Celebrating Rice Boy and Vattu: An Interview with Web Comic Creator Eric Dahm (Part Two)

Fans and Community

James Lee: Let me shift gears a little bit. The following questions fall under this umbrella of “finding your own people,” about community and audiences. So, to start off, is there an audience in mind when you were in which you tell your approach towards with your work?

Evan Dahm: I try to be extremely clear, and I try to make the storytelling engaging and have a “pull you forward” sort of way. I like working with extremely dense big ideas but part of what is appealing to me about storytelling is that I want to do that in a way that basically anybody can understand and that pulls you through it in an exciting sort of way. I'm trying to make it as entertainment effectively so that is kind of a way of having an audience in mind, but I don't have a particular audience in mind.

With The Island Book trilogy that I did for First Second Books, those are ostensibly for a middle grade audience, which is, I think, from 10 to 14. I guess I kept it kind of intentionally superficially simple, but I didn't think about that terribly much, and I don't really know how to think about that terribly much.

My sort of tastes don't tend to go in the direction of intense gore or violence or sexuality in terms of storytelling. So, though there's not a lot, I haven't had to think about it very much. And with most of the stuff that I want to do, part of the creative challenge to me is taking the big, complicated ideas I want to work with and making them work in a pop cultural register. That's as much as I think about it.

James Lee: I think those are good considerations, because when you start crafting towards your audience, then perhaps that changes how you think about the story and maybe compromises your own vision for it. With that in mind, though, there's this idea in business and media about the long tail.

In comics it often came up a while back as “1000 true fans” – that you only needed a thousand people who really support you to have you be able to do to work you want. How do you feel that kind of idea holds up especially after all these years with crowdfunding platforms and other shifts in the field?

Evan Dahm: I imagine that the numbers on that have changed somewhat, but that was exactly the sort of thing that made sense around when I was starting before Web 2.0. I have this experience a lot now over the past several years going to comic conventions and stuff where an awful lot of people tell me that they came to my work around 2010 or before 2010 which is great to see that people have been interested in what I'm doing for so long.

But the fact that it's a big percentage has a feeling of inertia or decreased momentum or something as if I got in with a certain type of world and now nobody else finds me so I've been trying to keep that in mind. But I want a big pop cultural footprint. I want people to read this stuff.

James Lee: I was one of those 2010 people.

Evan Dahm: Hey exactly. Did you go to a convention that I signed that or a show?

James Lee: I think it was maybe Comic-Con.

Evan Dahm: Cool.

James Lee: I don't know I lost track over all these years.

Evan Dahm: That's a very long time. Yeah the solution for independent people doing lo-fi art like comics is I think it's always going to be a small number of people who are very invested, especially if you're really doing your particular thing in the way that comics allow you to do more than other more expensive media, then your dream should be that you connect with the probably pretty small number of people who are totally on board with what you're doing now. Maybe that's not enough in every circumstance to support a career but that seems honest.

James Lee: Yeah, I'm starting to think maybe there's about X amount of people that supports the work which makes it sustainable and then maybe there's a smaller amount of people who really support it in a way that makes you feel motivated to keep doing it, let's say as like a community.

So, with that said, maybe to build on that, so something you raised in your documentary was that the actual work of making comics is quite depressive. You stare at a screen or paper all day alone oftentimes kind of get something out of your head. We can joke about this, about how long it actually takes to make comics and all the different skill sets you kind of need to do them as well. So, the question would be then what keeps someone going in comics work? Especially doing it independently. Why comics over something else like let's say the novel?

Evan Dahm: Working in a novel is appealing to me sometimes because it's so much more efficient. But for me the answer to that question for me is different from somebody starting out or whatever because what keeps me going is that first of all I've been doing it for so long that it feels like a native language in a way. But also, I know that I'm talking to an audience and that I'll hear something from somebody, and that people will read it. That's a big part of what keeps me going.

But also there's this trick you have to do where you become clear enough on what you want to make and have a sort of internal motivation to do it in exactly the way that you want to do, and then you have to sort of fool yourself into having faith in it and thinking that it's possible and thinking that you'll do it well, even if you're disappointed in every single step of it or whatever. There is a part of my brain constantly doing this sort of imposter syndrome, or down talking, or that sort of stuff. There's always a million ways to talk yourself out of doing something. But well first of all it's my career so I have to but also, I just sort of built the way that I think of this stuff around just not giving that any oxygen, I guess. And just sort of trying to look at it objectively like obviously you could talk yourself out of doing it. Obviously, all the things that I see wrong with a page that I've drawn in a certain light, those are objective faults, but I'm fucking doing it. This is the way it's going to get done, with these faults. I'm making a 1300-page comic book. It is what it is.

