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

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Raymond Scott, Bath Toy


In honor of the centennial of the birth of musical mad scientist Raymond Scott, the toy company Presspop has produced an action figure of the poor unsuspecting man. It's terrifyingly realistic, and includes a CD, a clavivox and a pointing finger to play the clavivox with.


You know Scott's music whether you know it or not. Likely it's permeated your consciousness through its use in old Warner Brother's cartoons via Carl Stalling. And there are a dozen or more CDs of Scott's music, some performed by him and his quintette, others by bands like the Beau Hunks. Scott himself made an appearance in Michael Chabon's Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, at a party where Salvador Dali wore a deep sea diving suit. And now you can have your very own six inch tall Raymond Scott to fill that Raymond Scott-size space on your shelf.


My thanks to Ted Pratt for pointing this out to me.

Today's Poor Almanack


I'm not sure this makes much sense, but it made me laugh when I thought it up (which is often a warning sign). Originally there was as set-back-your-clock joke in there somewhere too, but it got lost in the final. And I'm not sure if "Pecunia Fugit" is correct, because I don't know Latin.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Cul de Sac on YouTube, Updated Slightly


This is pretty cool!

Well, it was pretty cool, but it's gone now. More later.....

Update: it should be up  again next week. I'll let you know.

Comic-Con Magazine


A few months back I did a joint interview with the below-mentioned genius, Stephan Pastis, for Comic-Con Magazine, courtesy of the gracious Gary Sassaman. Well, the whole magazine is online here. You can turn the pages and everything, and little lap cards fall out of your computer screen. You'll instantly notice that Stephan is better-spoken, better-groomed and generally more thoughtful than I am. I think he's taller, too.

March


Here's a repost from last year, only because we're expecting 5 to 8 inches of snow.

Saturday, February 28, 2009

What Stephan Pastis Does While Waiting for his Tuna Sandwich


Stephan Pastis, the genius behind Pearls Before Swine, orders a tuna sandwich for lunch, and amuses himself unconstructively by doing this.

Today's Poor Almanack


Here's a slice of desperate graveyard humor for the imploding newspaper business. If they could only reposition themselves as something more necessary, newspapers might survive. Did you know that you can clean glass with a newspaper and white vinegar?

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Mardi Gras Parade 2009


The First Family makes its way down Wilson Blvd on Fat Tuesday (photo thanks to Jennifer Hart, Arlington), and they're followed by Gov. Palin, below (photo thanks to Bono Mitchell). I appreciate these as I was stuck at home and missed all the fun. My daughter Charlotte represented the family, kindly chaperoned by Mike Rhode and his daughter Claire.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Awaiting the Parade


Sarah and Barack can't wait to meet you at the Mardi Gras Parade, Tuesday at 8 pm, Courthouse to Clarendon on Wilson Blvd in Arlington.

Wouldn't this make a good illustration for a kinda scary children's book?

My thanks to Bono for the photo!

Oscar (R) Repeat


Here, I posted this last year, but too late to do anybody any good.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Today's Poor Almanack


This isn't entirely true. I did see Wall-E. And this may be the clumsiest lettering I've done, at least for this month.

When Worlds Collide, Part Five


Here's the grisly finale to our little story.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

When Worlds Collide, Part Four

I'm proud to have done the first cartoon featuring an assorted jellies caddy. 

Mardi Gras Parade 2009

You may remember the above from last year.

Here's this year's Clarendon Mardi Gras poster. Various diverse hands have been constructing larger than life versions of some Almanac finger puppets to amaze and amuse the crowd.

Barack Obama, left, the magnificent Bono Mitchell, right.

When Worlds Collide, Part Three


Is that thing a tiki head, an Easter Island head or Abraham Lincoln? I just figure it's a pretty off-putting restaurant tchotchke and not at all condusive to fine dining.

You'll note "lowering" was changed to "glowering" in the final version, if you have time for such things.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

When Worlds Collide, Part Two



Since I've got nothing to say and no time to say it, I'll just post the week's Cul de Sacs. Here are Tuesday's and Wednesday's. A commenter on gocomics suggests the P.J. stands for pepperjack, which seems reasonable.

