SPX Haul 2025: Reviews Part 4
Spondule and Navichet don't have a posse.
Back in September, I traveled down to Bethesda, Maryland and picked up a whole host of comics. Some are long, some are short. Not sure if all are good as I haven't read most of them. That's what we're here to find out. As I read through my pile, I'll be typing up reviews and sending them out. Some installments might have a few, some may have one. All depends on how much I feel I need to write and how many I've read.
In this third installment, I once again go back to a comic I've talked about before, but this time I have a print copy.
3rd Voice
I’ve talked about “3rd Voice” a few times since Evan launched it back in 2022. It recently began its third book but I won’t be talking about that or the second here. No, this is all about Book 1, which I picked up in hard copy form and could not be more delighted by. Getting to re-read this whole section in one go, at a speed not mediated by loading times, set my brain alight and made me all the more energized to read the current chunks.
It’s a refreshingly vague comic, concerned not with lore or a grand adventure or a big bad to defeat or a romance to be had. We, generally, follow Spondule and Navichet, two Gleaners (junk collectors…kinda….sorta) who traverse the wastes, going from keep to keep selling and trading what they find to make ends meet. The two met up…at some point (again, refreshingly vague) and seem to have a close yet slightly adversarial relationship. Or at least Spondule has this attitude, hot head that he is.
All of this is set against the backdrop of a fantasy world post-industrial collapse (the end of the Engine Age,) where vast swaths of the world are enveloped by The Bleach. Fears of the atomic age and of our current environmental eradication mix and match within. A world full of people (all wonderfully non-human and varied and simple and fantastical) trying to survive, to live, within the fragmentation.
Book 1 aka 1st Passage comes in three parts: a short prologue (Argument) followed by the bulk of the book, which is divided into two main sections: the sojourn in Ansporruk (and subsequent fleeing) and the escape from Xundítriggar’s cult. Technically, Dahm only creates two delineations - Argument and 1st Passage. Reading it as a unit, there’s a clear shift from one to the next, even if reasons for the fleeing from Ansporruk directly lead to their capture and escape from the cult.
1st Passage is Navichet’s story. It’s easy to assume Spondule, by virtue of his loud, large personality, would be the prime mover. He certainly talks the most and doesn’t lack for narrative threads. Navichet, though, gets the arc. She steals the book from the cultists - different cultists than Xundítriggar’s; these worship the Bleach. She drives the action through her covetousness of the book and the information within, forcing them to flee this keep just as the last one, now with a bounty hunter on their tail.
It is her hubris and curiosity that causes problem after problem and ends up placing her at the center of Xundítriggar’s cult’s attention, which eventually leads to the calling down of a god onto this planet in an abandoned mine (well, it’s a giant hole in the ground at least.) She is left with a milky eye, scarred with knowledge and more cautious - if I knew my Edda a little better, I might be able to elucidate the Odin comparisons more - though no less voracious in her hunger.
Now that I mention the Edda, Dahm seems to be positioning “3rd Voice” as if it were one of those manuscripts. As is we had found this story, in fragments and larger chunks. A long-ago, far-away work, requiring translation and mediation to grasp the intricacies. The language, full of archaic phrasing and “O”s, frequently has editors notes containing the “original words” for which the translation potentially loses the ambiguous or multi-layered meanings as well as those meanings themselves.
Know, O Reader, that this is only the beginning. That this object, this tome gilded with purple, is but one entry to an Age undreamt of. Let us become one of the dreamers and rejoice.
Elias Rosner
Elias Rosner
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