R.S. Benedict
Welcome to Rite Gud. The podcast that helps you write good I’m R.S. Benedict. A lot of this podcast is about the publishing industry, breaking into it working within it and our frustrations with it. But some writers and artists strike out on their own. Joining us in this episode is Evan Dahm, writer and artist of Third Voice, Rice Boy, and other online serialized fantasy adventure comics. Thanks for coming on.
Evan Dahm
Thank you so much. I’ve enjoyed this podcast. I appreciate it.
R.S. Benedict
Now. Well, thank you so much for seeing that I noticed on your bluesky, you said, you have many obnoxious opinions. I look forward to hearing those today.
Evan Dahm
That was specifically in response to your recent episode about fantasy world building was titled provocatively against world building. I love it. Yeah, we
R.S. Benedict
had to, we had to. All right. So why don’t we start off? Why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and the kind of work you make.
Evan Dahm
I make fantasy adventure graphic novels mostly. I’m originally from North Carolina, I live in New York City, I have been creating and mostly self publishing a series of fantasy adventure graphic novels since 2006. When I was in college in North Carolina, I’ve done these big, colorful sort of surreal fantasy stories, rice boy order of tales, VAT, two. And third voice is this one that I started about a year and a half ago. And I’ve done several other things for publishers alongside those over the years, but the backbone has always been the serialized self publish stuff. And that is what I love doing. Nice.
R.S. Benedict
Well, that sounds pretty great. Now, you’ve been doing this online, mostly, from what I can tell, instead of working with like a publisher and putting out regular sort of graphic novels. Why did you choose to do this? Like self published online?
Evan Dahm
I don’t know. That’s just kind of how I landed. So I’m teaching this class lately. I just finished my second semester teaching the web comics class at SVA. In Manhattan. Yeah. And it occurs to me talking to these like undergraduate age students, that it was really kind of, in imaginable like it was on the table to do when I was a young person trying to figure out how to make comics and take them seriously. It was like, it was available to me culturally, to that I could just put the thing online and an uncompromising way, and maybe people would find it. But now, you can still do that in certain ways. But it feels like it is much less easy to imagine doing that. And that’s not their fault. That’s just the culture we’re in. Maybe
R.S. Benedict
there was a really big web comics boom in the early 2000s. So Penny Arcade, there were mostly a lot of Geeky Gaming comics, but also a lot of interesting comics with with really different, you know, fantasy adventure horror. Yeah, it was just really, really big. I think that’s how I met Keeley and I, our producer actually met was on the forums of some webcomic or another. It was really, really, really big at the time.
Evan Dahm
So you’re familiar with the, the world of my, the world of my origin here? Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, it was really big. And every it felt like everyone had one and then that just kind of stops in a
Evan Dahm
way. I mean, there’s, it’s big now too, there’s a huge there’s a bigger variety of stuff. And it’s kind of the level of quality is hugely increased across the board. But sure looks
R.S. Benedict
like it I remember that most of that stuff was fucking terrible.
Evan Dahm
But the place of it in the culture is very different, you know, because the internet now is not, you know, people don’t habitually go to websites, people go to the platforms. You know, we all are familiar with that trend.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, yeah, that’s true. It was different than they were there were websites and there was the keen spot web ring of this collection of pop semi popular online comics and stuff like that, that you kind of bounced between. And I guess that’s not a thing anymore. Really? Yeah.
Evan Dahm
I mean, there are like, and, you know, web rings generally just these like little Uh, really organic and socially embedded, you know, proto social networks. I think about this a lot like the way that I built my audience and kind of still the logic by which I try to keep my work. And my approach to having a readership is built on these organic modes of finding things and sharing things that are seriously discouraged, by the way that the entire internet works now. Yeah. But like, it’s still probably worth something I don’t know. I like. Like, I got to think that that’s still the way to do it. Because I, I can’t build my work around the Instagram algorithm or whatever. Yeah.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, it sounds kind of nightmarish to try to do that. As a greeter. I know, there are people who do manage it and do a great job. And I just, I couldn’t, I couldn’t not.
Evan Dahm
You know, the challenge is, for me to look at that. I don’t know, I don’t want to be too judgmental about that. I mean, I have my like, approach and my approach, I have the benefit of having some momentum from starting it before. All these spaces work the way they do now.
R.S. Benedict
But yeah, but I’m wondering if someone starting off now would be able to do that. From from day one the way you did? Yeah,
Evan Dahm
I don’t know. I mean, it would, it would be slow going. But But I mean, you know, if you’re trying to build a genuine engaged audience with like, the weird little thing you’re making, that’s a slow process, probably no matter what the circumstance?
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. So you decided to do all this on your own and go into self publishing for you? What are some of the the upsides of self publishing?
