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

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Three Easy Steps to a Sunday Cartoon


Last Sunday's Cul de Sac made me happy, mostly because it started out as a kinda lame idea but ended up being pretty good. And , look, the colors came out pretty!
Above is the first sketch, where I had a vague idea involving Alice barging into Petey's room and annoying him with chatter. It was boring, so I gave her a puppet, which helped, but it didn't come alive until Beni joined her.
When in doubt for a big finish, introduce Dill. But I didn't know what he'd say until the very last minute. Above is the rough I sent my editor; you can see that I added the final comment outside the box. Then I moved it over to Dill's balloon, et voila.

12 comments:

david t said...

very nice to get a window in your creative process. hope we'll get to see more of those. & the gag is very good too.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for showing your process. Very interesting and one of the my favorite sundays yet. I can't wait for the next treasury

giulia sagramola said...

wow wow pretty funny as always! I read linus in italian and I'm waiting the day to have a book of cul de sac in italian, I love your worls :)

Jesse Cline said...

I loved this one!

antoine marchalot said...

ah ah ah
this one is so funny !!!

... as usual

arcticcircle said...

great to see truly rough roughs. I always feel a bit guilty when I send poor Brendan my barely legible pencil scrawl. Piers Baker's roughs are neater than my finished artwork!

Larry Levine said...

Very cool, thank you for sharing your work process--and the fun thumb sketches!!!

Ruben Bolling said...

It's great to see your process here. And it's a great example of the comedy Rule of Three. One annoying kid isn't so funny. Add another annoying kid, and it's a bit funnier. But it's the THIRD annoying kid that strikes comedy gold.

here today, gone tomorrow said...

I love to see how you went about this.

La dee da!

teresa.frog.applause said...

I think the same thing happened to Mr. Rogers once, a hand snafu involving Henrietta Pussycat. That's show biz, Dill.

ross said...

awesome! I love seeing other people's process. Though, to be honest, I expected to see more magic involved ( or some type of idea-generating-chanting at the least ) . I will assume this came before the first sketch.

Don Shank said...

love process sequences!
really great!