{"id":681,"date":"2011-05-24T10:04:27","date_gmt":"2011-05-24T15:04:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/?p=681"},"modified":"2023-08-10T09:49:39","modified_gmt":"2023-08-10T13:49:39","slug":"richard-thompson-profile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/2011\/05\/24\/richard-thompson-profile\/","title":{"rendered":"A Profile of Richard Thompson, Creator of "Cul de Sac""},"content":{"rendered":"

Our overwhelming appreciation of “Cul de Sac<\/a>” is well documented<\/a> here at Movement Point<\/a>, so we were pleased to find a profile of creator Richard Thompson in this past Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Michael Cavna’s article, “\u2018Cul de Sac\u2019 creator Richard Thompson faces life\u2019s cruel twists with artful wit,<\/a>” (May 19, 2011) traces both the development of the strip and Thompson’s experience with Parkinson’s Disease.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“Otherwise, it\u2019s not really fair.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a>, watching Petey’s soccer practice. That’s some serious perspective going on there:<\/p>\n

\"Cul<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/em>‘s almost callous treatment of the home-grown “Cul de Sac” puzzling at best.<\/p>\n

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…)<\/p>\n

I can only hope that at some point, the Post<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

(“Cul de Sac” strip detail from Richard Thompson’s blog<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, “\u2018Cul de Sac\u2019 creator Richard Thompson faces life\u2019s cruel twists with artful wit,” (May 19, 2011) traces both the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[157,158],"class_list":["post-681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics","tag-cul-de-sac","tag-richard-thompson"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pedXm-aZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=681"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6165,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681\/revisions\/6165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}