Every now and then I like to take a break from composing turgid, burned-on-the-outside-but-frozen-on-the-inside screeds about the human situation and write about
cartoons and
comic books and other fun things. I think that hour has come again.
So, old news: the newspaper comics page is on its deathbed. Its passing looks to be a peaceful one: no doubt the autopsy will show the cause of its death was the shriveling of the daily newspaper. But there are secondary factors that can't be excluded from consideration, namely the general hoariness of the syndicated comic strip. They've largely come to exist as a symbol of sanity and stasis in a rapidly changing world: everything might be going crazy, but at least the boomers and seniors can open the comics page and expect
Beetle Bailey to make a joke about golf, an exclamation mark to appear over Blondie's head when she sees the enormous size of Dagwood's sandwich, and Mary Worth to still good god they're still doing mary worth it's 2016 for god's
Although some decent new strips have appeared in the last couple of decades—
Get Fuzzy ain't bad,
Lio can elicit a chuckle from time to time, and
Pearls Before Swine is pretty good—the conventional wisdom says that virtuosity quit the comics page along with
Calvin and Hobbes in 1996.
But the conventional wisdom overlooks
Cul de Sac, a comic about a boring little suburb and the weird little kids who call it home.
Cul de Sac is the brainchild of veteran illustrator Richard Thompson, who made a living drawing cartoons and caricatures for
The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and
Atlantic Monthly, among other esteemed publications. In 2004, he took a stab at narrative and created
Cul de Sac as a weekly strip for
Washington Post Magazine. Three years later,
Cul de Sac was picked up by Universal Press Syndicate and began appearing seven days a week in newspapers across the United States.
Cul de Sac never had a shot at becoming a sensation on the scale of
Garfield or
Dilbert: no matter how good it was, newspaper readership in 2007 wasn't nearly what it had been in the 1980s and 1990s. But it won a loyal following, and earned Thompson the admiration of his contemporaries. The first
Cul de Sac collection begins with a foreword from Bill Watterson—and his personal endorsement isn't something the reclusive genius bestows liberally.
Watterson also blessed
Cul de Sac with
a portrait of Petey Otterloop, one of its main characters. It was the first piece of art Watterson had shown to the public since retiring from
Calvin and Hobbes. Would that the occasion were a happy one: Watterson's purpose was to paint something to be auctioned off to raise money for research into Parkinson's Disease, with which Richard Thompson was diagnosed in 2009—just two years after
Cul de Sac was syndicated. In 2012, Thompson reluctantly retired in order to focus on his health. On July 27—a little more than three months ago—complications from his illness sent Mr. Thompson to his rest. He was 58 years old.
I more or less shrugged off the obituaries of Alan Rickman and David Bowie, but I'm still bummed about Richard Thompson. He was a genius, and from the looks of it he was a lovely person. Receiving
The Complete Cul de Sac as a birthday gift in September made me even sadder about his death. His comics say he wasn't nearly ready to quit.
Today we're going to look at some of my favorite strips from
Cul de Sac's unfairly short run, and maybe try to figure out what makes it so inimitably charming. If this is your first glance at the comic and you wish to see more, you can find its entire syndicated run on GoComics (
starting here). But I heartily recommend getting a copy of
The Complete Cul de Sac: it's got a selection of strips from its
Washington Post Magazine run, author commentary, and the original uncolored versions of the Mon–Sat strips (the syndicate has colored in most of the dailies for web publication, and it often detracts from or distorts Thompson's line work).
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