Vattu
April 22, 2019 8:13 AM   Subscribe

Evan Dahm published the thousandth page of his fantasy comic Vattu yesterday. Set in the same variegated world as Rice Boy and Order of Tales, Vattu is about a girl from a nomadic culture and her reckoning with an empire: how, and whether, she can live within it, escape it, fight it, reform it, or survive it.

As well as turning out exquisitely finished pages of Vattu every week, Dahm has illustrated The Wizard of Oz and Moby Dick; will shortly publish a middle-grade graphic novel inspired by Melville, Earthsea, and Russian science fiction; recently completed another graphic novel about the Harrowing of Hell; and ran a commentary blog on his old Rice Boy work.
posted by Iridic (6 comments total) 35 users marked this as a favorite
 
God I love this comic so much. It’s a true epic, without being an unwieldy behemoth of a story like ahem, many famous fantasy novels. Still stuck on volume one or two but I need to catch up.
posted by cricketcello at 8:28 AM on April 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


One of my regular reads. And I must agree it's superior to most "fantasy epics"... the world-building is well-thought-out and the character design is simple and excellent. My only issue is that recently the title character has almost disappeared behind the machinations of the dog-faced empire leaders and I'm getting more interested in the story of the king 's portrait painter. But then, RiceBoy was not always the focus of his own story and Dahm has proven to be a story teller I can trust.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:54 AM on April 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


Ooh, this looks cool.
posted by suelac at 9:52 AM on April 22, 2019


Dahm's stuff is wonderful, very thoughtful about fantasy as a genre and ways of telling stories outside of the conventional. It's been a real trip seeing him on twitter engaging with christology as (I think) an atheist anarchist and drawing on John Dominic Crossan's stuff.
posted by ocular shenanigans at 11:31 AM on April 22, 2019


I read through Rice Boy - an odd, very enjoyable, trip, thanks! - and am looking forward to the rest the linked works.
posted by verschollen at 2:08 PM on April 22, 2019


Thanks for posting this! I was just thinking about Rice Boy after reading On A Sunbeam -- the immersive world-building felt similar to me. I'm glad to see that there's more Vattu (and other Evan Dahm works) for me to enjoy.
posted by ourobouros at 2:38 PM on April 22, 2019


« Older What's The Matter With Kansas, Tech And Education...   |   The worlds of sand, salt and pepper are far from... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments