Lee drops the reader into the middle of this world, letting the characters meander along making long conversation but never explaining too much. It took many readers a long time just to figure out that the tall, lanky, flat-chested Griffen is a woman, and Lee let that information percolate for a couple of hundred pages before casually letting drop that Griffen and Molly are a married couple. Which is not to say they don’t have sex with other people. Griffen is sarcastic, circumspect, and coolly intelligent Molly is warm, playful, and wounded. Molly periodically sees eerie, cryptic visions, which can get confusing, since Griffen, Molly, and their many friends and enemies live in a world that can be as weird to a 21 st-century reader as any psychic hallucination. Hell, there are times when even Molly has trouble telling the difference. Griffen and Molly are both running from Pasts, and as Book One unfolds it becomes clear that Griffen, who used to move in surprisingly powerful circles for someone currently working odd jobs as a mechanic or stable hand, has the kind of past that could get them killed. Which is why Book Two, currently running online, is subtitled Chase. 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.
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