Core Curriculum
Boston University’s Core Curriculum was “a great-books style sequence of courses interweav[ing] the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences into a single structured curriculum,” and, during my two years in Core, I became very involved in the program. In addition to serving as a editor of the Core Journal, I also did designwork, including two Core t-shirt designs. The picture above, a collage of all things Core from robots to Leviathans, was designed as a poster for for the Core Journal, but the Dean was such a fan it became the 2004 Core T-shirt design. (The prophet and sybil reading atop the column of Core was designed after as a result, and it’s one of my favorite doodles ever.)
Journal of the Core Curriculum
Published annually by Boston University, the Core Journal is a multi-disciplinarian collection of art, poetry, scholarly papers, and essays. I served on the journal for two years, serving as Editor-in-Chief in 2005. For that fourteenth edition, we chose a theme evoking travel journals, i.e., something out of Gulliver’s Travels, thus the fantastically map on the cover. Running the journal was a fun albeit taxing experience; my designwork highlight was including a flipbook Greek trireme at the bottom of each page. As one flipped through the book, the trireme sailed across the page, collided into another ship and sank. No one ever seems to notice these sorts of things in publications, but I love them!
The Adventures of Team Joe
Back when I was young and had better hair, I was bold enough to start my own fan club. Of course, a fan club requires a comic book, and so for a half decade and nine issues, I wrote and illustrated the most non-sensical comic book a teenage boy with delusions of creative grandeur can concoct. I always wanted to get to issue ten, and jobless after college, I set about doing one final issue that treated the previous nine issues as a fever-dream of my comic-book alter ego. In the end, it took me another five years just to draw this all-encompassing cover for the project. Maybe the next time I face extended unemployment, I’ll return to the (mis)adventures of Team Joe.