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, December 4, 2011

Yesterday's Cul de Sac, December 3 2011 and Tomorrow's. December 5 2011

I fretted with this thing and rewrote and photoshopped the dialogue so many times that I was sure it had unraveled into hopeless incoherence. The object of Alice's mockery, the cheesy uplifting TV special full of easy epiphanies, seemed obvious when I started out. But with each little piddly adjustment it grew more unnecessarily complicated. At one point I added "childlike sense if wonder" to Alice's rant, diluting it even more.

So I decided to do the whole thing a second time figuring, if you're gonna fail, make it look intentional. This time the subject is "childlike sense of wonder". And this one was harder to do than the first;  each drawing and each bit of text are separate bits hammered together in photoshop (Alice in the third panel looks awfully familiar, no?).

Thankfully one person grasped what I was flailing at, here (scroll down a bit). Now I don't have to make a third attempt at this.

5 comments:

naam said...

Well, let me assure you the point of the first comic smacked me in the face first time I read it, and I loved it so much I instantly transport it to my 'look at these once in a while for a good laugh'. I found it quite genious.

Shame I read about your struggle before facing the second, still love it thought! I'd say your struggle payed off. Thanks!

Laurie Lindop said...

I think any artist can appreciate Alice's struggle to create and how sickening easy creative epiphanies can seem when left in the hands of the Lifetime Channel. The question is, once her muse returned, was the dance any good? Only Bennie can say....

Mike said...

Haven't seen such an inspiring look of childlike wonder since Walter and Margaret Keane split up.

And thanks for the shout-out, which restored a grouchy, solitary old man's faith in a world he had rejected years ago.

gilda92 said...

Alice is the antithesis of Zen.

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't have noticed the photoshop copy and pasting if you didn't say anything!