Retconversations With Greatness

For pretty much my entire twenties, I wrote a web comic starring Karl Marx and a variety of other nineteenth century thinkers. This seemed like a pretty normal thing to do, for a millennial living in the early 2000s and making his way through an undergraduate degree in sociology followed by a master's degree in creative writing. People even told me they enjoyed it occasionally, and they seemed to be sincere.

By the time I hit my thirties, though (and the mid-2010s), it began to seem like kind of a silly thing to still be spending time on, and I wrapped it up with a novelist's zest for finality: with Marx and most of the rest of them blinking out of existence and into irrelevance.

A few people told me at the time that they were disappointed to see the comic finish, and a few people over the years have asked me if I ever planned to bring it back — a question I've always answered with a definitive "no". Having gone to all the trouble of plotting out that neat ending, why would I revive the comic? How would I revive it? The main characters literally didn't exist anymore. Besides, if it had seemed silly for a thirty-something to be writing a web comic about Karl Marx in the mid-2010s, how much more ridiculous would it be for a forty-something to be doing it in the post-COVID era?

If you've read the rest of my (sporadic) blog posts here, though, you'll know that about a year ago I had the revelation that I was proud of a lot of the stuff I did in my twenties, and that I missed having some of those low-key creative outlets. (Call it a midlife crisis if you like, though I think resurrecting a blog is a lot tamer than whatever it is Leonardo DiCaprio is doing.) You'll also know that writing a blog post these days takes me a lot of time, because I want them to be good and I don't want them to be so hot-take that they inadvertently offend someone — so as a creative outlet, blogging again has scratched an itch but only intermittently.

The web comic, though — because it was all pre-made sprites and all I had to do was add a few dozen words of dialogue — was always quick to do: get an idea in the shower, have the comic finished by the end of breakfast. And, rightly or wrongly, it feels much harder to inadvertently offend someone with words you put in the mouth of an avatar of Karl Marx than an opinion you take the trouble to express yourself.

More to the point, though, compared to the relative sanity and prosperity of 2014, when the original comic ended, the post-pandemic, Trussonomics, Musk-Trump presidency world of 2024 seemed to be crying out for a bit of under-the-radar Marxist web comic critique. The CEO of a health insurance company literally got shot in the back in broad daylight and all anyone in America could talk about was how hot the the shooter was. You have nothing to lose but your chains!

So earlier this month I decided to do it: I decided to look at what it would practically take to bring Conversations With Greatness back. And as soon as started playing around with it again, I knew I had to. It was fun. It felt relevant. And it didn't require too much heavy lifting in the retcon department to bring all the main characters back again.

If it's anything like the first decade, I expect hardly anyone will read it, and as a result, much like this blog, it's largely a creative outlet for me rather than something that's going to change the world. But, also like the first decade, when individual comics made it onto Reddit, onto the Hairpin, onto German academic usenets, every now and then the new incarnation might get something just right enough that it gets shared around more widely. It might make a few people laugh. It might make a few people wonder.

And if it doesn't? Well, at least I'm not buying a sports car and chasing women half my age.

You can always read the latest comic at www.andrewladd.com/cwg.