Evan Dahm
Yes. Oh, I didn’t really finish the, my answer to your question. I’m so sorry. No, no, that’s my fault. Just, it was less considered than it may look or that I make it sound in retrospect, it was just like, I’d making comics for a while. And like high school. In early college, I started this project rice boy, which felt like the first time I like, you know, was saying something and was interested was was like, really fully on board with the thing I was making. And the only thing to do is just to put it on the website. Yeah, you know, to make a little website and put it there and hope people found it. Of course, I, like everybody starting out wanted, like, institutional recognition. I wanted somebody to publish it or whatever. But it just didn’t, that wasn’t the avenue, self publishing, it became feasible. And this sort of became the engine of my entire career still. So yeah, the upsides of that, though, I mean, one does not need a huge audience, if you can cut out that much of the the middleman stuff, right? Yeah, that’s the big thing. And that allows you to be uncompromising in certain ways. And I have loved that. Because, you know, the industry and the way that comics fit into, into our pop culture, is really volatile, and unpredictable and varies and is weird. And I just want to make the thing that I am obsessed with making. Yeah, I don’t I mean, I’m trying to more consciously just double down on that lately. I can’t I don’t know what the fuck else to do, honestly.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, you don’t have a publisher and editor going, um, can you make this less weird? I
Evan Dahm
- I mean, I have done books with publishers. And those have been mostly pretty good experiences, but that I don’t see that as the driving force with my whole my whole deal.
R.S. Benedict
Well, that’s good. That’s good. And I’m wondering if you got these traditional publishing deals after doing so well, on web comics, maybe if that gave you a little bit more, I don’t know strength or clout to be able to sort of stick up for yourself as opposed to if you’re just some newbie going. It’s one please publish my comic. Please go. Okay, sir. I’ll do what you want. Yeah,
Evan Dahm
I wonder. I guess y’all haven’t talked to very many comics people on this podcast, have you?
R.S. Benedict
Not a lot. Wendy shoes is a frequent guest. But she’s really our, our main comics person who keeps coming
Evan Dahm
back? Because I do I do wonder about the different place of like, my understanding is that like, self publishing is more of a, an understood part of the comics ecosystem than it is for pros.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, that’s true. She started with a webcomic to mooncakes Oh, yeah,
Evan Dahm
I know that one. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t have I wouldn’t have been able to get in with the publishers that I have gotten books that I’ve done books with, without the benefit of, you know, mostly having a demonstrable audience, but also like showing that I can, you know, do the work. Right, that sort of Like, and then it does, you know, doing a lot of this stuff, self publishing, it gives me some perspective on like, what are the compromises I am making and working with a publisher? What specifically can they offer me? Is it worth it? As opposed to, you know, my early on mindset was just like, well, I want a publisher because I want a book, I want them to write and see my book, you know,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, I want a book, I want lots of money and groupies, because that’s what happens when you’re judicially published is what we think before we’re traditionally published and, and fame. And I’ll go on talk shows, and everyone will love me, and I’ll never be sad again. That’s what will happen if I get a traditional book publishing deal.
Evan Dahm
There, but for the, for the grace of God.
R.S. Benedict
That is what will happen. You’ve dealt with a lot of the good side of self publishing and that you’re, you know, you’re independent, you’re making your own decisions. What are some of the downsides of it,
Evan Dahm
I mean, it is a lot of work. And it’s a lot of moving parts, there’s a lot of infrastructural shit that I have never been able to really wrap my head around, I’ve never been able to get my self published books distributed or in bookstores or anything, just because I’m not I don’t feel like I’m really infrastructurally good at that sort of thing. I have set myself a pretty intense schedule, I don’t know that it’s that much more intense than if I were working for a publisher. But the pressure to stick to that sort of thing and to be really kind of like self destructively. overworking Yeah, is different. Because, like, if it were a publisher demanding these things of me on a contract, that’s, you know, an injustice. But if I’m doing it to myself, then I will just, you know, run myself into the ground. Because it’s mine, you know, I can do whatever I want.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, it’s, you can’t really negotiate or mutiny against yourself so much of the time. Yeah.
Evan Dahm
And there’s this like, tenuous feeling that I periodically have had where, like, I have a better work life balance now than I have in the past. But there’s this, you know, people will tell you, Oh, you deserve a break, or you’re working too much, or you’re working too fast or whatever. But I have no structure for my entire adult working life, I have had no structure around me, that guarantees me a certain amount of money or whatever. So like, I just make if I stopped working, that I make less money, you know, so like, you can see how that would be a sort of a self destructive cycle.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah. Yeah. The Freelancer trap in a lot of ways. Yeah, I’m my own boss. Oh, I’m the shittiest boss I’ve ever had. Damn, damn.
Evan Dahm
But I mean, it’s not exploitation, if you do it to yourself, I mean, all the labor that I am putting that all the all the free work effectively, that I put into the stuff that I own is like, not actually free work, because it’s my stuff. You know? Yeah.
R.S. Benedict
What kind of free work? Do you mean? Oh,
Evan Dahm
I just mean, like, early on, before I had any guarantee on like, making money on the comics that I was doing, I was just sort of putting all this work into making this stuff. Right. And it’s not like I was exploiting myself, because I was building my, you know, intellectual property. That That has been my career. Kind of that makes sense. That’s, that’s the sort of dynamic I mean, I
R.S. Benedict
get it. Okay. Your schedule. I went on there. And I saw you’re releasing a page a week, which, I know might not sound like that much. But this is a page of full color. No,
Evan Dahm
it’s a scene a week, it’s probably seen, sorry, six to eight pages.
