I seldom blog. When I do, it tends to be a burst of several in a week, then nothing for months. So many blogs, so little time...I don't want to waste anyone's time unless I have something to say about something I really care about. Otherwise, I'd write sitcoms.
But my favorite comic strip, Cul de Sac, ended yesterday, and I must pay homage. The strip centered around Alice, a sometime precocious, sometimes clueless preschooler, her antisocial older brother Peter, and an assortment of odd and wonderful classmates, friends and teachers. The parents appeared occasionally, but the strip was really Alice's.
Many years ago, I wrote and recorded four songs and an outline for a musical stage version of Calvin and Hobbes and sent them to Bill Waterson, in the hope that I could get permission to at least try to bring this great cartoon to the stage. Well, Mr. W had given his editor instructions that no proposals for any merchandising or other adaptations of S&H were to be forwarded to him or considered at all, and the project died with a rejection letter from said editor. At least two of the songs showed great promise, I thought, and the heartbreaking ballad He Never Pulls My Hair Any More would've brought down the house. I grudgingly resolved to write a strip about an anarchic little girl myself and adapt that to the stage. I drew a character I liked, even named her--Becca--but never seemed to get her right from any angle but one. And I work better with one-shot ideas; using the same character every day would have been difficult if not impossible. The idea died and I went on several years later to create QlownTown instead.
It wasn't until just now that I realized that Richard Thompson had created that very strip.
My first impression of the comic was that it was sloppily drawn. Sometimes the line outlining Alice's head would run right through her nose. He didn't seeem to bother to take the time to erase a second, sribbly line that wasn't as perfect as the one he'd finally drawn over it. Perspective was sometimes an adaptation of the real thing.
The humor grabbed me first. Some days there was no punchline, or one might laugh at the third panel and the fourth panel would serve as an epilog to the main story, a natural continuation of the scene, even though the high point occurred earlier. There were times when the children spoke with wise, adult polysyllabic words, and other times they "spoke as a child". But Alice was always Alice, Peter was always Peter, Kevin was always her hapless bucket-headed friend. Thompson glided from one approach to the other flawlessly. And I fell in love with the art. So free, so sketchy; adult skill combined with the free and random style of a child's drawing. I used to wish my drawings were perfect; now I wish they were looser. And he colored them with a watercolor effect that made me think of a children's book.
Thompson has Parkinson's, and he has decided to retire the strip because it's becoming too difficult to draw. In the cartoon world, this is like Pavarotti losing the ability to sing, or Frank Gehry being unable to design architecture, or Meryl Streep having to quit acting. For those of us who love cartoons that combine wonderful art with wonderful writing and characterization, it is a terrible loss. Like Charles Schultz before him, Thompson never stooped to portraying kids as cute moppets who elicit an "Awww" with the innocent, cute, harmless and saccharine things they unwittingly say. He showed the world from the skewed perspective of a child, which is sometimes mean, sometimes clueless and sometimes sideways-logical.
There are strips that I put in the pantheon, the uppermost hierarchy of all-time great comics. Pogo. Krazy Kat. Calvin and Hobbes. The Far Side. And Cul de Sac.
It was only syndicated for four or five years, a very brief time compared to fifty plus years of Peanuts or BC. A phrase from the title song in Camelot comes to me: "For one brief shining moment."
For one brief shining moment, there was Cul de Sac.
But my favorite comic strip, Cul de Sac, ended yesterday, and I must pay homage. The strip centered around Alice, a sometime precocious, sometimes clueless preschooler, her antisocial older brother Peter, and an assortment of odd and wonderful classmates, friends and teachers. The parents appeared occasionally, but the strip was really Alice's.
Many years ago, I wrote and recorded four songs and an outline for a musical stage version of Calvin and Hobbes and sent them to Bill Waterson, in the hope that I could get permission to at least try to bring this great cartoon to the stage. Well, Mr. W had given his editor instructions that no proposals for any merchandising or other adaptations of S&H were to be forwarded to him or considered at all, and the project died with a rejection letter from said editor. At least two of the songs showed great promise, I thought, and the heartbreaking ballad He Never Pulls My Hair Any More would've brought down the house. I grudgingly resolved to write a strip about an anarchic little girl myself and adapt that to the stage. I drew a character I liked, even named her--Becca--but never seemed to get her right from any angle but one. And I work better with one-shot ideas; using the same character every day would have been difficult if not impossible. The idea died and I went on several years later to create QlownTown instead.
It wasn't until just now that I realized that Richard Thompson had created that very strip.
My first impression of the comic was that it was sloppily drawn. Sometimes the line outlining Alice's head would run right through her nose. He didn't seeem to bother to take the time to erase a second, sribbly line that wasn't as perfect as the one he'd finally drawn over it. Perspective was sometimes an adaptation of the real thing.
The humor grabbed me first. Some days there was no punchline, or one might laugh at the third panel and the fourth panel would serve as an epilog to the main story, a natural continuation of the scene, even though the high point occurred earlier. There were times when the children spoke with wise, adult polysyllabic words, and other times they "spoke as a child". But Alice was always Alice, Peter was always Peter, Kevin was always her hapless bucket-headed friend. Thompson glided from one approach to the other flawlessly. And I fell in love with the art. So free, so sketchy; adult skill combined with the free and random style of a child's drawing. I used to wish my drawings were perfect; now I wish they were looser. And he colored them with a watercolor effect that made me think of a children's book.
Thompson has Parkinson's, and he has decided to retire the strip because it's becoming too difficult to draw. In the cartoon world, this is like Pavarotti losing the ability to sing, or Frank Gehry being unable to design architecture, or Meryl Streep having to quit acting. For those of us who love cartoons that combine wonderful art with wonderful writing and characterization, it is a terrible loss. Like Charles Schultz before him, Thompson never stooped to portraying kids as cute moppets who elicit an "Awww" with the innocent, cute, harmless and saccharine things they unwittingly say. He showed the world from the skewed perspective of a child, which is sometimes mean, sometimes clueless and sometimes sideways-logical.
There are strips that I put in the pantheon, the uppermost hierarchy of all-time great comics. Pogo. Krazy Kat. Calvin and Hobbes. The Far Side. And Cul de Sac.
It was only syndicated for four or five years, a very brief time compared to fifty plus years of Peanuts or BC. A phrase from the title song in Camelot comes to me: "For one brief shining moment."
For one brief shining moment, there was Cul de Sac.
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