Monday, February 16, 2009

When Worlds Collide


This week the Otterloops go to P.J.Piehole's Family Restaurant, which I stole from the Poor Almanac. It's my futile attempt to better integrate my personality.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

A Valentine's Day Public Service.


And some advice; if you're on a deadline and in a hurry, draw candy. It's quick 'n' easy!

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Fridge Funnies

I did this in March '04. It kinda wrote itself, and seemed to make sense. In some interview years ago Maurice Sendak said that in Dickens' books everything is alive; the chair is alive and the table is alive and the fire in the grate is alive, etc. This takes that idea to ridiculous extremes, I hope.

So a coupla years later I did another fridge cartoon. It got a little convoluted, though I like the final balloon. And I like the implication that the photograph is several rungs above the comic strip on the social ladder, and that the comic strip is a little wiseguy in a derby. I'd planned on doing some more chatty fridge-clutter cartoons; they're like those old animated cartoons from the 30s where all the books on the shelves would open up and the characters would spill out and do funny stuff.  But they're hard to draw and to think up and I'm lazy. For some reason I have no trouble drawing most of your major appliances. Stoves, washers and dryers present no difficulties. But refrigerators defeat me.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Five




As Alan Gardner kindly pointed out, today is Cul de Sac's 5th birthday. Which has me worried, as Alice is only four, so I've somehow screwed up the math again. Above is the first sketch and the drawing used on the Post Magazine cover the week it debuted. Originally it was going to be on the plastic bag holding the paper too, but that didn't happen. Which is a relief, as it might've scared away Post readers and depressed sales.

I like the sketch a lot, and I wish I could draw the strips so loosely, but somehow drawing things in little boxes cramps looseness and forces the lines to behave.

Friday, February 6, 2009

Oont


I stole Oont from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Don't nobody tell!

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Gutzon


I'm confident that this is the only instance of a comic strip using Gutzon Borglum for a cheap laff.

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Today's Poor Almanack



Here's what's filling up space in the Post Style section today.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

The Blowhard's Reading Corner


Comics aficianado, scholar & journalist extraordinaire Chris Mautner asked me for a list of the books on my bedside table, which I'm assumably reading, for the weekly What Are You Reading over at Robot6. 

These are the books on my bedside table, though some are by my drawing board, because I sometimes read when I’m in the middle of a deadline. I left off some of the books my daughters have left there so nobody'll think I'm reading Twilight, Horse Adventures or Captain Underpants (which, ok, I've read four times).
  • The Art Forger’s Handbook by Eric Hebborn. Hebborn was a Cockney art forger and master of various art techniques who died under mysterious circumstances in 1996, and an entertaining writer. I figure this is a good skill to fall back on in case this whole cartoon thing heads south.
  • Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I’ve never read much Dickens and I started this a year ago and I’m enjoying it very slowly.
  • Ojingogo by Matt Forsythe. I just keep picking this up and looking through it over and over. It’s like a great silent animated fantasy you can hold in your hand.
  • Harvey Pekar: Conversations, edited by Mike Rhode. I’ve never read enough Pekar either, but I get a great introduction to the man in the 25 years of interviews Mike’s gathered here.
  • Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. I reread this every few years, like I’m doing now, because it’s the greatest comic novel every written, along with A Confederacy of Dunces.
  • Diaries: The Python Years by Michael Palin. Oh, this is fun to read! John Cleese says that Palin never shuts up, just yaps all the time. You can pick this up, read a few day’s worth of entries, and put it down a much happier man.
  • Ordinary Victories, Parts 1 & 2 by Manu Larcenet. I wish I could draw comic realism as well as Larcenet, and tell a story so interestingly.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Booboo Revealed


This is either a booboo, a technical glitch or an editorial oversight, I drew a misdirected pointer, or "tang", on the final balloon, making it appear that it was being spoken by Mom, then drew a corrected one pointing to Alice. But I forgot to expunge the one to Mom. I'm sorry, ok?

More Late Night Nib Talk: My New Favorite Nib

Warning; this is mostly for appreciators of pen nibs, also known as nibophiles, pendemaniacs and nirds.


