Author Photo

(Photo by Bono Mitchell , fez  by Nick & Carolyn's 36th birthday present to the author)

The present author relaxes pensively; behind him is the fruit of his labors, before him, the wide, wide world.

The first Pre- Almanac

Big Bill Clinton occupies the White House, Dolly the sheep gets cloned and in sports a guy named Mickey Mantle is wowing 'em as the Senators take the pennant  (OK, I don't know sports). It's 1997 and a young cartoonist is about to embark on a stage in his career that will have far-reaching repercussions.  Here, for only the second time in living memory, are two pages from the June 8 Style section of the Washington Post for 1997 that introduced  an as-yet unnamed feature to an uncaring readership.  And so,the very first Richard's Poor Almanac took up most of page C-1 --

then jumped a few feet inside, where the cartoon proper was hidden. This was something of a trial run for the cartoonist, whose only injunction from his then-editor, Gene Weingarten, was to make him laugh.  ("And no penises!")

  

The rest is history, though there remains one mystery: the original drawings disappeared, only to be found in a trashcan on the Post's fifth floor with the imprint of a sneaker clearly visible . Rescued from the trashcan, the art now decorates Gene's basement office.

Complete Teaser

Here, for the very first time, as a special teaser, are the ANNOTATIONS I wrote to accompany the section of the book that has over 80 of the watercolor strips that appeared in the Washington Post.

CUL DE SAC began as a sunday-only feature in The Washington Post Magazine in 2004. I painted them in watercolors instead of the process color needed for most newspaper comic strips. Here's an extensive sampling of them.

