Read 3rd Voice
Posting about A Garden of Spheres a few days ago made me realize that I forgot to mention that I read 3rd Voice for the first time a little over a month ago - and I liked it a lot, too!
Seeing these two mentioned closely together may give you some idea of what type of comics appeal to me, haha.
I've been reading Evan Dahm's work since I was in college and he was still actively updating Rice Boy. 3rd Voice is a new setting/"IP" he launched within the last few years, and he recently also released the first physical volume of the comic. I'd put off reading it until there was a book out.
Dahm's older work, particularly the very ancient Rice Boy stuff, has this really interesting resistance to genre - it's clearly fantasy, but so singular in its preoccupations that it's a bit difficult to compare to any other fantasy comics I've enjoyed. His environments are often very alien, full of weird plants and critters; there's a Scavengers-like vibe to a lot of his work. He peoples those worlds with weird blobby humanoid monster-guys. Lots of the people in his worlds look like newts or turtles or dogs. But they're usually not those things, and it's not always very similar to a furry aesthetic. I'd characterize the people he puts in his weirder worlds as friendly-looking aliens - critters with big, expressive faces, giant eyes, and lots of teeth.
In college, I enjoyed his work because it seemed so disinterested in the fantasy preoccupations of the time. After I graduated, he got started with Vattu, which I enjoyed a lot, but fell off actively reading every update as it went out. Vattu is a kind of sociological??? fantasy, about the stresses between a group of cultures and species living within an imperial capital. It spends an awful lot of time on the cultural and religious practices of those groups. Sometimes, it seems primarily interested in exploring the way its characters understand their own culture and identity. It's an interesting read, but it didn't quite grab me the way his earlier work had done.
3rd Voice makes a sharp turn toward fantasy adventure, which I find refreshing. It's still got a ton of material about its characters discovering various alien cultures and learning about their practices, but it's quite a bit pacier... and the protagonists have strong personalities, mysterious pasts, and, like, cryptic magic knowledge and shit. To me, it's a very appealing mix of all the different preoccupations Dahm's work has focused on over the last two decades. The setting is also extremely different from his previous work - fewer of the characters seem designed after animals, the world is explicitly post-apocalyptic, and the fantasy stuff is a bit more similar to fantasy storytelling you've seen elsewhere.
Also, one of the characters gets everywhere riding a strange sort of road bike with drop bars, which is hilarious. I really love it. What a cool bike!!
It feels like a very deliberate evolution of a lot of his earlier work, which is always fun to see someone doing successfully. And the printed book is really nice, too!! I'm glad I got it!