Conventional Wisdom

Okay, this one’s going to take a bit of explaining. A lot of Conventional Wisdom owes its existence to an impossibly nerdy cartooning project I embarked on back in college. I was in a Humanities course called The History of Ideas, which was basically many semesters of reading lots and lots of historically significant works. A few weeks into my first semester, I got possessed to slip into the classroom early and drew a little cartoon about the current reading (The Illiad) on the chalkboard. It was a big hit, and I ended up spending the next four years drawing a new cartoon for every class. Unfortunately, not every historically significant text is teeming with comedic potential (at least not when you’re doing last minute reading at 2am). So, to cover the times when I couldn’t think of something funny to draw about Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or whatever, I started making up cute mascot characters to draw as filler comics. Scribbles came first, but I had the entire mascot cast (sans Miffy) worked out by the end of my second year. Eventually, I compiled versions of the first year’s worth of comics into a book and sold copies on campus. Well, apparently a fellow student from those days recognized those mascots on the cover of my Conventional Wisdom books, ran home to find his copy of the History of Ideas book, and brought it for me to sign. Most of you probably couldn’t care less about that little story, but it was CRAZY AWESOME for me.

It was also strangely awesome to flip through those old comics and realize just how far I’ve come as an artist over the past decade. Yes, these sloppy doodles you see before you are actually an IMPROVEMENT.