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September 28, 2026 Hello everybodyyyy. Thank you for visiting and reading 3rd Voice Web Comic; the scene I just put up I am very pleased with. Bunch of technical drawing

If you are in NEW YORK CITY, I invite you to come to the “Ambiguity Program,” a live screening of short cartoons. This friday October 2, 5 pm, at 388 Atlantic Avenue downtownish Brooklyn.

One of the big english language “webtoon” platforms, TAPAS, is going to shut down probably by the end of the year—though I think no actual messaging from the institution itself has so far taken place. It feels like everything is owned by enormous publicly-traded companies with little respect for the labor that built their value in the first place! It feels like all of these companies are just buying each other and cashing out at first opportunity. Everyone I know in bigger-budget popcultural spaces like videogames or animation has been struggling through this for many months.

Comics is kind of different from those big profitable mediums, though KAKAO who bought Tapas for about a billion dollars some years ago apparently did not think so at the time. The platforms see a social space of creative work and potential energy and money being made, and naturally they are going to try to OWN that space! It has been miserable to see how this conquest has taken place over the couse of my time making comics on the internet: materially, people don’t go to websites, and it’s really convenient to put your comics on the comics platform where everybody is… and ideologically, the “horizons of career possibility” for an independent cartoonist are dramatically narrowed. It was once possible to imagine self-publishing, and building an audience and a career dependent solely on interest from a number of actual readers. It is more difficult to imagine that now: now the most immediate picture of “success” is getting a big number of followers on one platform, and getting noticed by the platform so they’ll give you a CONTRACT, and you can get paid in a much more abstracted way for your work (and of course they can kick you out for any reason, and they can demand types and quantities of work you can’t manage…)

I teach the “Webcomics” class at SVA and a lot of doing that is about trying to narrativize these things that are happening in the industrial space we’re all in. What I keep returning to is basically: if you’re an independent cartoonist, you are not subject to the same pressures as these vast cynical machines. There are ways of thinking of what you’re doing as building work outside of and beyond the platforms, because what you’re doing will outlast all of them anyway. AND there has to be a way to make the case to the people reading what you’re doing on this or that platform that they can FOLLOW you elsewhere!!! Because building a career or a part of a career as an independent artist is a much more robust thing if it’s on the basis of a smallish number of interested human beings, instead of on the basis of a contingent relationship to a big platform that hates you.

Anyway what is gonna happen. I am looking forward to a more broad backlash against the platforms and the generative AI and everything. I am discouraged to see that a lot of the ways that backlash takes shape is by being against THE INTERNET in full. But we’ll see!! This is just the sort of ideation I orbit around with this stuff lately.

SPX was fun... a miracle... a relief

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Latest Letter Column

You can email me something at 3rdvoicemail@gmail.com and I will maybe get to it here.

I’ve been eagerly anticipating your "next page" on Rice dash Boy dot com since midway through Rice Boy, and it’s hard to believe it’s been two decades since it started. The art and storytelling have been consistently captivating, and I’m particularly impressed by your ability to present a rich and compelling narrative while still maintaining a deep sense of mystery.

Perhaps you’ve already touched on this in other 20th-anniversary commemorations, but in what ways would you say your approach and output have changed or evolved in that time, and are there aspects that you feel have been relatively consistent? -ReverendTed * June 12, 2026

Hello thank you! The main thing I am thinking about lately is my approach to planning and serialization… like I started Rice Boy with a kind of template, and rambled around dropping ideas out there and hoping that I could make it connect eventually… in Order of Tales and early Vattu, I was very much reacting against this approach by anxiously trying to map everything out more rigorously in advance… but then over the course of Vattu I started to see the value in giving myself space to improvise within a loose structure, SO 3rd Voice is built from the start on that premise, sort of. There is a way in which it’s just an attempt to do what I did with Rice Boy in a smarter way. The basics of writing out scenes and drawing and coloring are basically the same, though. My little coloring hacks I came up with around the start of Rice Boy are the premises of my entire understanding of digital coloring ever since honestly!!!

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