Best Review Ever

I used to buy Print Magazine in its more substantial iteration as an actual, you know, magazine, when it cost a week's salary and bristled with rate cards. It was one of a flock of "design" magazines, like Communication Arts & the slightly inscrutable Graphis that filled my shelves when I was a dewy-eyed illustrator.                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

So imagine my surprise, in a spate of Google self-searches, to come across this;

I’d planned to include The Art of Richard Thompson on this list, but my Print colleague Steven Brower just beat me to it with an excellent write-up of his own. But luckily, I can substitute another new Thompson book from earlier this year: The Complete Cul de Sac, a two-volume paperback with an intro by Art Spiegelman.

For my money, when it comes to comics about kids with visual kicks, no cartoonist – not even fellow fan Bill Watterson – comes close to Thompson. Sure, Charles Schulz may have created the world’s most famous strip. But let’s be honest: design-wise, compared to Cul de Sac, Peanuts ain’t worth peanuts.

Listen: Schulz drew a tiny cast of simple, standardized characters on a shallow stage with practically no backdrop. Over and over and over. Every single day. For fifty frickin’ years. Aaugh! Thompson, on the other hand, has built on the lineage of such masters of the excitable pen cartoon form as George “Krazy Kat” Herriman, Ronald “St. Trinian’s” Searle, and Elwood “PushPin Studios” Smith.

Take your time to savor all five years of this hilariously clever, helpfully annotated collection. And after that, you can still look forward to the 2004 Richard’s Poor Almanac: 12 Months of Misinformation in Handy Cartoon Form.

(Excuse the sudden shift in fonts; I don't know how to fix it). This was signed Michael Dooley and titled "7 Outstanding Cartoon Books for 2014". He was further identified as-

the creative director of Michael Dooley Design and teaches Design History at Art Center College of Design and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is also a Print contributing editor  and writes on art and design for a variety of publications. 

So he had gravitas, or at least a paying job (what is wrong with the fonts?), and we were even Facebook friends, always a good sign.