WEBCOMIC WEDNESDAY REVIEW: Rice Boy

Hello, everyone! I’m Aaron, and I’m back again to bring you your next favorite webcomic (hopefully)! Please, if you have any feedback, leave it here in the comments or contact me on Twitter (@Sully_Writes). And as always, if you have or know of a webcomic that you’d like to see reviewed, reach out and let me know!

I’d also like to give a big thanks to The Webcomic Whisperer for this week and the last week’s recommendations. Check out the blog here for more great webcomics!

Creator: Evan Dahm
Webcomic: Rice Boy

Summary: Rice Boy is a fantasy comic that follows the adventures of the titular character, the chosen “Fulfiller” for an ancient prophesy that few denizens of the world Overside hold onto any longer. Along the way, Rice Boy must explore a world that he hardly understands, while the fallout from millennia of false prophets hangs in the air around him.

Story: Rice Boy features one of the greatest weird-fantasy (I don’t know if that’s a genre, but I’m going to coin it) stories that I have read in webcomics. The characters and the world have incredible depth to them. There is rich history that lies just beneath a surface only scratched at. Due to the fact that I read a considerable number of pages in one sitting in order to complete a review, I sometimes find myself loosing focus and begin to skim through the comic of the week, especially one with this many pages. However, with Rice Boy, I found myself baffled that I had clicked through hundreds of pages without ever realizing how much time had passed. I enjoyed it that much.

The creativity, not only in the world but in the very voices of the characters, is engrossing and it is difficult to stop reading once you’ve started. Rice Boy does fantasy in a way that feels like a mash between Saga and Adventure Time (I don’t think I can give a higher compliment than that for a fantasy adventure comic), while keeping a up a tone of melancholy and a world of intrigue.

Art: The art of Rice Boy is simple, but it is simple done well. Evan Dahm makes up his own rules and adheres to them, creating expressiveness and empathy in character made up of only a few simple shapes. The illustrated world is soft, rounded, and above all; strange. The fantastic elements really hit home in this comic.

If anything could bear improving, it would be the lettering, which occasionally becomes muddled. The panel breakdowns also aren’t the most dynamic or out-there, but they fit the style and the storytelling. There is nothing wrong with the art, but aside from the creativity, it isn’t groundbreaking. It is not laden with detail, but perhaps it shouldn’t be.

Conclusion: Rice Boy is an easy winner, with the story all wrapped up in a neat little bow. I’m not sure who specifically that I would recommend it to, but I would definitely recommend it. Check this story out and I don’t think that you’ll be disappointed. In the end, I give Rice Boy…