Carl The Second was an opportunity to work with an actual, living, bonafide, honest-to-goodness playwritght. I was going to take on his play, which had already been showcased in several theaters and put on my own production of it – as a book.

 

The play is about a man who has decided it was his fate to always be second-best. It's as if he had gotten his fortune read and completely took it to heart – except Carl himself was his own fortune teller. The climax of the play surrounds a baseball game where Carl proves his worth as second-best. So in expressing how baseball and fate can define something about oneself, I chose to visually combine Baseball and Tarot Cards together.

In the play, there are many instances where Carl talks to the audience directly, telling them what’s about to happen and explaining what has happened before; much like a fortune teller. So in my “production” of Carl, I gave him a whole page —a piece of the stage, if you will— to play the role of this play’s fortune teller and reveal to the audience what’s going to happen. 

 

The rest of the book was built upon this.