R.S. Benedict
Oh, god. That’s so many.
Evan Dahm
Well, I mean, a scene is just my convention, but I present stuff as like pages of a book. And it’s a certain number of pages a week. And I couldn’t, you know, I just sort of have certain rhythms down where I know that I can get that amount done. And I, I like having a sort of more digestible chunk of the thing every week, around when I started this comic, third voice in late 2022. I was like rethinking a lot of my approaches to serialization and trying to, like, build a new approach that made more sense, because I just sort of had been doing a lot of things that was just how it was done, you know? Yeah, so I’ve seen a week. Lately works. I have to take a break every so often, but I feel like it’s a good good rhythm. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
that’s a lot. That seems like a lot. I mean, that’s a lot of drawing i i am not a great artist. I don’t draw good, but that takes a long time.
Evan Dahm
Yeah, I mean, I work pretty quickly and a lot of a lot of figuring out how to do this stuff is figuring out how to do it in a quicker kind of industrial way. So that’s part of it. Part of it is also But I’m very engaged in what I’m doing lately. So if I, if it were a slog that would suck, but I’m able.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, I mean, you’re passionate about what you’re doing, I assume. That’s good. You’re making a serialized adventure, right? So why did you choose to serialize, your work instead of finishing it all together, and then putting it all out at once,
Evan Dahm
this is another thing that is just sort of circumstantial, that in retrospect looks like a decision that I made. I think, like, when I started rice boy, in 2006, I wasn’t really aware of web comics. And there weren’t very many that were like pages of a book, like one big, sustained, dramatic story. But it made sense to just put them out one page at a time. And then as I as I kept doing this stuff, like it just that was how I do it, you know, I’m building an audience, putting the thing page by page now that I have the perspective of having done a couple books for publishers and gone through the whole process of like, you know, finishing a whole book in phases before I hear editorial feedback. And then like, the book comes out, and the publisher has all these promotional tools at their disposal, but once the books out the books out, you know, and then nobody’s talking about it a couple of months later, right. But maybe those promotional tools are a worthwhile trade off. But it really makes sense to me to work on the things serially and use the long term space of it being a thing, updating every week, for years. As a, you know, an audience building thing, you know, it becomes this going concern that people can see, even if they’re not actively reading it, you know, is it build something for me, that people are aware that this thing is going on, that they can jump in on if they want to? You know, yeah, that’s how I think of it now. And I think it’s, I think it’s a good way of doing it. Yeah.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, I know, you started this before, there were just three websites before social media was really huge. So I’m guessing growing your audience back then was a very different ballgame compared to what it is now. But I feel like social media is in kind of a weird place right now, too. And I’m wondering if maybe some of the old ways some of the old ways will return out of necessity, considering so many of our big social media platforms are very jank at the moment and are actually throttling links to other sites. Facebook is rather notoriously like cutting back traffic to a lot of other websites right now. So his Twitter, I suppose tick tock? Well, people are trying to America is trying to ban Tiktok right now. So I don’t know how useful that’s even going to be anymore. So how did you grow an audience in the before social media times? And then did you have to adapt to a different strategy? In the new era of social media?
Evan Dahm
This is the weird part about teaching the class because what I see is this, like huge transition towards like, the corporate intranet is just like, how it has always been to people who are in their early 20s, you know? Yeah, then like, there’s all these ways of thought that I still hold on to, but that feel like old fashioned now because they’re so incompatible with the thing. But I do think that there’s some probably universals like things that still apply, even within this new space, like taking the work seriously, and being uncompromising with it, and trying to have a sort of respectful relationship to your audience. And, you know, not trying to, like scam them or mislead them. And I guess that’s a harsh way of putting it, but
R.S. Benedict
you’ll never be a proper influencer. You’ll never be a streamer. You gotta sell gambling apps to children. That’s how you make the big bucks. Yeah. But
Evan Dahm
like, everybody kind of implicitly knows that there’s these short term gambling ways of developing an audience or whatever, or being an influencer or whatever. And that’s not i That doesn’t appeal to me. But there has, I mean, I’m a person who like connects with particular pieces of art, and like, is committed to them, you know? So I got to think that that’s a relationship that people can have to a thing that’s, that’s presented, honestly. So that’s, that’s what I’m going for. But yeah, I don’t know. It was different back then. I mean, I just sort of like, made a little website and put some stuff on Live Journal. And then within several months, the sort of web comics, social ecosystem was dimly aware of me. Ryan Norris, who does dinosaur comics. Are you familiar with
R.S. Benedict
this? Oh, yeah, of course, you must remember that. So are comics who
Evan Dahm
I accidentally just talk to you for a minute AT T calf this past weekend. Nice. I think him linking rice boy and like 2006 or seven is probably the reason that it took off to begin with nice, which is like, you know, that’s a different thing from blowing up going viral on social media now, because that is a social thing that takes place. I mean, Ryan recommending a comic to his readers, he is doing that as a creator to his audience, but it is it is a more honest and social thing than than other types of blowing up that we’re more accustomed to in the modern internet. Yeah, that’s the distinction I’m trying to pinpoint lately, I guess. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
I know what you mean, this is something that somebody is specifically recommending, as I saw this, I think it’s pretty cool. Check it out. Versus here’s something the website a type of content that the website has decided to promote. Because even if you do share a link or share something, we all know the screwy algorithms might emphasize certain contents and de emphasize other kinds of contents. And it’s not 100%, even if you are resharing, or reblogging, or re tweeting or whatever it is called on on your platform. No guarantee that’s actually going to be seen. And how and how it came across your eyeballs was probably a little bit more organic to and less about like, well, this, this post on Facebook was boosted. So you saw it.
