FAQ - Conversations With Greatness

What is Conversations With Greatness?

A web comic about the greatest thinkers of the 19th century acting like idiots.

Sure, but why?

Why not?

I started writing Conversations With Greatness in 2004, when I was an undergraduate in the Sociology department at McGill University. Mostly it was a way to blow off steam, make friends, and impress girls. (It accomplished at least one of those.)

Over the years, it also became a way to comment on politics, keep in touch with friends, and impress girls.

Wait, you've been doing this for twenty years?!

No, actually. I wound it up in October 2014. That whole tenth year was an incredibly meta, year-long arc to cap off the series with a finality that was both elegant and practical, because I never thought I'd come back to it again.

And yet here you are.

I don't think that was a question.

So why did you bring it back?

Oh, lots of reasons really, most of which I'll save for a memoir or a therapist. But mainly it seemed all of a sudden like a dumb web comic starring Karl Marx might have currency again. There's certainly a lot more material to work with now than at the end of 2014.

Plus, you know: blow off steam, keep in touch with friends. I've given up trying to impress girls.

Can I read the first ten years of comics?

No, unless you come round to my place for dinner and look at them on my laptop — and you're not invited.

Why not?

Because inviting strangers on the internet to your house for dinner is a bad idea.

No, I mean, why can't I read the first ten years of comics?

They were hosted on my old GoDaddy hosting, which I got rid of because it was very expensive and didn't even have SSL.

But couldn't you just upload them to your new hosting?

I could, but the files are mostly GIFs at 460 pixels wide, which look really crappy on today's high-resolution screens. Plus a lot of the punchlines obliquely reference obscure pop culture or political events that most people today wouldn't get. (I'm not even sure what I was going for in some of them.)

I'll probably still put some of the older ones back online at some point, but only once I've come up with a good way to do it.

Why are there no women in the comic?

Because the characters are all famous thinkers of the 19th century and generally speaking they didn't let women do that back then.

In the comic's original incarnation, I did have three female characters: Marx's wife, Marx's maid/mistress, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. But that seemed kind of problematic in its own, Bechdel-unfriendly way, so for this new incarnation I'm doing what Disney does with its racist old movies like Peter Pan: reproducing the sexist culture of this particular historical moment as an invitation to think about where discrimination comes from, and how these problematic patterns continue to play out in our modern world.

Why are all the comics numbered with Roman numerals?

It seemed like a good idea at the time.