So there’s Dicebox, a sprawling science-fiction epic about Griffen and Molly, a pair of itinerant workers and/or space bums carousing from planet to planet in search of food, shelter, old friends, and work.

But it still costs money in the real world, which may be one of the reasons it’s taken so long for Jenn Manley Lee’s Dicebox, which is among other things a luminously colored webcomic, to see print. Another factor, surely, was Lee’s determination to wait until she had drawn the entire 300-page first volume of her planned four-volume epic before publishing. But now, with the help of a healthy pre-order campaign, the stars have aligned, and Dicebox Book 1: Wander is a thing that exists and makes the universe better.ĭicebox is one of those comics that make me grateful for the Internet, because it’s hard to imagine concepts this unique surviving and thriving anywhere else. Can you imagine a print comics publisher hearing a cold pitch for, say, Dylan Meconis’s Family Man-it’s sort of a werewolf comic, see, except there’s only occasionally wolves or witchcraft, and it’s mostly about religious conflicts in 18 th century Bavarian academia-and wanting to touch it with a ten-foot pole? Or, hell, would any publisher have dreamed of considering Thurberesque comic strips about historical figures, with punchlines that require a deep familiarity with everything from Regency novelists to midcentury Canadian politics, until Kate Beaton showed the world how much it wanted exactly that? This is what the Internet is for: ideas too good to make it past an editor. That, and cat photos. As Jason Shiga once said, on the Internet color is free.

Dicebox book kickstarter