Comic Book Resources interviews Richard Thompson about his comic Cul de Sac, his influences, and his Team Cul de Sac that is raising money for Parkinson’s Research.
Much of the strip’s humor comes from the fact that many of the characters have their own unique worldview. Sometimes it?s Alice and Dill and Beni misunderstanding and reinterpreting reality. Sometimes it’s the adults and kids talking over each other. Other times it’s Alice and Petey not understanding each other and when they do, the rest of us have no idea why. It?s done in a way that?s odd and sometimes funny, and sometimes strange but always in a playful fashion. Is this perhaps your view of the world and how people interact?
Yes! I’ve always had a feeling that life is a series of non sequiturs and that we’re all untrustworthy narrators. The friction among the clashing points of view is an important part of the strip. It makes it richer and livelier and lets me have several things going on at once. It also lets me build strips on what might otherwise be pretty thing material, like following bugs, buying sneakers, going over a bump in the sidewalk with a kiddie car. And it puts the burden of the strip on the strength of the characters; if they don’t have an interesting point of view the material falls apart. Not long after I started the strip my dad pointed out that each of the characters is off in his or her own little world and the strip is about the small places where they overlap. I’ve tried to stick with that idea.