Evan Dahm
Yeah. And it can be like, I don’t know. I mean, it’s it’s too easy to feel too bleak about this. Because yeah, it is a bleak and human thing. But we’re still people, you know, and we’re still people still get interested in things. And people still are passionate about things made by other people. And art still appeals to people because it’s about inter, you know, high context, communication, you know, so I feel like, I don’t know that those. That’s what, that’s what I am holding on to.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I hope so. And I’m kind of wondering if we’re, maybe I’m being optimistic or naive that we’re going to see some kind of social media collapse, or at least see things being shared and moving around in a different way than what it’s been for the past 10 years.
Evan Dahm
Yeah, I’m optimistic on that.
R.S. Benedict
I kind of hope so.
Evan Dahm
There’s a lot of people, like there’s a lot of people who remember the old model and wants to go back. But then there’s a lot of a lot of my students just openly hate this shit in such a refreshing way, you know? So yeah, I don’t know. I’m encouraged about that. I think. Yeah, I
R.S. Benedict
mean, the fact that some of these big social media platforms, Twitter has literally never been profitable. So it’s weird that it even still exists. And it looks like it’s just kind of in freefall. I don’t know what the fuck Facebook is doing anymore. What it’s even becoming I don’t. I don’t know. I don’t know. It just seems like a weird mess.
Evan Dahm
They’ve become disgusting. I mean, Facebook is I see so much AI shit like grotesque, horrible AI shit on there. I don’t go on there. And Twitter is now recommending just the most awful stuff. So I only just post my promotional stuff there. I don’t put them on the way they used.
R.S. Benedict
They stopped going on Twitter after they reinstated the child porn guy. That’s right. Jesus Christ. Like that was the most fucked up thing I haven’t like I don’t I don’t want to be here. I feel like I feel like Chris Hansen’s gonna show up on my door. If I fucking post here anymore. I’m done. I hope this. We’ve definitely gotten less traffic on the podcast as a result, but I’m okay with
Evan Dahm
that can’t Well that status quo cannot maintain. I mean, like a website like that, at that scale, cannot exist in a circumstance where I don’t know that something’s gotta give there. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
God. Yeah, I would love to see if we, if our online media landscape could change again. Maybe it’ll change to something even more horrific. I doubt we’ll go backwards. Because that’s never how it goes. But maybe we’ll see something a little more organic, like in the good old days, I don’t know. But if you’re young people want to know what it was like go play a game called Hypno. Space outlaw. That is what it was like to be on the internet in like 1999 It is the most perfect simulation. And it’s amazing. It’s magical.
Evan Dahm
I mean, it was like an onion. uncolonized space. No way. Can it go back? You can’t take the institutions and the money out of it. Really? No. You can like build sort of nature preserves, I guess. For the old the old logic.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, the didn’t the original Space Jam website going down or something that I feel like that symbolizes the end of an era. Yeah, that’s it. It’s over. It’s not going back to Space Jam sites down. It’s gone. Rip put it Anyway, so online, there’s a lot of content. And a lot of it’s really, really bad. And a lot of it’s made by plagiarism robots. So how do you as a self published creator, get your work to be seen? Like, how do you stand out in this massive ocean of online content?
Evan Dahm
I mean, there’s like my answer to that. And then there’s the like, what is a person? What should a person do approaching this new?
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, I don’t, I don’t think anyone can really give accurate recommendations in terms of like, here’s what you should do, because it’s different for everybody. And especially, it’s different, depending on the kind of work you do, and who you are, as a creator. For a lot of creators, you can be like, you’re an influencer first, almost. And your work kind of gets big from that. But I think a lot of creatives aren’t really interested in doing that, you know, like, like, maybe you can sell your books by being very spicy on social media. But for a lot of us just don’t want to do that, that sounds miserable, or you just don’t, it’s just not you. So instead, what I’d ask is like, what did you do? Maybe it won’t work for all of our listeners, but maybe it will work for some of them? I don’t know. Yeah,
Evan Dahm
I mostly have just sort of tried to have the various spaces that I am on the internet, self evidently, like demonstrate that I am constantly making this stuff, and I’m putting it online for free. The main thing is that I’m making this huge amount of material over the years, and people can read it for free. And that is my promotional thing. I mean, getting people to see it in the first place. That is a tricky thing, and would be trickier. Now, if I was just starting out that it was Yeah, I don’t have access to a lot of promotional infrastructure. But what I do have is the capacity to just make my work available for free and build audience attention and engagement that way, and people do if they like it want to buy the book. I mean, I understand that, yeah, what I’m wrapping my head around lately is that like, as all these platforms are running into their walls, I am trying to wrap my head around this idea that like, you know, I have an audience that is interested in what I’m making, I’m trying to like, support a certain type of engagement with what I’m making, and to encourage my audience to see it as work that exists outside of the platforms, you know, yeah, so when Twitter dies, or when I fully abandoned Twitter, because I have seen too many fucking snuff films on there, or whatever. Oh, god. Yeah, this is apparently a real problem. That’s what Whoa, broke it for me. Sorry, shouldn’t say, Oh,
R.S. Benedict
that’s okay. But like, Jesus Christ, man.
