Navied Mahdavian

every artist will say their medium is the highest art form, but they're wrong, because cartooning is the highest art form, because you can say so much with so little, and with just like a few lines, you can express happiness and smugness and sadness.

Because every time I am drawing something, I mean, I find that I'm recreating the cartoon on my face, like I'm trying, I'm expressing it on my face, exactly, contouring my face as I'm drawing it, and there's constant like the erasing, and until I get that expression.

One of the things I like about it and being here at TED Next is the intersections between, like when I was asked to sit down with you, I was like, I'm going to be talking to a doctor.

I don't know.

Like, I don't know what I'm going to be talking about.

But then as I started thinking about it, like realizing that there were those overlaps.

I was going to make a joke about the demon, where it makes it sound much more dramatic, but I think the demon is this desire to be liked, and for people to laugh at what I'm doing.

But the book and the cartoons are really different, because the cartoons, you're just doing one after another, and you just kind of turn them out.

You find something that's funny, and then they're inevitably going to be rejected at the end of the week after I've submitted.

And then you just move on, where the book is a much larger...

project and uh so the book that i wrote this country searching for home in very rural america i mean that was a project that from its inception to publication was about three years which is a very different process than the cartoon that you know i think of something funny about dog butts draw it send it out and then just move on to the next um cartoon uh idea but

I don't know if there's ever this excising or like reaching a point of completion, like the book was finished, but even

In the process of drawing it, there's the, like, getting the 10,000 hours in, where the beginning of the book to the end of the book, comparing it, the drawing, like, style at the end is better.

And I've spoken to other artists about this, the frustration that when you're working on something long, where, like, you are just always getting better at what you're doing because it's a craft, and then wanting to go back.

And, like, I wish I could go back and redraw those.

But then inevitably, then that would look better than the end.

And I feel like that process is just...

It's a constant.

And so maybe that's the demon.

It's just the never being satisfied with what you're doing.