Posted by Jim at August 28th, 2004

I’d always intended to make commenting about online comics a regular feature of this blog. As with many things I’ve intended to do, I haven’t gotten around to it. Consider this post a down payment on good intentions (which pave the road to Hell?).

Note: In the process of telling people about the premise of this comic, I’m going to give away the major point of tension in the first chapter and possibly other minor points later on. So, if things sound interesting and you don’t want to know much about the comic before you start reading, stop reading as soon as you can.

Wish3 is a comic written by Sylvia T. Leung, a student in Digital Media at the Otis College of Art.

It’s about Basil, a high school student who discovers he’s the recipient of the family curse. The curse is that the third son of a third son can make three wishes, but, after the third wish will either go mad or die. Worse, he discovers that his family already knows about the wishes, is planning to have him make one wish for each of them, and didn’t tell him about the consequences.

The comic is about his attempt to break the curse before he (accidentally or intentionally) makes the third wish. Assisting him is one of his brothers, a friend, and a spirit associated with his family.

The art seems good (at least to me, a person untrained in drawing), though I sometimes find the fight scenes a little confusing. I’m guessing that this is because the story is drawn to fit print style comic pages as opposed to the web. In fact, like many an online comic writer, she’s selling print versions of her work.

The plot and characters feel real to me. We’ll see how things develop before I can really say what I think about that. Still, it feels right so far.

The author used to update quite sporadically owing to an understanding of copyright law which seemed to indicate that she would have to register each page separately if she published them separately. At $20 per page, it would get expensive. Thus, she updated a chapter at a time.

Now she’s updating weekly. I’m not sure what changed, but I’m assuming it turns out that she can probably copyright each chapter at once.

Whatever may be the case, I recommend the comic. As someone who enjoys history (real or imagined), I enjoy watching the characters find out about Basil’s family’s past in an attempt to learn how the curse came about and how to end it.

Of course, I tend to enjoy stories in which the characters slowly discover the causes of the situation they’re in and then can use that knowledge to solve the problem. That’s a pretty good description of most role playing games I’ve run. Judging from the forum, however, it seems pretty likely that the comic appeals to more people than just me.

It deserves to.