Evan Dahm
When these things die, I mean, the idea is that, like, I’m still making the work. And if you’re interested in it, hopefully you’re interested in it enough to follow me somewhere else or whatever. You
R.S. Benedict
can go to rice boy.com. And there won’t be snuff films on it, presumably?
Evan Dahm
Yeah, unless something has gone very wrong. Yeah, yeah. How do you get your work to be seen and stand out? I don’t know. I mean, just, I mean, I’m feel like I am doing something that is very unusual, and very particularly my weird thing. Yeah, this is not because I’m special. You know, anybody can do that. Yeah. And to some extent, it probably stands out a little because it is that I don’t know, it’s hard for me to pinpoint this sort of thing. Yeah.
R.S. Benedict
You the Creator can never really guess of what of your work is going to be the big thing. thing that you thought was going to be really good or like really get attention is kind of ignored. And then the thing that you didn’t really expect people to give a shit about is the thing that goes super big. Hmm, okay,
Evan Dahm
yeah. And then there’s like different types of attention to a thing that goes super big. It might be very shallow attention from a huge number of people. But then the thing that you’re more attentive to, and devoted to and committed to, might be a very small number of people, but it is a type of attention that where they will, you know, personally invest in it and follow you along for years and years. I’ve never had a huge audience. But I have people who have been really interested in my work, who I know pretty well, personally now who’ve been around for like, 10 years or so. Nice. That’s cool. That’s what I want. That
R.S. Benedict
feels pretty good. I love that. Yeah. Making a small weird thing for a group of small weird people. That sounds pretty good.
Evan Dahm
i Yeah, I’ve been feel very fortunate about that. Absolutely.
R.S. Benedict
I think that’s the goal for a lot of our listeners. Yeah, I’m making weird stuff for about 30 other people. Yeah. And as long as they’re there, I’m happy.
Evan Dahm
I wish I had more specific advice about the yeah, getting to that point. I mean, I just have my autobiography about it. Yeah.
R.S. Benedict
So let’s talk a little bit about your career. creative process you work mostly in comics. I’m not sure if you’ve done much prose. Can you talk about the difference between how you’d approach comics versus prose,
Evan Dahm
I have done prose, but not in any publishable way. And I don’t know, I get a lot out of prose. So I have some sense, I think of it, the main thing is efficiency problem, and how it takes a huge amount of time to to cover comparable amounts of narrative material, I guess, in comics, as opposed to prose. We call them graphic novels. But to make something that feels like a novel in my experience in in the medium of comics, and has to be, you know, decades of work. Basically, I like working with visual material. And I feel like there are types of visual literacy that get really sidelined or lost in our culture that it is gratifying to me to engage with, I don’t know there’s, there’s ways in which it’s probably a lot more schematic like I can’t, you know, planning has to take a very different role, because I can’t really go back and edit stuff, even if I’m not serializing it page by page. Editing a comic is a very different thing from editing a prose thing. And then like nailing everything down into like pages and graphic design elements. Like that’s just a type of concern that doesn’t really exist in prose. It feels kind of like clunky or inelegant to have to balance all these things in ways that prose never feels to me. But I don’t I’ve never really written prose seriously, but it feels like a hybrid kind of very clunky industrial art form to me sometimes, but I love it. I mean, it’s the only way I can think to do storytelling in a pretty uncompromising way, visually, basically. Nice.
R.S. Benedict
Would you like to talk a little bit about your approach to genre fiction?
Evan Dahm
Okay, the world building podcast, I’m totally on board with all of you all’s thoughts? Yeah. Very smart stuff, some deserved criticism of the Brandon Sanderson School of literalistic fantasy storytelling.
R.S. Benedict
I’ve been reading your comics, and I see that it appears that it does take place in some sort of world. And yet we’re against world building. Shadow made Evan
Evan Dahm
in a way. I mean, it’s funny. So I, that is one of the things that is most like loudly evident about the work that I do. Is that like, it’s in a fantasy place. So a majority of interviews and conversations that I’ve had about this stuff probably have been about that. And then like, in the early to mid 20s, I ran a series of panel discussions at comic conventions with different cartoonists about world building. I don’t know, I’ve thought a lot about this stuff. And there are certainly uptight literalistic self defeating ways that we’re all aware of that you can do that, right. Like the idea that you have to figure out the whole geography of a place before you write the story. Quick, that makes no sense to me,
R.S. Benedict
but that use a map of Florida, like, Anthony.