1. Here's the first peep out of Alice Otterloop, from the Washington Post Magazine of February 8, 2004. In a note at the bottom of the page to ever-patient editor Tom Shroder  I wrote, "Tom, here it is. Gulp!"
2. Petey emerged almost fully-formed.  I wanted the anti-Bart Simpson and I got him.
3. Beni and Dill and Dill's hat. Official Washington is very far away.
4. The whole class. Narjeel,got shortened to Nara and lost a braid for syndication. And Marcus looks different but has the same mother.
5. It's really the Washington Monument.
6.
7. I went down to tha National Gallery and drew that vent so it's accurate. They also have nice lightswitches.
8. I went on school field trips to the National Gallery many times. The picture with the shark in it (Watson and the Shark, 1778, by John Singleton Copley) is every kid's favorite.
9. Akin to another, similar gag from when I, thought everything in the strip could talk.
10. Mr. Danders appeared fairly early on,,foisting himself, a talking animal., into a.kid srrip like an invasive specie.
11.
12.
13. This was all reused in the dailies. Nothing goes to ll,waste.
14.
15. We're jumping around chronologically. This is from 2007, but it fits the " story".
16. This is 2005. They're on the DC Metro on their way to a Nationals game.
17. RFK Stadium, now superceded by Nationals Park.  I drew this from photos I took at a game.o
18. That beach house is not only a joy to draw, it's 100% accurate.
19. This is from 2004, but it fits in. Except for Alice's hair.
20.
21. Scenic, isn't it?
22..
23.
24. I'm very proud of all these puns.
 25. Maybe my favoritec strip. The drawing  didn't come together till I blacked out the walls. Suddenly- BANG- it jumped off the page. I like the acting too. It's very simple and understated,, mostly because I used the same rough for each panel.
26. Tai Shan is a giant panda born at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. on July 9, 2005 at 3:41 AM. He is the first panda cub born at the National Zoo to survive for more than a few days. He was very big news.
27. Alice shows unusual sense in panel two. I soon fixed that.
28.
29. This one's weird. I'd thought of doing several set in a coffee house, thinking Alice would be a good foil for the self absorbed artsy types who congregate there.
30. The Grandma Saga in shortform.
31. One of the few t imes I played with the strip's format. I usually get lost when I try thistuff. To make it worse Alice has confused "escalator" and "elevator". There are several Metro stations that have this configuration.  
32. Petey dreams of Christmas with music by Tchaikovsky.
33. Taking down Christmas is always so hard. I like the timing here.
34. Washington famously panics at the first sign of snow.
35. Once I got a grip on the perspective this was just a matter of writing funny place names.
36. An early out-of-body experience for Petey.
37. Here's the beginning of Danders' first Unintentional Adventure, from 2004. He was good at letting me pretend that the strip was about something else.
38.
39. Danders assumes a new identity or is mistaken for someone else in each strip. His protean nature and talent for assimilation is his greatest defence. Or he's so bland nobody gives him more than a second glance.
40. Coincidence? Or cheap dramatic device?
41. The ease with which Danders forgets the whole point of his job makes me happy. So doees his pirate talk.
42. The spelling of Glandey High seems uncertain.
43. Oh, this was fun to draw.
44. Ocean City is an Atlantic resort town in Worcester County, Maryland. Ocean City is widely known in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States and is a frequent destination for vacationers. It has many cheesy gift shops.
45.
46. This is very close to a later strip I did as a daily, but this one's prettier.
47. There's a short story I love by the fantasist/tall tale teller R. A. Lafferty called "You Can't Go Back" about a bunch of kids who find a secret moon that hovers over the Osage country in Oklahoma. The kids get to the moon by whistling for it and climbing up from the roof of their grandma's truck. The image of a tiny moon appeals to me.
48. We lived within hearing distance (2 miles) of the Montgomery County Fair.
49. We went to the fair for years, so much that we recognized cows from one year to the next. And baked goods too.
50. Another of the strips set in a coffe shop. They're just not that funny. Too earnest.
51.
52. The creepier side of Christmas. A German Expressionist Christmas has been done by someone, somewhere, I'm sure.
53. The second of Danders' Adventures, this one not so inadvertant.
54. FEDUPS struck me as hugely clever and funny when I thought of it, circa April 2006. I'm sure it's been independantly invented several thousand times at least, like all clever ideas.
55. The FEDUPS guy is one of my favorite ancillary characters.
 56. I like Ms. Fermat, the Urmart greeter with the knuckle tattoos, too. I should've introduced her to the FEDUPS guy.
57. A wall full spatulas and egg timers strikes me as hugely funny too. I doubt if either one's ever been independantly invented. And if so I don't wanna hear about it.
58. There is a lesson. I made this up as I went along, like usual, not too hard considering there was a week between each.
59. An epic of love and loss with egg timers and spatulas.
60. Special effects!
61. Art equals Creativity plus Neatness. I was alwayos bad at math.
62. Money does come from pants.
63. Back-to-Schol pants-buying is a grim time. Unless you've got seven cents to lblow.
64. With this appearance I suddenly understood Ernesto Lacuna. Not who he is, he's an enigma. I understood his comic potential as a Petey-provoker. He's based on several kids I knew who're now probably highly successful and maladjusted.
65. Petey wins a passive-agressive fight!
66. Hey! Petey's not under his blanket!
67. As a long-time Renaissance Fair-goer (participant to innocent bystander), I can attest that the above is historically accurate.
68. I've lived around DC most of my life. I've seen a well-known senator leaving a drug sttore with 3 bags bulging with toilet paper (on sale), a well-known TV newsman playing on a playground swingset while waiting to do a standup, and my own mother ram then-first lady Lady Bird Johnson in the shins with a stroller loaded with my then-baby brother (she apologized). I'm not impressed by much.
69. From when Petey played the trombone, and I found it too hard to draw .
70. This is my favorite field trip.
71. This would be a great day for a nose bleed.
72. Children wearing winter coats swing their arms funny when they walk.
73. I labored a long time ghostwriting the text for Oswaldo Twee's book, both mking it apropriately dire and making it fit.
74. In the cartoon of the class approaching the library there's a rgreen towel up in a tree. Maybe the sock was in another tree.
75. This is a painstakingly accurate depiction of a DC Metro train and of my dislike of cell phones.
76. Eskimoes  had only a few words for snow, but it makes a good starting place for gags. They have hundreds of words for "gags".
77. The parking garage drawing makes me very happy at the safe distance of six years later. At the time it seemed confusing, nudged into coherency only when I put in the yellow arrows. Thank god for signage.
78. Drawn from life, alas. This appeared on the First of April, making Alice more up-to-date than I'd give her credit for.
79. The payoff: Alice gets the bum's rush, her usual fate in Sharing Time.
80. The Last of Danders' Unintentional Adventures, this appeared in the Post Magazine a few months before the daily strip launched in September of 2007.
81. Could that toy truck be the feral toy truck featured in the syndicated strip on page 250? Or do I know how to draw only one toy truck, making identification impossible? Whatever, the Metro station and train are 100% accurate.
82. This and the following strips were scanned from Post Magazine tearsheets, the originalsthe having been lost. Once, at this same museum, an unknown child of about 6 turned to me and snarled, " That's not a dinosaur! That's a pterosaur!" after I misidentified a Quetzalcoatlus out loud. Kids like dinosaurs.
83. This is an accurate view of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, to whom I lent the original and who then lost it. Butterfingers! The others I lost on my own.
84. The museum had recently opened a very impressive Hall of Mammals that my daughters loved. I was very familiar with the Hall of Mammals.
85. A museum press gang! Don't laugh, they're real. Beware.
86. The museum had a life-size model of a blue whale in their hall of undersea life that I loved when I was a kid (I thought it was real). When they redid the hall in the 90s, they gave the by-then decrepit blue whale to one of the contractors. Who put it, in pieces, in his garage. I thought an affable guard giving away bits of the collection to polite visitors was hilarious. Six years later I'm still waiting for the laffs.

