Linkspam: Unspeakable Conversations

( Content Warning: Eugenics, Euthanasia, Peter Singer )

Webcomic Recommendation: Digger

I was trying to avoid dealing with my line edits yesterday, and the avoidance behaviour eventually stretched out to the point of reading all seven hundred and something pages of Ursula Vernon's webcomic Digger. Despite it winning the Hugo for Best Graphic Story in 2012 (at which point it had completed its arc) I'd somehow managed to miss it before now. Actually that may not be entirely true, the first half dozen pages seemed slightly familiar, it may be I looked at it and wasn't taken by them. I should have stuck with it, because it really is some of the best web-comics writing and world development I've seen.

Our title character, Digger, or Digger of Unnecessarily Convoluted Tunnels if we're being formal, is a wombat. A five foot or so, fully intelligent wombat, from a civilization of wombats, who digs a tunnel one day (this being what wombats do) , hits some bad earth and comes out she knows not where. Well, actually she knows it's in a temple of Ganesh, the statue of the god tells her so, but where that temple is is nowhere she's ever heard of. And heading back down that tunnel is contra-indicated as there's definitely magic involved. (No decent wombat gets themself involved with either gods or magic, so this whole scenario is a problem for Digger).  So Digger's stuck trying to work out a way home, and what the magicked tunnel means, with the help of the local population. Which includes said intelligent statue of Ganesh, the local hag (19), who keeps patching her up, Murai, a teenage priest/religious warrior with a somewhat tenuous grasp on sanity after her previous mission (actually PTSD might be a better label, but it's presented as a sanity issue), and a nameless outcaste intelligent hyena. Helping or hindering as the mood takes them are Jhalm, head of the local religious warriors, and a tribe of intelligent hyena hunter-gatherers. And then there's the Shadowchild, a talking shadow that keeps approaching Digger for moral guidance, and then disappearing half-way through the explanation. Not to mention a back-up cast of soothsaying slugs, trolls, shrews and vampiric vegetables.

The individual character arcs, and the way they are developed out of the world-building and mythology are really fantastic. Digger is just utterly practical, Murai is badly broken, but desperate to do the right thing, and the nameless outcaste hyena who becomes Digger's closest friend is equally broken, utterly lonely and just trying to survive. Grim Eyes and Boneclaw Mother, two hyenas introduced later in the story, are equally as good.

If I've got a criticism, it's that the ending is very abrupt. There are reasons for the main story ending suddenly, but I'd have spent a bit more time on the epilogue.

The artwork is black and white (apart from the intermittent coloured covers for the different printed volumes) and is always at least good, while some of the black-dominated scenes, where effectively you're drawing with white, are quite spectacularly good.

Content warning for domestic violence. Well handled,  but utterly, utterly tragic.

(Oh, and I got to the line-edits eventually).