The Kickstarter for Vattu: The Sword & the Sacrament is happening now!!!
You can preorder the second book, or get both at once, and help make this book a reality. It’s been years since the first one came out and I’m really excited to make this happen finally!
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I started actually publishing Vattu in July of 2010, and planning and development around a year before that. So let’s call this an anniversarial thing, but really I just think it would be helpful to collect my thoughts publicly a little around this book that still feels extremely personal and quiet and idiosyncratic to me.
I struggle to think about how big this project has become, and how long a period of my life has been covered by it. While the broad strokes of the plot have been clear from early on, in the last few years I’ve felt myself slipping into a different sort of approach to writing it: less like I’m dutifully recording a self-contained story, and more like I’m using the story I’ve built so far as a way of exploring ideas. The more of it there is, the more it feels like I can live in it, instead of just building an interesting thing. I don’t know how else to say this, and I’ve never felt that it’s a betrayal of the plot-focused approach to the story. This isn’t like anything I’ve made and I have to believe that whatever value there is in it is because I’m doing it my own weird way?
This isn’t to say that it’s been consistently exciting and engaging to work on. This is something I want to be clearer on because I feel like a lot of people approach creative work as something you should only pursue when you’re 100% engaged or “inspired.” For me for practically any large-scale project, the most exciting part is early on, when I’m developing the idea and it’s clear enough to fit in my head, but not clear enough to feel too nailed-down to one particular finite incarnation. My excitement about a project is significantly lower than that throughout the entire rest of the process, but it varies a lot within that. It’s a commitment, it’s not a magical feeling all the time. Vattu has occasionally been a struggle, and I’ve occasionally felt totally out-of-touch with the vision I had when I planned it and started it. And the guiding vision of it has changed considerably, in a way that my previous books never did. But I feel that I still know what I’m doing with it, and I’ve been doing a lot more writing on it lately and getting pretty excited about where we’re going. (Having a couple of other things to jump between usually helps me through this process)
Where we’re going: in the interest of having four books that aren’t of enormously different lengths, I’ve recently decided to change the ending point for Book 3 (the one we’re currently in). This decision comes from a formal place but I do feel it works for the story, and makes Book 3 work a little better as a unit. I estimate now (July 2017, page 847) that we’re around 100 pages from the end of Book 3. I am thinking of the current moment in Book 3 (or the moment starting in the next couple of scenes) as a major turning-point for the story; I’m excited about finally being here and I don’t want to say more than that. And Book 4 will be intense, and even with all the planning that’s gone into it it’ll be the most challenging writing I have ever done, and it may be bigger than I think it’ll be. I am thrilled and horrified to think of what the whole story will look like in a few years when it’s done.
Oh and titles! I’m changing the title to Book 3 slightly (it’s hardly been posted anywhere, but until now it was “The Lantern and the Shadow”). Here’s the titles of all four books of Vattu; finally:
The Name & the Mark
The Sword & the Sacrament
The Tower & the Shadow
The River
I’d like to be getting the third book printed this time next year. I have the cover art pretty clear in my head and I’d like to get that done and visible in the next few months.
I would like to write more about my process in the future; maybe this at least will be an annual thing if I can remember. I know that my approach and my aesthetic and the place of webcomics in the internet have changed dramatically since I started Rice Boy 11 years ago. But I love doing this work and I love that I have an audience that makes it possible for me to pursue idiosyncratic projects at absurd scales. Thank you so much for reading.
Just wrapped up SPX in Bethesda, and I WON THE IGNATZ for Best Online comic!!! SPX and those awards (and the comic for which it is named) mean so much to me and really appreciate the award.
Vattu book 3 begins today. This one is a big one, and we’re starting out with the first look so far at the absolute upper echelons of Sahta’s government. Thank you all for bearing with me during the break. I’m looking forward to getting into the thick of this book.
The Oz project is wrapping up and a book is happening soon. My Patreon has cleared 300 a month, so everybody who pledges within the month will get a ton of sketchbook pdfs. I’m feeling good and optimistic about the things I am working on, and I really appreciate you reading.
Updates will be a little less frequent for the near future, as I suddenly have a big secret thing to work on for the next few weeks. Here for now is the new Vattu Character Guide though, finally!
San Diego Comic Con is coming up next week; I’ll be there at table 1334 with Becky & Frank, Tyler, Zach, David, and maybe others of whom I am not aware??? It’s the Big One.