Signed Copies!

There are still a few issues we have to clear up, like do I want to be paid in cash or  in chocolate?, but it appears the fine indy bookstore Just One More Page will offer copies of the Complete Cul de Sac SIGNED by the author (me). Just One More Page is familiar to anyone who loiters on this blog, as it was the launch site of the Team CdS book. So we're old friends. As always, we'll offer the signature in several styles, including our new rubber-stamped Ersatz style. Ah heck, with the way things are going, you'll be lucky if you get a signature that's even barely legible.

1. Otterloop Bold Distended 2. Otterloop Grotesque 3. Palmer Method 4. Otterloop Hasty 5, Otterloop Serif Formal 6. Otterloop Extra-Hasty Verging on Sloppy 7. Otterloop Slapdash Bold 8. Otterloop Fancypants 9. Otterloop Wrong-End-of-the-Pen 10. Otterloop Corroding (genuine iron gall ink) 11. Otterloop Erratum (discontinued) Hey, I've seen these jokes before.

Next from the Cul de Sac Collection: Postcards!

The Map of Cul de Sac and Adjacent Place Postcards, smaller than you've seen it  before, just 5.6"x4.25"! And- they're really mailable!  These postcards are not toys; they really work! It's almost unbelievable!

Exciting New Post Aims to Gin Up Book Sales

With less than a week till the exciting official release date of the Complete Cul de Sac (May 6, 2014) it's time to start creating a big fuss in hopes that you, the credulous comics reader, will be caught unawares and part with $50-plus. Toward that end, I've been trying to cook up some unnecessary yet attractive extra material to offer you, the jaded consumer.  Oh boy!  I'm excited already, how about you?

THE MAP OF CUL DE SAC AND ADJACENT PLACES POSTER - The initial offering from the Cul de Sac Collection is this mostly-accurate map of almost everything mentioned in the comic strip, rendered with loving precision. You'll be lost without it! Collectors pay as much as $25 million for the original painting,* but you can have a printed poster of the same image for only pennies! $13.50, to be exact. You may notice a certain discrepancy, attitude-wise, in the image offered at the site. It may even appear sideways. This is easily remedied by rotating the whole thing clockwise. Rotating it counter-clockwise will result in an image that is upside down. This would be wholly unacceptable. Therefore, we've prepared a small pamphlet, profusely illustrated, entitled, "Turning My Cul de Sac and Adjacent Places Poster Around; How Can I  Do This?" The pamphlet, which comes with an Introduction by the Rev. Edwin Howland Blashfield on  the "Moral Sense: Do Cats Have It?" with a picture essay on Parisian Hootchie Girls, for only $13.50. Sorry, no sales to minors or the mentally unstable.