In an earlier post, I'd driveled on at length about my favorite pen nib, the Hunt ##101 Imperial, shown above. I use a dip pen nib every day of my life and am therefor a leetle obsessive about them; a bad one can send me into a funk that poisons the whole household and probably scars my children permanently, but give me a good nib and I sing & dance like Donald O'Connor (which also scars my chi- but, never mind). Nibs can vary in quality within their species. Get 30 nibs of the exact same kind and hold them in your hand; half of 'em are OK-ish, 10 of 'em are decent and 5 are sweet, and, if you're real lucky, one is immortal, a Nib for the Ages (that adds up to 31, I know, I know). It all depends what you're after, of course. I'm after one that draws fine lines effortlessly, on edge or square on, upside down even, and does fat lines without spreading out too far and compromising the ink flow. It's usually immediately apparent how well the nib is going to perform, just by the feel of it dragging on the paper, or the tiny variations in shape of the tines. It's this finely calibrated nib-sense that makes my wife's eyes roll audibly in her head if I so much as say the word "nib".

Now, the Hunt Imperial nib is good for drawing, but it was designed for ornamental calligraphy, specifically copperplate or Spencerian calligraphy. This style, popular in the 19th century, used a fine pointed nib with flexible tines allowing for great variations in line width by hand pressure instead of nib width and angle, and it demands great skill and a good bit of flair to pull off. The 19th century was an explosive period for steel nibs, as I'm sure you'll remember from your high school history book, chapter 21, "The 19th Century; An Explosive Period for Steel Nibs". Though steel nibs (actually often bronze) had been around for a while, maybe as long ago as ancient Egypt, they were inferior in line-quality to reed pens or, later, quills. Quill pens were cheap and fairly easy to produce as long as enough geese were handy, but didn't last long and needed sharpening often. By the early 19th century, steel nibs were much improved in quality, but were horrendously expensive, costing about two day's pay for a laboring man. And they were produced laboriously by hand, being carved one at time out of a block of steel with a putty knife (this part's not true). But, as with the manufacture of most things during the Industrial Revolution, improvements were made.

Birmingham, England was a center for the production of small metal objects, toys, jewelry, buckles and such, in fact it was one of the first manufacturing towns in the world, and the Jewellery Quarter is now an historic neighborhood. It was there in the early 1820s that John Mitchell began to apply button making technology to nib making, using a series of hand presses to shape, pierce and slit the nibs. Within ten or so years dozens of nib manufacturers had sprung up in the area, among them the firms of the Mitchell Brothers, Josiah Mason and Joseph Gillott, and at their peak they employed over 5,000 workers and produced an astonishing 1,500 million pen nibs a year, which wasn't too short of the world population at the time. Needless to say, the price of a steel nib dropped, from 12.5p each to 1.25p for a gross (144). At least one historian has said that this sudden affordability democratized writing and certainly it boosted literacy.


Though John Mitchell may have been the first (there's some conflict in the sources I've found; most such advances are simultaneous impulses), Joseph Gillott (pronounced GILLott, his bust pictured above) seems to have been the man who most perfected the art & science of nib manufacture. From the book "Forty Years of Ink";
It was Joseph Gillott, however, originally a Sheffield cutler, and afterwards a workman in light steel articles, as buckles, chains, and other articles of that class, who in 1822 gave impulse to the steel-pen manufacture. Previous to his entering the business the pens were cut out with shears and finished with the file. Gillott adapted the stamping press to the requirements of the manufacture, as cutting out the blanks, forming the slits, bending the metal, and impressing the maker's name on the pens. He also devised improved modes of preparing the metal for the action of the press, tempering, cleansing, and polishing, and, in short, many little details of manufacture necessary to give them the required flexibility to enable them to compete with the quill pen. One great difficulty to be overcome was their extreme hardness and stiffness; this was effected by making slits at the side in addition to the central one, which had previously been solely used. A further improvement, that of cross grinding the points, was subsequently adopted. The first gross of pens with three slits was sold for seven pounds. In 1830 the price was $2.00; in 1832, $1.50; in 1861, 12 cents, and a common variety for 4 cents a gross. About 9,300 tons of steel are annually consumed, the number of pens produced in England alone being about 8,000,000,000.