My Wizard of Oz book is finally available online now!! It’s being handled by the fine Topatoco people; more will be going on there in the near future.
Vattu is 700 pages long today!!!
Hi folks & welcome to the future. Vattu’s still going strong and finally dealing with some Grish stuff I’ve been looking forward to for YEARS, and a few good exciting things are on the horizon:
The Wizard of Oz book is done and I’ve seen the final proofs and could not be happier. Topatoco is gonna handle all of the fulfillment, and then it’ll be officially debuting at TCAF in Toronto in May, one of my very favorite conventions.
Goblin Week cometh, beginning on Sunday, January 25, and ending on Saturday, January 31. This means: everybody produces as many goblin-related creative works as possible for a week, and we all make a lot of noise about it. More details soon on that blog.
Finally, I’ll be starting the Rice Boy Rerun Blog soon, pending a goal on Patreon. Thanks everyone!
Last year I posted some writing about what working on Vattu is like on the approximate anniversary of starting the comic, so let’s do that again: a Vattu State of the Union. Helpful to orient myself and think about what it feels like to be in the thick of this thing and actually moving forward!!
The majority of this past year has been taken up by working on Island Book for First Second Books at a more consistent and frantic pace than I’ve worked on maybe anything ever. It is now DONE, as of a last (I think) round of small edits I made last week. Vattu had to be back-burnered occasionally but never stopped for too long, and it’s a relief to be back into it and engage with some very Big Statement parts of it lately.
A circumstance of this weird career I am trying to keep afloat with no clear template to compare it to is that I have to work on a dozen things at once as much as I can; I have to instrumentalize the most self-destructively productive parts of myself in order to move forward, because if I stop it starts to unravel.
I am a webcomics person; my work is only feasible because of the internet and the social structure of the internet is what allows it to be the way it is. I’m thinking a lot lately about how the internet is becoming more and more limited by corporate structures. It isn’t a vast strange space of individuals pursuing idiosyncratic work in high-context communities in quite the same way as it was ten years ago: now we engage with the internet by means of rigidly commodifying social media platforms. Everything feels increasingly desperate, and exploitative, and hostile to deep ideological or stylistic creativity. I don’t know what to do with this other than to try to be aware of it and move forward.
In this new context it feels like the work I do probably couldn’t have gotten any sort of foothold, audience-wise, had I started it just a couple of years later. And the work I’m doing now feels sometimes like it’s drifting even further from the sort of work that’s viable on the internet lately. I don’t know what to do with this either!
One way to move forward that practically everybody I know who came up around when I did has taken is to diversify and try to opt-in to this or that corporate structure, as the space for independent work has dried up. The First Second book is the first way I’ve really done that, and I’m extremely happy with how that process has gone– I have had to modulate or edit what I wanted to do with Island Book practically not at all, which is extremely rare. I’m optimistic that the American book-publishing world seems to be more aware of what comics can be, and more interested in expanding that space, even as independent work seems more treacherous.
I say all this just to outline some big feelings I’ve had over the past year or so about what pop culture is and what independent art is and what I’m actually doing. I am enormously grateful that I have an audience that’s invested in what I’m doing and seems to really Get it in a complicated way, in a cultural context in which that seems increasingly rare.
So anyway now I’m back in the thick of working on Vattu, at a slightly quicker pace than I’ve been able to for well over a year. Last year I wrote about how writing Vattu felt like exploring a space I’d built, but now it’s very different, as I approach the end of the third book and Plot starts to happen in a more focused way. The 45-page long sequence of Vattu returning home is something I’d been building up in my head since starting the comic in 2010; it felt like a way of reconnecting with my original intentions with the comic, and bringing to them everything else I’d built into it without meaning to over the course of it. Nothing turns out like you plan it if it takes you long enough to get there! I’ve been trying to learn how to lean into that, and be faithful to the plans I made in 2010 at the same time as the significance the story has to me as I’m working on it now.
There are two scenes left of The Tower & the Shadow, the third of four books of Vattu. I’d like to get a Kickstarter running pretty quickly after posting the end of it to get the physical version printed. The image at the top of this post is the title page for the book (with the matching pages from books 1 and 2). I am pretty happy with this one.
Thank you for reading
Vattu book 2 is debuting at CAKE in Chicago next weekend!
Chicago! The new Vattu book is debuting at CAKE this weekend!
Vattu 1102