Evan Dahm
Because I mean, what are you really trying to communicate? No one unless the story is about geography, which is an interesting angle, I guess, then I don’t know. It has to come down to what you’re trying to communicate to the reader. And you’re balancing that of course, with like, the implication hopefully, that there is more beyond the bounds of the story, but not that much more. I mean, come on. Yeah, I think about this motivating idea of like genre fiction generally or like fantastical fiction, generally, where it is about literalism. Like the way I explained this is in literary fiction, if there’s a ghost, the ghost is a metaphor for a character’s regrets, or memories or whatever. But in genre fiction, a ghost is literally a ghost, right? And that’s creepy. And he’s there, and he’s gonna get you. And like, in fantasy fiction, the fantastic world isn’t a dream or an allegory. It’s literally a place. So like, there is that tendency to like, take it seriously and delineate it all as like an objective thing. But it’s just so much richer to balance that with some awareness of like, what you’re doing, metaphorically, literarily, I guess. I mean, y’all talked about linguine who is like probably my favorite fiction writer ever to have lived like she does that really brilliantly. She’s obviously working from a tradition of like extremely like, you know, nerdy kind of objective sort of journalistic fantasy and science fiction storytelling, but she’s using it in this rich, politically motivated way. Yeah, I learned a lot from her just sort of obliquely I think, Oh, she’s
R.S. Benedict
amazing. The goat goat, the goat absolute goat. So as I’m reading your comments, I’m noticing there’s a lot of weird little guys A lot of weird little dudes in here. Tell us about your fondness for for making weird little guys. Where are these weird little guys coming from?
Evan Dahm
This is related to the world building question. Because I’m working in a visual medium. It has always made sense to me, or I guess the innovation that I hit upon with rice boy, when I was literally 18 years old, by accident is that, oh, I can just make up how every fucking things look, the you know, these don’t have to be like human being shaped characters, right? If I’m drawing it all, why not just make it all look kind of fun. Yeah, this felt like a huge revelation to me. And I’m just that I’ve stuck to it was the vast majority of my work. And there’s ways in which like, it puts the cartooning on a different level of abstraction like ordinarily, cartooning, one of the ways that people use that word is about drawing a person from reality in a way where the voice of the drawing suggests something about the person, right? The way that I think that I have, I don’t know, short circuited that process is that, in theory, the voice of the drawing of all the stuff that I’m doing is very, like journalistic and straightforward. But it’s the world itself. It’s the characters themselves that look all these weird sorts of ways. That’s an idea. I’m still wrapping my head around, but I love the freedom that it gives me in terms of like, character design, and yeah, I don’t know, I try not to be too like uptight or explanatory about it. Like, the temptation is to, like, delineate all the different like species of weird little guys, or whatever, or like, yeah, to make them all like fantasy world races or whatever. But I’m just not interested in that. And I want to more and more actively just not engage with the sort of race scientific aspects of the history of this tradition of fantasy pop culture. You know what I mean? Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
I think I know what you mean. Yeah. A little bit, even in like well intentioned, politically progressive, a lot of these things. It’s like, okay, that so there’s the race that very obviously represents this ethnicity. There’s the race that represents space Latinos. Yeah, there’s the Okay, I see what you’re doing there.
Evan Dahm
But it’s one of those things that like, it can be done sort of abstractly enough that you can kind of not see it, or that the writer could maybe not have seen it. But like, I don’t know, we got to think about this stuff, if we’re working with because we’re in a tradition here as Yeah, fantasy writers or whatever. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
definitely. These are all serial stories, and some of them are really long ones. Do you plan them out meticulously ahead of time? Or do you kind of play it by ear,
Evan Dahm
I guess I’ve done kind of both in different ways. So rice boy, in order of tails, the first two that I did between the ages of like 18, and 20, to 23, something like that. They’re both like kind of planned, I didn’t plan them in the detail, but I was leaning heavily on certain kinds of typified, you know, Missick adventure, Lord of the Rings type stories that allowed me to not have to plan that much with Vasu. It’s very much like there’s these big narrative trajectories, and there are big somatic ideas. And every step has to sort of move along these tracks, it was kind of planned. And then all throughout the process, because it takes so long to draw the pages, and you’re doing it front to back. All throughout the process. I am like, working and reworking the outline of the coming, you know, hundreds of pages, or whatever it is, basically, by virtue of doing that comic over the course of literally 12 years, that I feel like I am reasonably comfortable opening up a lot of space for me to improvise for this new thing, like third voice, it is like one big sustained thing. But there’s like, chunks of it that are that are very different sorts of stories. And there’s big parts of it, where I have basically just said that I hope I can fucking come up with something, you know, like, I’m reasonably sure that I can come up with something because like, I’m feeling engaged in this thing. You know, the development that I have gone through here is that early on, it seemed like planning was always the way to what how do I say this? It seemed like planning would always keep me safe, right? Like, these are long projects, they represent a long investment, a lot of investment of effort. I don’t want to fuck them up. So I better plan them out perfectly. Right, right. But then if if you work long enough front to back on one comic book, it is impossible to not have a lot of space of just open improvisation in that process. There are certain ways of loosely planning to give the impression of a tighter structure for that improvisation to exist within. But it’s improvisation and a lot of my approach to third voice has been, I guess, reckoning with that, and reading a lot of you know other types of serialized comics, seeing how improvisation has worked and other types of storytelling like that and how Having some sort of faith in myself to, you know, plan enough and know the sorts of planning that are useful, and the sorts of planning that are a little too uptight and brittle. And you know, I’m very happy with the first book of this comic. So I’m happy with it so far. We’ll see. I mean, there’s lots of ways that it will be clunky and rambling, but I don’t know, I’m having fun.
