The Power of Discovery

Not All Treasure is Silver or Gold

Once the schoolyard days are over, knowledge is no longer the currency of the realm. (Unsurprisingly, currency is the currency of the grown-up world.) But fortunately for all of us, some people never outgrow their thirst for knowledge. For some, the thirst just continues to grow.

Melvin Goodge was enjoying a great career in publishing in the mid-1980s. But upon the untimely death of his close friend, popular comic strip creator Clarence 'Otis' Dooley, Goodge realized that there was still so much he could learn from Dooley's work and he went back to school, eventually earning his doctorate in comics. Today he's not only the leading expert on Dooley's work, but arguably the most important scholar of late-century strip cartoon speech bubbles, period. And his life, he says, is so much richer for it.

discovery