Daylight saving

Given the endless recent discussion of newspapers’ demise—a five percent circulation drop since March was just announced—comparatively little mind has been paid to the death of the comic strip.  This may be because the comics have been rotting away for years, as useless as classifieds.  With a few exceptions, characters are stale, situations dull, and jokes hopelessly flaccid.  Once the playground of McCay, Gross, and Kelly, the funny pages aren’t much fun, or all that interesting.  If this form of humor leaves us, conventional wisdom says, it’s been plodding towards the exit for years.  And anything that kills The Lockhorns might not be so bad.

Though I love the comics deeply, I’ve come to accept their fate.  Or, rather, I did—until I began to follow the work of cartoonist Richard Thompson.  If one strip might serve as an argument against the decline, it’s his terrific Cul de Sac—recently collected in Cul de Sac Golden Treasury: A Keepsake Garland of Classics.  The comic is vibrant, warm, and beautifully drawn; unlike its staggering peers, it’s outrageously alive.  Cul de Sac is proof that the medium has juice, even as it dwindles.  This unintended subtext adds a layer of poignancy: this wonderful creation was born at a terrible time.

In 2007, Cul de Sac spread to the dailies from the Washington Post Magazine.  I’m not sure how I found it—my city’s paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, reserves its space for Hägar the Horrible and Rex Morgan, M.D.—but I’ve come to read it each day on the Web.  The story is simple enough: a group of children plays games, attends preschool, and finds adults confusing.  Their parents are baffled and thwarted; a teenager stews in his room.  There’s an eccentric teacher and a pompous guinea pig.  And that is pretty much it.

Yet like the great kids’ titles—Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, even Little Orphan Annie—Cul de Sac draws strength from realism, facing its characters’ fears.  In one early strip, the four-year-old Alice Otterloop spends Thanksgiving at her grandmother’s house.  When a friend inquires about it, she describes a gravy spill which led her “to take a bath in Grandma’s scary bathtub.  I still smell like her crabapple-lye shampoo.”  Her friend’s response as the two walk away: “My grandma smells like the bingo hall.”

It is sad and bewildering and true.  And as with Peanuts, such dialogue seems funnier in retrospect—we glean the cuter parts and toss away the rest.  It’s only upon reading these strips that we recall their characters’ troubles—and those of our younger selves.  This underpinning adds heft, and makes sweeter episodes—Snoopy cavorting with Woodstock; Calvin and Hobbes sipping cocoa; Alice talking to bees—feel earned, not saccharine.

In a more recent Cul de Sac, Alice sits in bed, grumpy as all hell: “Ooh, I can feel it.  I’m going to have a major tantrum today.  I can feel the pressure building.”  Her mother bursts in, oblivious, telling her to come for breakfast—waffles with whipped cream and strawberries!  In a lesser comic—Hi and Lois or Blondie—the kicker is obvious: “Maybe today won’t be so rotten after all!”  Instead, we get this: Alice, teeth clenched, seething, “Oh, it’s going to be a bad day…”

A friend of mine dismisses Cul de Sac’s humor as deriving from “kids saying grown-up things.”  I don’t know that he’s wrong.  But when a writer presents his characters in all of their dimensions, such concerns seem secondary.  In a 2008 interview with The Comics Reporter, Thompson said, “I didn’t want the strip to be about the zany antics of those little dickens, Alice and Petey.  I wanted it to be about the kinda gently surreal parts of childhood, where the kids don’t know what’s going on or how things work, and maybe the adults don’t either. The mom and dad are good parents but not great parents.”  Being able to “get it right” this way is rare, regardless of genre or form.  That alone makes Cul de Sac worthy.  We can only hope that, as there once was for Watterson, Schulz, and the rest, there will be a medium to support Thompson’s gift long into the future.