been preoccupied with exactly the dichotomy you identify between Character-Writing and BigPicture-Worldbuilding-Writing (what the kids are calling Lore). I have started, in an automatic like self-evident way, thinking of the former writing mode as Spondule-writing, and the latter as Navichet-writing. One is moment-to-moment; each thing grounded in character and one thing proceeding from the last in character-plausible movements. The other is "what’s going on" outside of the characters, what the big impersonal moving parts are, what the STRUCTURE of the story is. It is something like balancing the two of these approaches... Or incorporating them into each other... Bearing in mind that we only EXPERIENCE the big-picture stuff by means of the small-picture stuff. Anyway the scene (pp 216-221) that went up today is kind of related to what I’m saying here. It just ends up being another little post hoc model I put on the process of writing that may or may not be helpful. // I really appreciate you reading this stuff and I appreciate that I’ve been able to mostly thread the needle of putting so much of it out there for people to read.
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Hey Evan! Two important questions:
-We’ve had a few night scenes in 3rd Voice so far, and they all have a really blue, really lit look to them. There’s not a lot of pitch black in the comic! I’m sure the moons feed into this too. What inspired you to choose depict night in this way? It’s got a very 80s anime vibe to it!
-What’s your favorite soup?
Maybe the night sky is the greatest soup of all... All the best, your pal Alex * August 24, 2023
Hey buddy. I posted a little explanatory video on patreon, maybe in fact very shortly after you sent this email, talking about the night coloring. I am really enamored of the color choices in a lot of boom-time anime; I think it’s kind of the central metaphor for my coloring, in my own head at least. There’s a way night is sometimes rendered particularly in TV anime (that is, material designed to be more visible on lower-fidelity screens, importantly) that I like— to work similarly I basically use my normal flat colors for everything but remove the yellow (of Cyan Magenta Yellow, which can represent all colors I use). That’s the starting point anyhow. But the things I wanted for nighttime coloring were: 1) things don’t just “get darker,” I want to avoid any possibility of oversaturation or possible decreased clarity in printing, 2) clearly NIGHTTIME, in a visually self-evident way, 3) color is still present in some capacity. The moons being big and bright is, sure, a textual support for this but that wasn’t a part of my thinking.
I dunno I think I like that sort of white bean and andouille sausage soup a lot; I think that’s a standard one. I like that soup is becoming a real Motif in this comic lol. thanks bye!
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I’ve been thinking about getting a tattoo of T.O.E, what’s your thoughts on this? And would it be like, pay for a licence? Or more like "just ask me first", or something else? And what’s your thoughts on none-commercial fan reproductions of things from your works, in general? GeorgeWL * September 1, 2023
It is nice to know! But you are welcome to do this sort of thing without my input as far as I am concerned. Incidentally also I think it has turned out to be best for me if people can share what I make however they like noncommercially!!! cool
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