3rd Voice Vattu Rice Boy Order of Tales
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About

Hi my name is Evan;

I made this stuff. Since 2006 I’ve been working on ambitious fantasy-adventure graphic novels. Most of them I’ve self-published online here, where you can read them for free. I think my work tends in the directions of invented worlds, lost histories, and character-focused drama.

The main (only) thing I’m working on right now is 3rd Voice, a long-format serialized fantasy graphic novel, which you can read here for free.

Before that, I made & serialized online Rice Boy from 2006 to 2008, Order of Tales from 2008 to 2010, and Vattu from 2010 to 2022. These three comics take place in the same invented world, though Vattu is pretty much entirely discrete. All three have been published in print, also. Other work in comics I’ve made with publishers includes the Island Book trilogy with First Second Books (2019-2022), The Harrowing of Hell with Iron Circus Comics (2021), and Last Delivery, also with Iron Circus Comics and coming out soon. That’s the big stuff (though I have also illustrated a couple books).

I’m a queer neurotic living in New York City; I’m from North Carolina and I’m a graduate of Appalachian State University with a degree that has nothing to do with this. I’m thirty-five. I look something like this. I have a weird little life that I am grateful to have.

This website

has been around since sometime in 2007 I think; and the latest & most comprehensive rebuild went up just now, as I write this, in late 2022. This site is a free & pretty lightweight archive of comics I’ve made, and as of December 12, 2022, it’s the home of 3rd Voice.

This is effectively a web 1.0 read-only website. It works fine; it doesn’t have to be any flashier than this. It takes absolutely no information from you. It doesn’t even know you’re here. But I’d love to know you’re here if you want to tell me; you can email me at riceboyart (at) gmaildotcom, or of course you can go by means of the 3rd Voice Letter Column, a new feature that, for once, might be said to stretch rice-boy.com slightly out of the strictest definition of "read only."

Elsewhere,

I am on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, some other stuff I can’t remember. Oh if you’re interested in directly & straightforwardly supporting my work, please consider subscribing to my Patreon.

3rd Voice has specific accounts set up to mirror updates & relevant noise on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and it’ll be running on Webtoon also. Multimedia components will go up on YouTube.

Where do you get your ideas?
I get interested in things, I try to cultivate spaces for improvisation: sketchbooks, loose doodle-writing. There is a kind of groove you can get into where you’re not too self-conscious; I am not there very much. I try to be receptive to images and ideas that emerge in my brain; I try to have awareness of what’s going on in parts of my brain that I’m not consciously focused on.

What order should I read these things in?
I really don’t want to tell you what to do, but personally I advocate for publication-order reading in all things. A prequel is a different thing from a book that later got a sequel written for it, just as an example. Also there’s really only any textual connective material between Rice Boy and Order of Tales.

Why are there no people?
I like inventing a setting that feels really strange and disorienting, and I like working in a visual medium that gives me the space to make up how every single things looks. Why not make up how all of the people in the story look, too! I just started this approach with Rice Boy and have become pretty attached to it; it feels like the way forward with the most potential energy for me and I’m surprised it’s so rare in visual media.

Where do you start with world-building?
Just remember that you are never actually making a real place; you’re making a literary device. The generally-received knowledge is you have to start with geology or cosmology or some other ridiculously big-picture element. But it is helpful to me to remember that we experience the world through the medium of society, and stories tend to be told at that level. Somewhat more elaborate thoughts on this are in that video essay.

Why do you put so much stuff out there for free?
Frequency of this question has fluctuated a whole lot over the course of my doing this. Basically I owe my entire career to putting this stuff online for free; no one would know if they were interested in it if they couldn’t read it for free. I don’t have the benefit of an enormous promotional budget or infrastructure, so this is what I’ve got. And I have really gotten attached to it! I love to be able to put this out there and encourage people to read it, and pressure them not at all (or at least not very much) to pay anything for it.

Are those real invented languages (conlangs)?

The Overside stories (Rice Boy, Order of Tales, Vattu) have functional writing systems but no actual invented language. Most are roughly alphabets, though Sahta writing in Vattu has a kind of syllabary structure.

3rd Voice has actual functional invented language in it, as well as an alphabet (or occasional sort-of abjad). The main world-internal language is called Corners; I made it and it’s functional and I’m not revealing very much about it outside of the comic itself. Some good high-context discussion of all this on the discord.

 
All contents copyright 2006-2023 Evan Dahm. Some rights reserved.
3rd Voice logotype by Andriy Lukin.