|
Loading... Cul De Sacby Richard Thompson
LibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendationsLoading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This is a wonderful comic book! Richard Thompson channels some of the great classic illustrative styles and mixes them with his own originality. He and Pat McDonnell are the best artists on the comics page today (visually) but Cul De Sac is much funnier than Mutts in terms of characters and stories. Kudos to Thompson for not only achieving classic status in comics but doing so on the newspaper comic page which has never really recovered from the retirements of Watterson and Larson. Thank you, Richard Thompson, for Cul De Sac!  bluesdance | Oct 29, 2009 |  Many of the reviews mention Calvin and Hobbes, which is a bit unfair. That's an awfully high bar to reach, and Cul De Sac doesn't quite make it. It did, however, make me laugh hard enough to finally start reading a comic strip regularly again and that hasn't happened since... well, since Calvin and Hobbes. You won't see the deep levels of satire or philosophy that Watterson excelled at, but you will get the delightfully whacko Alice Otterloop, her family and her schoolmates, some deceptively simple artwork that matches the tone perfectly, and the kind of off-the-wall reactions to normal situations that make comic strips come alive. (  ) cabridges | Oct 14, 2009 | The most fun I've had reading cartoons since "Calvin and Hobbes" ended. Truly. I love "Get Fuzzy" and "Pearls before Swine", but "Cul de Sac" is really something special. The slightly loopy drawing, the marvelous characters (especially the neurotic Petey Otterloop and his indefatigable little sister, Alice) will stay with you and make you laugh at odd moments away from the strip, attracting the curious stares of your friends... There are so many wonderful, slightly surreal details - the Otterloop dad's tiny car that gets lost in the sandbox, the Otterloop mom's slightly manic cheeriness and her optimism, little friends like Dill, the coloring god. If you're smart and looking for a new strip to love, check this out. You won't be sorry. brynnlune | Oct 3, 2009 | The comparisons between this work and Calvin and Hobbes are unavoidable - even if the Early Reviewers description hadn't made the comparison, the introduction by Bill Watterson would invite it. Unfortunately, I didn't like Cul de Sac as much as I had hoped I would. I'm a huge Calvin and Hobbes fan, so perhaps the comparison raised my hopes too far. There were a few very funny strips (especially the Guinea Pig ones), but the majority didn't quite hit my funny bone. It's hard to pinpoint why I don't like Cul de Sac more - perhaps the tone, which seems darker than Calvin and Hobbes, or perhaps that the characters are much harder for me to identify with than Calvin and his parents. In summary, Cul de Sac may have been a decent or fairly good comic strip collection if taken on its own, but it suffers greatly in comparison with Calvin and Hobbes. (  ) gfvonb | Jul 23, 2009 | A great peek into the world of real kids -- I found it charming and funny. I liked the "rough" and sketch-y feel of the artwork. Definitely a worth checking out if you liked Calvin and Hobbes. (I don't think it will be as well-remembered, though.) (  ) Corvidae | Jul 7, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
References to this work on external resources.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Book description |
|
Cul de Sac's whimsical take on the world and playful sense of language somehow gets funnier the more times you read it. Four-year-old Alice and her Blisshaven Preschool classmates will ring true to any parent. Doing projects in a cloud of glue and glitter, the little kids manage to reinterpret an otherwise incomprehensible world via their meandering, nonstop chatter. But I think my favorite character is Alice's older brother, Petey. A haunted, controlling milquetoast, he's surely one of the most neurotic kids to appear in comics. These children and their struggles are presented affectionately, and one of the things I like best about Cul de Sac is its natural warmth. Cul de Sac avoids both mawkishness and cynicism and instead finds genuine charm in its loopy appreciation of small events. Very few strips can hit this subtle note.
I also like the nightmarish suburb that the Otterloop ("outer loop") family inhabits: the identical houses crammed in endless rows, the relentless highway traffic strangling the soulless development, the ugly shopping malls, the oppressive parking garages, and sticky-floored restaurants. Like most of us, the family negotiates this modern awfulness as a simple matter of course; the critique appears only in the drawings, where the strip suddenly works on another level.
And oh, those gorgeous drawings! With a mix of rambling looseness, blotchy crudeness, and sheer cartoony grace, Thompson's expressive pen line is the equal of any of cartooning's Old Masters. Thompson has a very sharp eye and a command of technique we almost never see anymore. He reminds us that comics can be more than illustrated gag writing, and that good drawings can bring a comic strip's world to life in countless ways that words cannot. The artwork in Cul de Sac bowls me over. It's a pleasure to study long after the strips are read.
The first fifty pages of this book are taken from the earlier incarnation of Cul de Sac that appeared in the Washington Post Magazine. Here we discover that Thompson has a natural flair for watercolor painting too. At this point, however, I'm not even surprised.
I hope you enjoy Cul de Sac as much as I do. I think you're in for a real treat. --Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, 2008
Alice Otterloop brings the funny to suburbia in Cul de Sac, "a suburban community ringed by a mighty wall and girded by a moat of stagnant traffic."
More than half of our nation's population resides in the "burbs. Knowingly, Richard Thompson's Cul de Sac follows the antics of four-year-old Alice Otterloop as she navigates her way through life at Blisshaven Preschool, "the scene of [her] daily toil." Suburbanites across the nation will easily recognize the quirks and conundrums associated with house-lined streets, sidewalk canvases, and magnetified refrigerator art.
Instructed by the proper Miss Bliss, Alice regularly has issues with taking a nap, speaking out of turn, and remembering what a triangle looks like. Helping her through life's ups and downs are her eight-year-old brother Petey, Dad (a.k.a. Peter), and Mom (a.k.a. Madeline), as well as Mr. Dander
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400)
The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details.
Quick Links |
| Ebooks | Audio | Swap |
| — | — | 0/16 |
Cul De Sac by Richard Thompson was made available through LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Sign up to possibly get pre-publication copies of books.
Wikipedia in English
