Conventional Wisdom

(Historical Notes: Oh man, how’s THIS for a dated comic?  Remember back when we all thought 2016 was going to be the legendarily bad year?  Or when we though world-shattering badness could even be restricted to a single year at all?  Or that everything being soul-crushing awful was somehow a temporary aberration and not the default state of the universe?  Or that there was even the slightest chance that your life might ever know a fleeting moment of happiness instead of this ever-deepening spiral of humiliation and failure that somehow manages to get even worse with every passing minute and will NEVER EVER EVER END?!?!?!?!? …did I drag that bit out a bit too long?  Heck, this was the short version, and I STILL feel like I went a bit too hard.

But to be serious for a moment, MAGFest 2017 feels like the point where Conventional Wisdom really turned a corner.  I won’t repeat myself on how badly the 2016 schedule burned me out, suffice it to say that this was my first convention after all that, the first one I went into with a clear notion that SOMETHING about how I did con trips and comics had to change.  In fact, MAGFest 2017 would be the start of me NOT posting the entire set of convention comics all in one giant update.  It was out of desperation rather than any grand plan, and I only broke the update into a couple of large chunks instead of one page a week, but it was still a step in the right direction.  Unfortunately, it ALSO saw me desperately try to cram as many pages in as humanly possible, largely because I felt guilty about the updates taking so long and wanted to make sure it was worth the wait.  Is there a non-video game equivalent to “feature creep”?  If so, that’s totally what happened here.  Of course, the extra workload only made things take even LONGER, and thus the burnout only got worse.  But we’ll get into that later.  For now, let’s dig into what I THINK is the longest Conventional Wisdom update in the comic’s entire history.  I mean, there’s no way I’ll ever do anything this long AGAIN…)