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

About this episode

Rolf Potts and Cedar Van Tassel discuss creativity, comics, and personal development.

“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 Tassel (@appleguy_comix) is the author of Appleguy and Beefwood, which was published by the iconic Montreal comics press Drawn & Quarterly in May of 2026. A lifelong plant and prairie lover, he does work on…

People in this episode

Host: Rolf Potts

Guest: Cedar Van Tassel

Topics covered

• creativity
• comics
• webcomics
• artistic process
• personal development

Keywords

• creativity
• comics
• webcomics
• Cedar Van Tassel
• Rolf Potts

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Drawn & Quarterly

Books & works: Appleguy, Beefwood, Souvenir, The Misadventures of Wenamun, Calvin and Hobbes, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

Places: Great Plains

More episodes of Deviate

• What movies (do and don't) show us about places before we travel there · May 5, 2026 · 42 min
• Exploring the idiosyncrasies of male friendship, with Andrew McCarthy · April 8, 2026 · 51 min
• Debunking the mythology of BEFORE SUNRISE, with co-writer Kim Krizan (in Paris) · March 10, 2026 · 38 min
• Super Bowl special: Why football kind of matters, with Chuck Klosterman (kind of) · February 5, 2026 · 46 min
• Time is your truest form of wealth (and travel helps you embrace your riches) · January 8, 2026 · 58 min
• Kansas Never Plays Itself: How movies lie when they take us places · December 16, 2025 · 1h 14m