Stones of the North, a print I made way back in like 2007?? and the original art, which I put up in the latest batch of originals on the ol’ etsy.
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#illustration #rice boy #evan dahm #riceboy #the one electronic #golgo #calabashHere’s the “Card Game Triptych” now that the three Searchers are introduced. This was I think the first piece of merchandise I ever made?? Back in 2007 or so probably. Maybe it will be available again soon…
I like this page; a real setting-it-into-motion page. I never realized how much I did the tiny-vignette establishing shot, as in panel 7 here. It’s definitely not something I’ve done lately, but I like how it fits into Rice Boy’s limited, iconic sense of space. Color-coded places and clear signifiers with unimportant specifics. Gerund’s here.
I wish now that this had happened later; I don’t like their entire
relationship being in retrospect. But look at the shadow of those window
panes I drew with a laptop trackpad! damn
Cal’s so nice and forgiving, look. I have always been really interested in thinking about what living forever would do to a person. Putting aside the nitpicky in-world fact the T-O-E is a robot guy, I think his inhuman pragmatism is a plausible result of living for a long-ass time, right? And Cal hasn’t ever been so dispassionate, but I get the sense his forgiveness comes more from having a wide perspective of what a life is, how contingent it is, how a unified, fully responsible Self is a fictional idea. WELL I don’t know; so far I’ve felt constantly like I’m analyzing somebody else’s work, this was so long ago!
T-O-E putting his jacket on the god-pillar is a cute thing I didn’t remember. I’m seeing a lot more melodramatic, “epic” talk than I remember, too, if you know what I mean. It’s always felt like a kind of separate register of speech I learned from fantasy media that it’s easy to slip into when writing, but hard to do in a way that feels earned and embedded into the narrative. T-O-E does it constantly, but I tried (more and more consciously) to mitigate it with a little humanity/weakness/something?? Seems like a prerequisite for high fantasy (which I guess by some definition Rice Boy is) is the story taking itself more seriously than it deserves. I really like writing with thees and thous too but I haven’t given in too much yet to that pretension.
thank you Patreon patrons
Ok this is I think the essay I was seriously misremembering by Le Guin last time. Anyway I beseech you to read her fiction; I have really never found fantasy writing of greater richness & depth & consciousness than the Earthsea books.
I don’t know what I think about the lightning-powers. I guess I decided later on that it was a special thing only T-O-E could do (and it’s probably safe to assume that I didn’t think of the Machine Men as a whole species of people early in the story, but again I don’t remember exactly). Also I’m still really happy with the look of T-O-E’s torso; a bunch of little shapes but clear and simply put together. I’m great
I like how goofy and nonsensical so much of this comic looks, as I come to each page of it out of context.
Some images from Doctor Strangelove in T-O-E’s face here. T-O-E is just constantly rude; why is he everybody’s favorite character??
Ursula K. Le Guin has a great essay in Steering the Craft that I don’t have handy that relates a little to what I was just writing about– the customary centrality of violence (”conflict”) in stories as we think of them, and how contingent that assumption is. I might be misremembering it but it’s a great essay; Le Guin is one of my favorite writers. Anyway there’s many ways for stories to work beyond the modern, rigorously literal, conflict-oriented mode that we think of as objectively superior. It’s something I want to think harder about and incorporate into what I’m doing, but I’m living with the same status quo assumptions as everybody else.
(thank you patreon patrons)
(oh hey that book got funded)
A free or pay-what-you-want download of around 2500 pages of comics I’ve made, including most everything at rice-boy.com, and other things previously not available online.
In case you are need of easy and free indoors entertainment. Good luck in this weird and anxious moment my friends
