Gaming, Science Fiction, Culture, and Such
Über-blog BoingBoing ran a nice feature article on Cul de Sac maestro Richard Thompson recently that is well worth a read, looking at how he’s adjusting to a new workflow, in partnership with an inker, as he juggles the demands of a daily strip with the extra challenge of Parkinson’s Disease.
And be sure to buy the Team Cul de Sac book!
Our overwhelming appreciation of “Cul de Sac” is well documented here at Movement Point, so we were pleased to find a profile of creator Richard Thompson in this past Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine.
Michael Cavna’s article, “‘Cul de Sac’ creator Richard Thompson faces life’s cruel twists with artful wit,” (May 19, 2011) traces both the development of the strip and Thompson’s experience with Parkinson’s Disease.
When you’ve got such comics page legends as Bill Watterson and Garry Trudeau writing encomiums about you, you know you’re doing something right, and though Richard Thompson might slough off such praise, he’s definitely doing something right:
Thompson “has this huge range of cartooning skills…,” Watterson says. “Richard draws all sorts of complex stuff—architecture, traffic jams, playground sets—that I would never touch. And how does he accomplish this? Well, I like to imagine him ignoring his family, living on caffeine and sugar, with his feet in a bucket of ice, working 20 hours a day.
“Otherwise, it’s not really fair.”
The complexity of Thompson’s strips can indeed stop a reader with their wonder. Take the recent run of strips featuring Alice and Sophie on a jungle gym, watching Petey’s soccer practice. That’s some serious perspective going on there:
While I respect that the printed comics page currently exists in the troubled realm of the printed newspaper, whose imminent demise has been predicted for at least a decade, I must confess that I find the Post‘s almost callous treatment of the home-grown “Cul de Sac” puzzling at best.
During the week it rides the Style section along with “Doonesbury”—certainly hallowed company, and fitting for a strip that has better writing than any other strip in the funnies. But on Sundays, comic strip Prime Time, it’s stuffed into the recently revamped (read: downsized and tabloid-ized) Sunday Style section, next to the advice columnists, sometimes in color, always smaller than “Judge Parker,” “Beetle Bailey,” and the egregiously popular and insufferably banal “Zits.” That’s no way to treat what should be the Post’s marquee comic title (not that they do much better by “Doonesbury,” breaking it to run vertically alongside “Pickles” of all strips…)
I can only hope that at some point, the Post moves “Cul de Sac” to the front of the Sunday Comics section. Above the fold. It’s far too good to be buried a page after the wedding announcements.
(“Cul de Sac” strip detail from Richard Thompson’s blog.)
Were I to attempt to describe Richard Thompson‘s comic strip Cul de Sac, I could do little better than to describe it as Peanuts with adults. The children in the strip behave like children, yet have a delightful tendency to speak wisdom beyond their years in a way that still seems utterly age-appropriate:
The similarly preternaturally insightful children in Peanuts lived, for the most part, in a world where adults were shadows, figures whose voices and presences only revealed themselves in the children’s reactions. Cul de Sac brings the adults into the panel with the children, to excellent effect, reminding the reader that despite the children’s knowing speech, they are still at heart children, a distinction that was occasionally lost in Peanuts. And, of course, it helps that the adults get good lines as well:
Richard Thompson’s drawing line has an agreeable looseness that belies the depth of detail in many panels—and those panels will often be in quite non-standard configurations. Some of his finest strips feature tables that stretch over multiple panels, with each panel hosting a different person. He also knows when to omit background detail all together and focus on the character alone. And what characters they are.
Alice Otterloop is undeniably the star of the strip, ruling over her pre-school chums with a certainty born of being four, but I’m partial to her excessively introspective brother, Petey, and her unibrowed friend Beni. Throw in Dill (a combination of Linus, if Linus loved grocery carts, and Pig-Pen, if Pig-Pen ever washed, to stretch the Peanuts analogy), Nara, bucket-head Kevin, and over-mothered Marcus and you have a strip that never fails to amuse and, frankly awe.
And never forget: You can’t tie down a banjo man! Eternal words of wisdom . . .
(Images from Shapes & Colors by Richard Thompson. Buy it!)