Gillott's firm produced many varieties of pen nibs, especially nibs designed for copperplate lettering. Their #303 was (and is) one of their most popular. But their greatest creation, their gold standard, was the fabulous Gillott Principality.


Jeez, just look at that sweetheart, isn't it a pisser? As far as I can tell, it was only in production for a little over 20 years, but it was unmatched for flexibility and ease of ink flow. If you compare it to the Hunt Imperial, you can see the similarities, but also some differences, like the grinding marks and size of the vent hole. And how it just looks better made overall. One mark of a well-made nib is a slight concavity of the tine's outer profile; it means they fit together evenly and therefor will work better.


OK, my eyes are starting to roll audibly in my head. Suffice it to say, the Principality is one of the peaks of a now-diminished craft, and it's one that people who collect such things pay good money for. God knows how many hundreds of thousands, or millions, of these fine bits of steel were produced in the late 1800s, but the day when you could buy a gross for a few bucks are long gone. About six years ago a collector sold a gross of the Principalities as fund raiser for the Leukemia Society on eBay for $1,525, and individual ones go for about $20, or two days wages for a laboring man, if he has a crummy job.

It's too late to make a long story short, but I just bought one of these things, unused, on eBay for less than $20, and I'm scared to touch it. And not just because the oil on my hand might effect the surface (many nibs have a coating that should be removed somehow so ink won't bead up on the metal; some old-time penman supposedly used to pop the nib into their mouth and let saliva do the trick, and no, I'm not going to try it). What I'm going to do is, seal it in lucite and put it in a tank filled with helium then bury it in the backyard. And when the economy heads south and nobody's buying cartoons, I'll trade it for fuel, liquor, breadfruit and copra.


But in the meantime, guess what? The nib manufacturing firm Hiro Leonardt has started producing a nib closely based on the old Principality. It's called the Leonardt EF Principal, and I bought a handful of them, and dang, it's a nice nib to draw with. I'm sure I'm not using it correctly, as it's meant for ornamental lettering on smooth paper with iron gall ink instead of drawing goofy cartoons on vellum bristol with India ink, and I can feel it pulling ahead of me, like a racehorse forced to pull a garbage wagon. Maybe it's embarrassed. But it's also more responsive and better made than most of today's nibs, which for the most part are stamped out of aluminum foil by poorly-trained lemurs. So there ya go, a ray of hope in a dark world.

Mozart's Birthday


A cheap & lazy repost.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Deadline Zombie, and a Question



The above is a current self portrait, except my hair is actually longer and I'm wearing socks.

And I have a question that anyone who uses drawing ink might be able to help me out with. I have a bottle of ink that's about to go bad; it has a slight sour smell that'll likely just get worse. It's the good kind of ink, Dr. Ph. Martin's High Carb, and I hate to dump it out. Is there any way to prevent it from spoiling? It's in a 30 ml bottle that I'd cleaned out, poured from a larger bottle, and I'm not short on ink. But these days I don't want to waste ink, especially the expensive stuff. Anybody got a suggestion?

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Last Chance


One last shot across the brow. This was for the New Yorker a few years back.

Saturday's Almanack


I did one like this for Bush, too, and I'll post it if I can find it.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Morning Sing-Along

Good morning! It's 12º in Arlington. Let's warm up with an Ann Telnaes sing-along! 

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

First Cul de Sacs


This is the first Cul de Sac, which appeared in the Post Magazine on February 8, 2004.
This is the second.
This is the rough for the third, which I'd planned to be the first (note paste-overs).
And here's the third.
More TK, as us print journalists say.

Friday, January 9, 2009

Saturday's Almanack


If you live in the DC area, you know what I'm talking about.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

The Elderberries


Today's Elderberries by the mad comic genius Corey Pandolph has a shocking development. If Dusty and Boone think I can fix a radio, they're in for an awful let-down. And my thanks to Corey for drawing my nose not too big.

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Battle of the Bands


Hey Kids! Let's go to a rock 'n' roll concert! Featuring Titanic Tom Toles of Suspicious Package on drums! YAAAAAAAAAAAAY!

Go here.