Designing a creative life on your own terms (with Cedar Van Tassel)

“A joke is kind of like a little life-lesson in addition to being funny. If your joke is really good, there's a little nugget of truth in it.” – Cedar Van Tassel In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Cedar discuss why kids want to be paleontologists and astronauts, and the existential "book" Cedar wrote when he was four (2:00); how Cedar got started reading comics, which ones were his favorites, and his own early comics projects (8:00); the golden age of webcomics, and how Appleguy got started (16:00); the world of Appleguy and Beefwood, and its "roadside attraction" and other geographical subplots (24:00); how Cedar went from drawing an Instagram comic to having a book of comics published by a major North American indie comics publisher, and what his creative process looks like (37:30); and Cedar's four pieces of creative advice: 1) Be opportunistic; 2) Give yourself some rules; 3) Don't torture yourself; 4) People will find your interest in something interesting. Cedar Van T...