View Photo Gallery — Comics are ailing. He’s ailing. But Thompson’s funny bone checks out just fine.
Bill Watterson receives reporters about as often as Charlie Brown receives a Valentine. Long viewed as the J.D. Salinger of comics, the creator of the retired and still-beloved strip “Calvin and Hobbes” guards his privacy by rebuffing most every entreaty for an interview.
Now, however, comes a question about a certain “kid strip” cartoonist.
One name, one talent entices Watterson to give what his syndicate says is only his second interview in two decades: Richard Thompson — creator of “Cul de Sac” and father to little “Alice Otterloop” and her child’s-eye view of life in Washington’s suburbs.
“Where to start?... ” Watterson says in an e-mail. “The strip has a unique and honest voice, a seemingly intuitive feel for what comics do best ... a very funny intelligence ... the artwork, which I just slobber over. It’s a wonderful surprise to see that this level of talent is still out there, and that a strip like this is still possible.”
On May 28 in Boston, Thompson will learn whether he has won the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award for cartoonist of the year. It is his second straight nomination for a strip that was syndicated almost four years ago. “Cul de Sac” is carried by nearly 150 newspapers, including The Washington Post, where it began. It has spawned four books, a handful of animated shorts — and legions of fans.
“Cul de Sac” is a whimsical skip through suburban life with Alice, her friends Beni and Dill, elder brother Petey and her classmates at Blisshaven Academy preschool. It’s all about sidewalk discoveries, childhood invention, parents who are one step behind their children’s antics. In this skewed suburbia, the Otterloops drive a minivan whose color is so neutral “it doesn’t appear in nature.”
A 2007 offering is the prototypical “Cul de Sac.” Alice — “who’s not afraid of anything” — is momentarily cowed by winged cicadas. Petey, typically squeamish out of doors, advises: “Do what I do. Construct a distancing fantasy as a coping mechanism.” Next thing we know, Alice is costuming the cicadas in napkin dresses and naming them. By the last panel, the Otterloop parents are reading headlines about intelligent “superbugs” wearing paper clothes. “Don’t tell the kids,” Mom says. “It’ll just scare them.”
“Richard draws all sorts of complex stuff — architecture, traffic jams, playground sets — that I would never touch,” Watterson says. “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.”
Watterson wrote the foreword for Thompson’s first “Cul de Sac” book in 2008. The foreword to an earlier Thompson collection was written by another industry legend, Patrick Oliphant, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist.
“I know he would hate to be termed a genius, but that is exactly what he is,” Oliphant says now.
So after a measured, decades-long career ascent, Richard Thompson sits at the comics mountaintop. Still, he is keenly aware of a constant fact: The pinnacle is crumbling.
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