R.S. Benedict
Nice. You’ve mentioned that you have this very, I think, really intense schedule. How do you keep to that? Like, how do you manage your time? Do you often find yourself finishing it at the last minute? How does your week go in between the scenes coming out?
Evan Dahm
I’ve been doing this schedule for third voice since late 2022. It’s, I guess, very occasionally, four pages, but usually six or eight pages a week, I don’t know, I just I have a sense of how much that takes, I know, I can pencil that in a day or two, I can eat that in probably three days. And I can color that in two days. All right, 4567. I normally have it done a couple of days early, and put put it early up on Patreon. Nice, you know, it’s my job, it’s the main thing I have to do every week, right? So there is that, but also I mostly engaged in it. And I like the physical process of it. It also helps me wrap my head around writing a whole lot. I can’t believe I did that to just one page up a time a few a few times a week, through that whole process. why that’s such a wild, like stilted thing I was constantly, I wasn’t able to like maintain momentum and have and have like a bigger picture of what I was doing like I am now I think I see. But the main thing is, I mean, I wake up early, I like doing what I’m doing, I get really focused on it. And I know my I know how much I can do basically.
R.S. Benedict
Nice. Now, you mentioned Patreon. If you’re comfortable talking about finances, would you like to talk about how you manage to monetize this?
Evan Dahm
Sure, for the majority of my time doing this, it has been about it’s been about book sales. Like I would get an edition of a book collection of one of the comics printed in addition of one or 2000 copies typically, and because I’m self publishing it, I am not splitting the money that I make from those books with anybody. If you get 1000 copies of like 400 Page color graphic novel printed, you get that down to like five or six bucks each, something like that. So like, you sell that at a normal retail cost for a book like that. And that is a lot of money for one book to an individual sell publisher. That’s the logic by which a lot of my stuff worked for several years. I mean, that’s still a part of it mixed in with that I’ve done books with publishers that I make some money on, although, you know, less predictable and just sort of more scattered way. Yeah, with the launch of third voice. I did these like big promo videos to try to push a new kind of logic and to present the Patreon that I’d been running for several years as more like, Okay, I’m doing this thing I’m putting out, you know, a monthly American comic books amount of pages a month, if you like it $2 A month, if you like no pressure, I’m just trying to push that more and you know, or make a good amount of money on that. It’s great. It makes me a little nervous to rely on the Patreon platform, which has the same, you know, venture capital wall that it’s going to hit at some point. Yeah, but, you know, again, I guess, you know, ideally, I have an audience that I can just sort of maintain some connection to in some kind of way, if not there. Yeah, that’s the main stuff. I mean, it basically a lot of it early on, for me just came down to like, how much does it cost to get a book printed? Am I reasonably sure that I can sell all these books? Am I able to ship all these books, and then in like, 2015, I started working with tepat eco, which is a company that has been doing distribution for web comics and and a bunch of other sort of independent internet art stuff they’ve collected and saved my life. They’re incredible. They do all the all my fulfillment and stuff for the past several years. I struggled to like delegate and work with people, but they saved my life, I think. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
no kidding. How long did it take you to get to a place where you were able to support yourself on comics full time and not have to worry about our day job or anything anymore? I mean, granted, make doing this is your day job, but you know, yeah, you know what I mean?
Evan Dahm
I mean, basically, right out of college. I had a couple of little jobs in college, but I was mostly making the comic taking the comic more seriously than going to school was already was getting I forget exactly. I I got a book printed late in college and was like selling prints and stuff, mail order my own mail order stuff. I was doing occasional comic conventions. And I was making enough to live on in North Carolina very cheaply right out of college. And then I moved to New York in 2010, and was doing an insane amount of comic conventions, and getting a lot of books printed, and living very cheaply. But I mean, I, you know, I feel very, I don’t know, I feel it’s embarrassing. I feel very fortunate to have been able to do that, I guess.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, that’s cool. Let’s talk a little bit about letting your freak flag fly. I know that self publishing leaves you freedom from censorship in a lot of ways. But like, how free is it, I know you’re, if you’re using a platform to market yourself or promote your work, you are going to be at the mercy of the terms of service agreements and algorithms. And from what I can tell of influencers and online creators, whether this is people who do it for a living, or people who just do it for a hobby, or whatever, there does seem to be a really intense and really immediate pressure from the audience for certain kinds of art a lot of the time like, oh, I want to see these to end up together, or I want to see a happy ending for this character. And you, you know, where’s the novelist will like, finish the novel and send it once it’s published, then people will like yell at you like, Why didn’t kill this guy? If you’re doing this every week, you know, this is coming to you like right away after you put it out. So do you ever feel that pressure sometimes, to maybe like pander, maybe I don’t know if pander is the right word, but sort of appeal to the audience a little bit more? Or do you ever feel this sense of like, oh, do I really want to do this, people are gonna be really mad, the instant this goes live on the website, or a bunch people are gonna send me angry messages.
