Latest News

June 30, 2025 Hello everybody. Our Monday updates RESUME. Next several scenes are thumbnailed and locked-in and I think I have some fairly good momentum currently... Yet more maneuvering I have to figure out for the last chunk of 2nd Passage but so far so good.

The PRINT BOOK of the 1st Passage of 3v is underway; I have recently gotten an encouraging chunk of proof materials (somewhat more information sometimes on the patreon), and I can safely affirm that I will have a good chunk of these available to debut this September at the SMALL PRESS EXPO in Bethesda MD. I really would love to see you there and I am excited to have this book to show you. Some vague plans for other release events, and some more convention appearances lining up for rest of the year.

I want to set up a mailing list but this shit has gotten wAY more expensive and convoluted over the last several years than I thought it would be. I have received many suggestions for PLATFORMS for this sort of thing but they all have comparable pricing that would become extremely expensive at any sort of volume. What to do! It feels like every way of communicating on the internet is being undercut and complicated! Of course in this particular instance I guess a big motivator is the development of certain privacy laws. Anyway I will maybe figure it out. My concern is that webtoons dot com is publicly-traded in the US and is therefore on track to become worse and worse and it’s been great to have a little audience specifically on that platform but what happens when they leave that platform, or that platform dies, or I leave because I can’t stand their increasing gen-AI efforts, or whatever. Do the users of webtoons dot com even maintain email accounts? what am I doing here. I just want to make comic thank u for reading comic

previous news

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!!

letter column archive

site map | devlog