Welcome to Graphic Policy’s spotlight on webcomics, where we take a look at one of the many comics available online: Webcomics Weekly (but don’t be fooled by the “weekly” part of the title; the feature may happen more or less frequently than that). We’re defining webcomics as any comics published online for free consumption by the general public that doesn’t require a  subscription service.

This week we’re taking a look at Rising Sand. The strip is created by Ty Dunitz and Jenn Lee, who was kind enough to answer a few questions for us about the webcomic below.

Graphic Policy: In a nutshell, can you tell us what the strip’s about?

Ty Dunitz: The sun is falling from the sky, and a group reluctant friends are going to try to stop it, to keep their world from literally burning up—assuming they even can.

GP: How often do you update?

TD: Our schedule has typically seen us release a new page each Wednesday. However, due to some recent injuries to each of our respective drawing hands, we’ve had to temporarily slow to two pages a month. Making a comic with visuals as detailed as RS comes with some serious stakes, and we’re unfortunately learning our limits the hard way.

GP: How long have you been producing the strip?

TD: Jenn and I launched RS just over a year ago. Preproduction began several months before that.

GP: Where did the idea for the strip come from?

TD: My first love is lore. I really enjoy concepts that take the time to consider minutae, that the reader can zoom in and out of like a fractal without it falling apart. Rising Sand‘s world of Erj, as such a concept, was initially an exercise to sharpen my worldbuilding skills—my original aim was to create a roleplaying game, as a sandbox for people to tell their own stories. As the project developed, however, I realized it might be fun to first tell one of my own. Briefly, the plan was to write RS as a novel, but Jenn convinced me otherwise… and, here we are. While presented as a colourful, animated friends-on-the-road adventure, RS is ultimately just a cynical coping mechanism for my anxiety about death. That possibly has yet to be made clear on the page, but… we’ll get there.

ADDITIONAL LINKS
RS on Twitter
Ty on Twitter
Jenn on Twitter
RS Patreon

Why it’s awesome: On the About page on Rising Sand‘s website, there’s a fantastic blurb that you’ll find pasted below that pulled me right into the story with an almost unnatural ease.

Erj is a world kept alight by a sun that has orbited faithfully since recorded memory—and now, that faith is faltering.

A band of extraordinarily unlikely heroes will try and keep the sky itself from falling while facing threats they could never have imagined.

So, you know, the usual.

There’s an incredible amount of great content to read through, with a wonderful aesthetic to each page (which you can have a look at below). Honestly, I’ve seen comics from the Big Two that struggle to compare to this, frankly wonderful webcomic. At this point, I haven’t read every page of the story, but what I have read I’ve really enjoyed – there’s around 50 pages of story content uploaded, which you can read in a pretty decent amount of time, so I highly recommend you check this story out. It’s so much fun.

Below you’ll find three pages originally posted to the site.

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