Words fail me, and drawing's too hard.

October 22, 2008 3:39 PM

Richard Thompson (no, not that one) is the writer and artist behind Cul-de-Sac, a delightful comic chronicling the lives of Alice and Petey Otterloop.

He's also responsible for Richard's Poor Almanac, a weekly comic in the Washington Post known for regional humor and a series of political finger puppets, including Scott McClellan, Fred Thompson, Barack Obama (well, kinda), Ron Paul, and of course, everbody's favorite Vice-Presidential candidate.

Unfortunately, while all of the comics are on the Post's website, there is no RSS feed, nor can you navigate through them in any reasonable order.

He also enjoyed mild notoriety as a result of the much-forwarded poem, "Make the Pie Higher."

posted by god hates math (14 comments total)

I tremendously enjoyed the works linked to here. Thompson seems like he understands cartooning in an era when the quality of traditional comic strips seems to be dwindling. I'm not converted from my daily webcomic browsing quite yet, but I'll keep an eye out for this series from time to time.
posted by LSK at 4:01 PM on October 22, 2008

"Unfortunately, while all of the comics are on the Post's website, there is no RSS feed, nor can you navigate through them in any reasonable order."

understatement.

Not sure which site you mean, but true of both the cul-de-sac one, and the reichard's poor.

Good stuff though.

I am going to run this up the chain where I work. I doubt they'll pick it up, but much better than some of the crap they have on the page. Judge Parker? WTF?
posted by cjorgensen at 4:32 PM on October 22, 2008

A note about navigating the archives of each - the Cul-de-Sac archives on gocomics are navigable, though it is difficult. The previous link works, though it's a pain to read in reverse chronological order. And, if you click on the calendar, you can navigate to anywhere in the last 30 days worth of comics. The Richard's Poor Almanac archives are non-existent, and I've yet to find an easy way to dig out all the individual comics.
posted by god hates math at 4:59 PM on October 22, 2008

Oooh, I like!
posted by martinrebas at 5:16 PM on October 22, 2008

We just got Cul De Sac in the Detroit Free Press a few months ago, and I was hooked from the start. It's a brilliant strip, with some truly understated yet completely bizarre jokes and storylines. The art is wonderful as well... Thompson's got this weird shaky line that looks like the bastard child of Charles Schulz and Robert Crumb.

Didn't know he did the other strip... looks good too.
posted by 40 Watt at 5:28 PM on October 22, 2008

I have an original Richard Thompson hanging on my wall. I used to work for a magazine in Washington, and Thompson occasionally illustrated stuff for us. I got to keep one of the illustrations, of astronauts playing golf on the moon. It's fun and witty and looks great above my desk. And, man, can that guy play guitar. (Oh. Wait a minute.)
posted by Man-Thing at 5:51 PM on October 22, 2008

Richard Thompson is great. I'm glad word is getting out there beyond the DC area. Here's an interview. Here's another slightly older interview , and a long one from January.
posted by gudrun at 6:04 PM on October 22, 2008

Haven't heard of Cul-de-Sac before, but I find it relentlessly charming! Great find, g.h.m.
posted by JHarris at 7:49 PM on October 22, 2008

I'm so glad he also hates Anthony. Everyone hates Anthony. Even Lynn Johnston - my theory on FBOFW is that she really wanted to start the comic over again so she could do it without Anthony.
posted by yhbc at 7:58 PM on October 22, 2008

I love cul-de-sac, which is really surprising because if you told me I'd love a comic about suburban children being zany I'd never believe you for a minute. Oh, and he posts new Poor Richard's Almanacs on his blog (the first link in your post) which does have an rss feed.
posted by aspo at 9:00 PM on October 22, 2008

So I got to reading Cul-de-Sac backwards, and was finding it awesome, but then got 30 days back and it said "This feature is for pro users only" and gave me a login screen.

Paywalls can suck the charm out of anything.
posted by JHarris at 12:04 AM on October 23, 2008

It makes me happy to see that the ugly line of English sixties/seventies cartoonists still has its fans in this day and age. A daily strip doesn't have the room for a truly horrid, blotchy line any more, but I can just tell that Thompson would love to whip out the pen he lovingly destroyed while trying to be like Searle and make a grand mess.
posted by egypturnash at 6:27 AM on October 23, 2008

So I got to reading Cul-de-Sac backwards, and was finding it awesome, but then got 30 days back and it said "This feature is for pro users only" and gave me a login screen.

Yeah, paywalls are lame. If you dig backwards on the blog (which I think is the best link of any), there's plenty of content; both Richard's Poor Almanac & Cul-de-Sac, as well as a lot of his freelance work, some of which I had seen before I really knew who he was.
posted by god hates math at 7:24 AM on October 23, 2008

Also, I'd like to point out that the Washington Post page for Richard's Poor Almanac now has a drop-down menu of strips, back to September 2007. I'm going to go ahead and claim this thread as being the motivator for that, thank you very much.

I was definitely secretly hoping that someone would see all the inbound traffic, come back to the thread, see that we were all bitching^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H having trouble, and implement a fix. WHEEEEEEEEEE
posted by god hates math at 8:32 PM on November 16, 2008