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

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Rough Week


Here's an exclusive first look at a future week of Cul de Sacs in early rough form. Uh-oh, spoiler alert! You can see I'm firing on all eight cylinders with this sequence, and the three Sunday roughs on the right are obviously instant classics. Even the last one, which I can't decipher (I think it says "Farley undied").

Actually, no, I dropped the fourth and fifth strips, labeled "closet", because they're pretty obviously not funny, and substituted two called "cart". So I'm only firing on about six cylinders. But this is what my initial rough for a week looks like, when I tally up the loose ideas stirring around in my head to see if there are enough to fill a week, or even two. 

There's a kind of raw power and beauty to this stage of the process, I think, and it's lost when the extraneous elements are added. You know, the lettering, the drawing, the squared boxes, the point, all the things that editors deem as necessary for a comic strip and that clutter up my time. In the future this will all be so much easier, when they develop that Wacom tablet that you'll wear like a hat, with its instant imaging cranial interface that'll further undermine the existence of print, or paper, or pen & ink, or any kind of instrumentality at all. Then we'll be like the Krell in Forbidden Planet. If "Monsters from the Id" wasn't too close to the title of an existing comic strip I'd go ahead and copyright it right now.

7 comments:

Kid Shay said...

Paper? Whatever happened to cave art? Of course reproduction is tricky, but it's the best way to draw mammoths.

Jesse Cline said...

haha. Lamp? I like seeing how your thought process works, post more!!

arcticcircle said...

NOW I see where I have been going wrong...

David Hagen said...

Kind of reminds me of the "How to draw Prince Valiant" books where they start with a stick figure and in the next step you've got P-Val!
I'd keep the "closet" strip, by the way. It made me giggle.

Ben Carlsen said...

@hungrydog: Indeed. Myself included. I feel I've been thinking too hard. I must slow down my thought processes a bit.

@David: But there were two "closet" strips. Which one do you like better?

Robert Gidley said...

It doesn't say "Farley undied," it says "Petey greens." But the undying one is better.

mark coale said...

I hope there will be a trip to Scotland and Castle Urquhart.