What Am I Doing Here?

Or Celebrating The Tangled Habitrail Of Creative Life

It’s a question I ask myself every day I decide to put clothes on. Which is quite often. Usually it’s asked in my head, or as a whisper to an empty room. Sometimes it’s directed towards my wife, Liz, or to my cats, Mucho and Honeybear — although at this point I’ve given up asking Honeybear. She’s exhausted. She’s spent the better part of the last twelve years dealing with my creative handwringing. Because that’s what it is. The scalp-raking, seat-shifting, face-grabbing anxiety that comes with making something out of nothing. Even now as I type these words I worry that none of this is hanging together… Hold on, I need to find a cat.

My career, if you can call it that, looks less like a straight shot up some corporate ladder and more like a crooked rabbit warren: full of dead ends, scratch marks and the occasional development deal. I’ve drawn cartoons for The New Yorker, written jokes for Norm Macdonald and sold a TV show about a tech company built on a gateway to hell. I’ve been a Sundance Institute Fellow, part of their YouTube New Voices Lab, and I’ve tinkered on hundreds of oddball projects, pitches and performances in between. Lately I’ve been writing short stories and children’s books, some published, some soon to be published, some I’m still working out. All the while I’m asking myself… what am I doing here? Why am I drawing penguins on a whiteboard for this room full of first graders? What am I trying to say with this book about aliens and robots and pizza? And what sort of misbegotten brain fart is going to pull me out of bed (fully clothed, obviously) tomorrow?

So what am I doing here, on Substack? For one, I’m lonely. Oh sure, I’ve got friends and a fantasy football league and alcohol, but when it comes to the creative part of my life, it’s pretty solitary. And, to an extent, it has to be. Here’s one inveterate doodler that put it about as cleanly as you can…

“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” - Pablo Picasso

No cap, Cubist. If you want to make something good, you need alone time. But it isn’t sustainable. Humans crave connection. And for me, a cartoonist, connection is key to filling the (okay Lars, this is it. Time to coin a phrase that you’re going to return to again and again to discuss the reservoir of ideas necessary for creative synthesis. Better make it good.) thought bog of your mind. (Oh God.)

How do you fill the thought bog? Conversation. Eavesdropping. Wondering aloud. Reading widely. In short, taking in as much of this world as you can in order to make sense of it. Or at least enough so that a decent cartoon idea crawls out of the bog, all slimy and gross and stuff.

So, reason number one is connecting with you to fill my (and hopefully your) thought bog. Reason number two? I love this format. Don’t get me wrong, I love sharing on instagram and I always will, but I’ve realized that there are some things I want to say that need more space than an insta caption allows. Substack takes me back to the 00’s when I was obsessed with the blogosphere. I’d ramble through the Blogspot backcountry, peeking in on different lives shared via personal essays, stories, travelogues, pizza reviews, strange obsessions. And while I don’t remember all the details now, I do remember how I felt back then. Relaxed. Curious. Engaged. And not the kind of algorithmic engagement we talk about now, I mean pulled in. The pace was slower, the focus was deeper and the experience was enlivening. That’s what I’d like to recreate with this Substack.

“Dude, are you going to land this plane or what?” — Pablo Picasso

Right, yes, sorry Pablo.

So why The Althing? The Althing was an annual Viking Age assembly of Iceland’s people and chieftains to enact laws and settle disputes, but it was also a gathering. A place where you would share news, gossip, hear music, see art and even engage in pagan rituals (stay tuned for my paid tiers).

But this is more than just a nod to my Viking heritage — I want that eclectic spirit to live here. Because when I look back through the rabbit warren of my career I realize now that all those tunnels (cartooning, writing, kids books, comics, etc.) are connected.

I don’t want to just dump cartoons on you once a month. Nor do I want to firehose you with picture book palace intrigue (although, juicy). I want to share all of it. Rejected toons, in-process drawings, stories I’m wrestling with, promising starts and so-terrible-they’re-hilarious ideas. We’ll take a peek behind the curtain of what it means to make a children’s book. What it is to create a New Yorker cartoon. And celebrate the fact that the creative path is a circuitous one. That no tunnel is dug in vain.

So welcome to The Althing. I’m excited to go down this rabbit hole together.

“Okay, for real, what am I doing here?“