The blog of Richard Thompson, caricaturist, creator of "Cul de Sac," and winner of the 2011 Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

This Week's Cul de Sacs, April 30 to May 6, 2012

Here are the roughs I sent to Stacy Curtis for this week of strips. Besides inking Cul de Sac, Stacy's got a full plate of children's book work, some of which involves traveling for school visits. This means he has to do the inking in a hotel room, not the most ideal situation for us sensitive art types whose psyches demand a familiar work environment to maintain creative flow.

So I thought a repeating Petey might make things easier all around. And as Petey tends to freeze up under mild duress all it needed was a stinkbug to provide just that.

 
Having decided on repeating Peteys-
 
it was an easy jump to overdoing it-
 
and piling the Peteys on.
 
If one flustered Petey is funny then an infinite number of them'd be a riot-
I hope. These are representative of the batch of roughs I foist on Stacy every week. Note how they get gradually sloppier as I lose track of the progress of the meager story arc. In fact I had no idea how to end it, so I told Stacy I would do the climactic Saturday strip, which features enough second panel exposition by Alice to frighten off anyone who dislikes text-heavy balloons.
So it all worked out well enough.

I did the Sunday about a month ago. It's photoshopped out of a dozen bits and pieces but, ssshh, don't tell anybody. Alice and Dill have had several Drawing Fights; victory has been disputed in all of them.

3 comments:

Dolly said...

Drawing fights! Am always delighted at your ability to recall or recreate lost childhood activities and those ever meaningful verbal exchanges ... it reminds me of how doing so is a lost art but fortunately one that you remember! Thank you for keeping the rest of us immersed in the memories of being 4yrs old 8)

paul bowman said...

Last Friday, just as Petey's situation was reaching its feverish denouement*, I was working in an attic, right next to the lone light bulb, which began attracting a lot of stink bugs as the day warmed and they came out from wherever they hole up. Normally I flick these guys away or ignore them, but after getting buzzed and whacking my head on the rafters on either side of me a few times, I decided it was me or them — and started taking them out with my hammer. It was quite a body count by day's end. Whoever does their PR deserves some kind of award, because they don't really smell that bad. I was a little relieved and a little disappointed, both, to tell the truth.

Washington Cube said...

Stinkbugs look prehistoric. They probably are. I've only had one in my home, and he came from Rockville. SweartoGawd.

Boys always had better drawing fights than girls. They could draw planes with just a few lines and circles and gunfire shooting out and bombs going off--all the good stuff. I had to get a boy to teach me how to draw those planes so I could have faster action and not get bogged down in detail.