Your Questions Answered!

That nice Alex Dueben made me spill the beans at Comic Book Resources.

And Chris Sparks reports that the Complete CdS is climbing in Amazon sales:

Product Details Paperback: 648 pages Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing; Original edition (May 6, 2014) Language: English ISBN-10: 1449438822 ISBN-13: 978-1449438821 Product Dimensions: 1.8 x 8.8 x 11 inches Shipping Weight: 5.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,467 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #4 in Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Graphic Novels > Anthologies #61 in Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Comic Strips

Chimera Obscura

Our old friend we've never met, Gil Roth, talks to that nice Caitlin Mcgurk on his always-interesting Virtual Memories podcast. Caitlin gives us a new nickname, which we'll never live up to, or down. It's  here.

The First Review

Is in, and it looks like, yes, it could be, Yes! He likes it! A definite rave by friend of the strip, Professor Charles Solomon! He says it here. Of course, he said it before, but hey, thanks, Chuck!

Mysterious Book Sighted

What is this?

I'm not sure, but it's currently out-selling the Complete Cul de Sac on Amazon.

Columbus, Ohio

I had a great time last week at the Billy Ireland Library thanks to Caitlin Mcgurk, Jenny Robb, Bill Watterson and all the nice people who came to the opening. I'm still breathing rarified air, or possibly helium

And hey, the bookstore has advance copies of the Complete Cul de Sac! Sshhh!

Photo by Jack Thompson

Columbus, Friday night

  

The somewhat sinister pair of hands in the above photo belong to Caitlin Mcgurk,  Engagement Coordinator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & amp; Museum at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. She will be our co-hostess this weekend for a show of cartoons by Bill Watterson and me. In the photo you can see the tasteful pale-green chosen as a wall color by Caitlin. Much better than the Drunk Tank Pink I'd chosen.

Caitlin came down to my studio a few months ago when I was hors de combat and selected a bunch of drawings for the show (so that's where all that stuff went.) She left behind only a note complaining about the filthiness of the art and a pair of used white gloves.

I hope you will join us to welcome in this spring season, look at some drawings and have some cheap wine this coming friday at six at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum!

A Decade + of Otterloops

I almost missed  an anniversary of major importance, and you did too I'll bet.


Cul de Sac debuted on February 8, 2004.   Consider that ten years ago: it was only forty years since the Beatles invaded the US; to mankind's great loss, Facebook was launched; my daughter Charlotte spent the time stretching string around the furniture to make jumps then ran around like a horsie and jumping them.

It kinda makes you stop and think, huh?

Richard's Poor Alamanac's Official dictionary of the games of the winter Olympiad

If you're near Columbus...

You might want to join us.

You can stop visiting

I'm home.

The Complete Cul de Sac is coming soon.

Bono Mitchell took a couple of photographs recently as cartoonists gathered to see Richard and his preview copy of the Complete Cul de Sac. Richard is now able to use a walker and go the length of the PT room twice before returning to the wheelchair. He's eating well, and enjoys a good burger.

You can pre-order The Complete Cul de Sac online at Amazon or Barnes and Noble now. It has an introduction by Art Spiegelman.

-Mike Rhode

 

Left to right - Mike Rhode, Michael Cavna, Richard Thompson, Donna Lewis and Nick Galifianakis.

Happy Holidays to all

Team Cul de Sac member Mike Rhode stepping in for Richard here -

I saw Richard in rehab last night, and he wants to wish all his family and friends a happy holiday season and also specifically requested this picture be posted. May all your wishes come true. Except for the mean ones.