Evan Dahm
I have a feeling sometimes I don’t know, by the time I’m committing to doing something intense that will like upset people, then it’s worked into the structure so much that I probably can’t change it. Or it would feel awkward to change it. I do get that I was so worried about this sort of like, stereotypically badass bounty hunter guy killing a really sympathetic character several months ago, and the comic and like, I really didn’t want to do it kind of, but it had to happen at that point. And like, in a way, I mean, people getting upset about it, it’s a compliment, right there. Yeah, that means they’re engaging with it in that I would be upset about it, you know, it means they’re engaging with it in the way that that I want, honestly. And I love that I did feel a lot of pressure, I remember early on was was bad too, which is the third big comic that I did. It’s nominally set in the same invented world as the other two. And I felt some pressure, I don’t know how much it was even articulated to me. But I felt some pressure to include more specific, like textual connections to the other things that in the same world, I would have done that, I don’t know. But Vatta was so much its own thing and had its own concerns that I it made sense to just double down on that, I guess. And then when I started third voice, it set in a different setting. And this sort of like nerd culture attention, which I say that with love this, like nerd culture, attention to the invented world, and the meta continuity between the stories and everything. That has been such a big part of like, my pop cultural space, and the way that people talk about my stuff that I was really nervous about that. And I in one of the launch videos, I did this, like, big apologetic thing, not really apologetic, but kind of apologetic about, like, Look, I know, it seems like kind of sad that this is not set in the same universe as the other comics. But I mean, it’s all just in my head, you know, and I’m still the person making it. And I mean, if you’re interested in this stuff, it’s not because it’s set in one particular invented world is yours, you’re interested in it, because I am making it in this particular way. And it’s me. I’m sorry, I was trying to think of specific examples of that. And that’s what I what I thought, the censorship stuff. I mean, that doesn’t directly apply to me in a lot of ways, because I’ve always been pretty invested in making like, kind of, kind of just pop cultural stuff. I mean, right. It doesn’t really occur to me to get too aggressive or risque with anything I have done creatively. So you’re
R.S. Benedict
never going like, Oh, I’m gonna go crazy. Just because I can fuck you dad. None of that.
Evan Dahm
Not really. I mean, well, that too, is a pretty politically intense book, I think. But that’s because it’s that’s what it built to and that’s what made sense to me. It doesn’t feel reactive, like you say, yeah, and then I did this book for Iron Circus called the harrowing of hell a couple of years ago. Yeah, which He kind of this is a whole other thing, but it’s kind of like a Christian anarchist angle on biblical apocrypha. And the gospel of Mark, right? It’s an adaptation of some biblical shit was like a pointed political angle. And I feel like a lot of people expected that to be edgy, you know? Because it’s, it’s a book about hell, and Jesus is in it and like, oh, wouldn’t it be fun for there to be a bunch of cool demons? Yeah, but it’s just like it is, I don’t know, these things just are what they are. And I am happy with that book.
R.S. Benedict
Nice.
Evan Dahm
I don’t know that I totally addressed all that stuff. The censorship thing doesn’t apply to me. But I am extremely sensitive to the fucking problem. And you know, when creators who make pornographic work, or creators who are somewhat more visibly queer than me, are like, shut out of these platforms. This is a catastrophic thing to the entire space in which we all are operating, you know, yeah, this is another way in which it’s probably helpful to try to, I don’t know, build a sense of our work as a thing that exists outside of the platforms and to have a really cynical kind of mercenary approach to the platforms like you know, they’re your enemy, but a lot of people are they’re so fucking use them. But there are enemies. Absolutely.
R.S. Benedict
Definitely. All right now, we’ve been recording for about an hour before we wind down where can our listeners find and support your work?
Evan Dahm
Thank you. Rice dash boy.com is where I do a bunch of the serialized stuff that I do a huge amount of stuff free to read there. I have some books out with first second books and Iron Circus comics. I have a new book out called the last delivery out in in June from Iron Circus comics plays like a horror thing. Cool, but you know my name everywhere. I’m easy to find.
R.S. Benedict
Nice. Well, thank you so much for coming on.
Evan Dahm
Thank you. lovely to be here. Thank you so much. And thank you all
R.S. Benedict
for listening. If you like what you heard, please head to patreon.com/write Good and subscribe. Until next time, keep writing good.