That last one is a bit of a joke, of course, but the others in that list are true. how to brew a good cauldron of druid beer.It takes all of the best aspects of Jeff Smith’s Bone – the black and white art, the relateable main character, the epic mythology, the length – and piles on deadpan humour, pathos, even more kick-ass female characters, and such difficult-to-address topics as… God, there’s so much to love about Digger. But it was really a recent episode of the SF Squeecast that spurred me to buy the whole thing. I was delighted when it won, as I had fond memories of the opening chapters. I let that question stew in my head for years, only for the comic to reappear on my radar with the 2012 Hugo nomination slate.

Talking wombats! Hyenas! Gods! Really foreboding, distinctive black and white art! How would the title character, a lost (but eminently pragmatic and capable) wombat, return home?

Despite that, it still occupied a place in the back of my mind. I’d heard about it through another comic – I think through Bruno by Christopher Baldwin. At that point, it was only a few chapters in, and once I hit the paywall for the comic, I didn’t go any further. All quite normal, really.ĭigger first appeared on my radar back when I was in university. Rath is far, far away from home, and it appears that someone, somehow, had been planning for that tunnel to be created for a long time – someone who wanted to escape into the world above-ground. Now Digger and her new-found companions – including an outcast hyena, a child made of shadows, a shrew-turned-pirate-turned-professional-troll, and a traumatized monk – are entering very dangerous territory involving prophecies and undead gods.Īnd, oh yeah: there are the usual fantasy elements like oracular slugs, winged librarian rats, and vampire squash. Unfortunately, that tunnel was much longer than anyone expected.

She hit a pocket of bad air while tunneling, and got so turned around that when she unexpectedly emerged from the floor of the temple of Ganesh in the backwater town of Rath, she did so with relief. Like, say, when you read a single-volume collection of an awesome, epic webcomic that was originally published over the course of six years.ĭigger-of-Unnecessarily-Convoluted-Tunnels is a wombat. But sometimes, sometimes, you get the opportunity to see that growth as it happens. Most of the time, this change is imperceptible because it happens page by page and panel by panel. As they grow, so do the creators behind them.

Digger the complete omnibus edition