 

Music, a dilettante's love story

Music is weird. I mean that literally; I think its effect on the brain is potent stuff, not easily measured. The neurologist Oliver  Sachs  wrote a book on it  called Musicophilia. Nowadays I can't listen to it with the intensity I used to; it's like drawing in that respect.

When he was about 11 my brother got a piano. He wanted to take lessons and he did for 6 years or so. And having a piano handy I started fooling with it. I had a friend who could play the German National anthem (Deutschland uber alles, from a string quartet by Haydn, then set to Gott erhalte Franz denn Kaiser) ( sorry). We had a children's encyclopedia set my mom bought in like 1960 and it had a chart with piano keys, notes of the scale and their names with dotted lines to each. So I figured out a C major chord. Pianos are just sitting there all tuned with every note visible  and they're easy enough to figure once the basic logic of notation's clear, and there're books for that. I didn't want lessons, I wanted a satisfying project, and I had the time to waste on it.

I was at Montgomery College then and the library had music books, opera vocal scores for piano in particular, and I got Wagner's Meistersinger and figured out the first page. It's great, real pompous and soaring, just what an 18 year old geek wants. It was an education in not just culture but history, but I just wanted to know how it worked. And keeping the radio on all the time just made it worse. It was sensory overload almost. I think I've mentioned that I've always found the point when you realize hey, I like this! you know, the aha! moment really interesting. I rememober getting interested in monster movies was precipitated by buying a poster of Bela Lugosi spreading his cape, and my wife got into Chinese culture big time after seeing a Jackie Chan movie.

It hit me how much I liked music after seeing a film in German class that featured Beethoven's fifth. And I wondered how it worked. For instance, how did I know a symphonic movement was coming to an end? There were these gears  shifting way down in the orchestra so you'd feel this change in velocity. That was the Coda, the tail of the piece. Brahms often overworked his, stuffing like 5 key changes into a few bars.

Anyway I got to the point where I could play the middle movement of Beethoven's Pathetique sonata, about ten rags by Scott Joplin and lots of chunks of things. On a good day I could manage the end of Wagner's Die Walkure (the magic fire music, it'll tear your head off) and several pieces by Ravel and Brahms. But I didn't have the patience to learn basics, scales and such. And then I got married and there wasn't a piano (my brother had quit his lessons after several years from the, ahem, spinster who covered her living room furniture with plastic to protect it from children. He offered his piano but that seemed wrong).

But in about 2005 I finally bought a piano, a  Charles Walter studio model, my dream piano, and started again. I decided lessons were necessary, which was brave I guess because I'm scared to death to perform publicly and I knew it would entail a recital. I took my first lesson the day before I first met Lee Salem, strangely enough, from Grace Chang, a delightful,, funny but no nonsense teacher recommended by friends. She had me sight-read a Brahms intermezzo, one of his (somewhat) easier ones except for a bit that has 2 against 3 crossrythms (dense). She was impressed and said my trills were good.. I knew I'd get along with her when we both liked a bit from Brahms' first piano trio; in the first movement; on the first page, the piano, playing in B flat, dips down unexpectedly to a chord with a bass in low E major, the polar opposite. When played right it's quietly seismic. Within two years I played in 2 recitals, once four hands with my daughter Charlotte who also took lessons and once with Grace.  

Then I started on the strip and didn't have time. I also realized most music was really beyond me (I still harbored delusions of playing the Meistersinger prelude). I was always a sucker for transcriptions; orchestral pieces arranged for piano and, thanks mostly to the internet, I had hundreds of pieces I loved,  all for piano, at my fingertips, if they could handle it. My piano tuner, a funny man,   said most self-taught pianists have eyes bigger than their stomachs and I knew what he meant.

Then it got harder. I couldn't wrap my head or my fingers around it like before. When we moved I donated the piano to Arena Stage, where my brother works . It was time to let that obsession go.

Comics Riffs Blow the Lid Off Again

See here.