I'm an advocate for graduate studies, provided that your situation allows it to be a financially responsible decision [0]. That said, there are a lot of limita

I'm an advocate for graduate studies, provided that your situation allows it to be a financially responsible decision [0]. That said, there are a lot of limitations of the graduate system that make writing iconoclastic dissertations that experiment with form or are full-frontal assaults on dogma a very poor career choice. At least in my opinion. For one, most institutions and most supervisors across most disciplines measure success by the number of papers one publishes, particularly in high-impact journals or prestige conferences. You also have about four-six years to make your mark and graduate. Because of the paper requirements and the timeline, I can't find it in me to recommend anyone attempt anything but an approach they believe will consistantly yield publishable results. "Swinging for the fences" and taking a bold but risky approach to your research might be the more rewarding approach from a scientific perspective, since even a negative result is a result, but negative results are more often than not unpublishable. All this to say, I _love_ research that is serious but playful. I love people who provide answers to wild questions. But I also think that if your goal is to graduate, writing your dissertation in the form of a comic is decision that will hurt you more often than it will help you. FWIW, I'm not defending the status quo. I think we should challenge it, and I think as a community we should create more space for "high-risk" research. I think a great example of this is eLife, a journal that will publish every paper it's editor chooses to send for review, but includes the peer-reviews in the published work. Anyway this was a bit of a rant, but kudos to folks following their intellectual curiosities through serious methods. [0] I, for example, live in Quebec, Canada so my tuition is just a couple of thousand a year, and I'm lucky that my stipend is rather generous.