Would you mind if I disappear for one second?

James Lee: Okay sure.

Evan Dahm: We're back. Alright hello.

James Lee: Okay welcome back. Thank you, if this is running long just let me know and we can wrap things up.

Evan Dahm: I'm good.

James Lee: Okay, all right because I still got a bunch of questions here. So, I want to say that there are definitely people who support your work, so I think imposter syndrome will always be rearing its head, even if it's not warranted.

Evan Dahm: Yeah and it's the sort of thing where what is the circumstance in which it's warranted? I understand it as it's just a sort of narrativization that my brain does to talk about an anxiety thing. There is no reality that it could point towards so why give it any attention?

James Lee: Okay, so building on some of these themes, are there any communities you feel that you're a part of? Groups of friends not necessarily let's say webcomics like a webcomics community, though you can point to one if you feel like you are part of one, but in general as well.

Evan Dahm: Yeah, I don't know, I have a couple of a couple of good little sort of crowds that I'm a part of in my social world outside of being a comics person. I'm not extremely social. I'm becoming more comfortable at that fact as being at the age that I am or whatever. Within comics world I do feel very close to the sort of cohort of people that I met through webcomics who were all kind of around my age and started all around the time I did. Basically, we just sort of would see each other all the time and it became a little scene. It's funny how locked in time that is because people aren't doing the same thing now and the way that I was publishing then and the way that I met those people just doesn't really exist anymore.

James Lee: Yeah, how do you even meet people, especially at conventions now? It's all very chaotic and strange these days.

Evan Dahm: Yeah, I’m not good, I don't think I’ve ever been really good at that. I need like an intro, or I need like an angle to approach or something. I can be like a charming professional person, but I don't think I'm extremely social.

James Lee: Yes, all kinds of troubles we have to deal with as introverts. So, here's a question. You run a stream, The Ambiguity Program, in which you regularly curate and show different kinds of animated cartoons, mainly strange and off the beaten path things. So, what was the motivation for doing this?

Evan Dahm: I’ve always been sort of interested in that stuff, but I hadn't learned terribly much about it, or found very much of it. It was kind of a premise to do that, and it was fun to build a little space and do the trade dress and just have a show. I don't know. I started it shortly after the pandemic just as having a thing to do that was sort of abstractly social. And it's been exciting to learn more about the cartoons and stuff and it's been cool to talk to people and meet a lot of people by means of the Twitch chat or whatever, meet a lot of meet a lot of people there. That was fun. It's been fun. I feel like it's been good for my passive visual education, just to see so many different ways that drawings can look. That's good for me.

James Lee: Yeah, some of that clay animation stuff – I remember dropping into a few of them - it's really bizarre but interesting.

Evan Dahm: It feels good for you, doesn't it?

James Lee: Yeah, it's like “oh people did all sorts of crazy things and maybe I can be a little inspired by that too.”

Evan Dahm: I love that feeling.

James Lee: How is Twitch, by the way? When we think about different platforms. Do you feel it's new and strange? How has that experience been running a Twitch channel and engaging with people there?

Evan Dahm: There's a lot of it that I just haven't learned how it works. I feel like there's a whole culture of Twitch that I don't understand. There's all these different things that people can do with their streams that I haven't learned, but as a very straightforward way of just “I'm putting a thing on the stream and there's people in the chat that I can keep up with and talk to them,” that works great. I run the sound through a physical soundboard so I’ve tried to make as much of it as possible physical and outside of the computer just so I can wrap my head around it a little better, I guess. It's been pretty cool, I guess. Years and years ago I used to livestream drawing. I would have the webcam on my laptop aimed at the paper on some precursor streaming service to Twitch but that sort of thing has been just easy to do for 14 years or something.

James Lee: Yeah, it's like one of those things I feel a lot of artists kind of do, I guess to add some more variety to let's say their social media presence.

Evan Dahm: I haven't done streaming drawing in a while. It’s kind of stressful.

James Lee: Yeah, you got the live audience component, and you have to perform in a way.

Evan Dahm: Even if you're not performing, you're still kind of performing.