Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson for January 17, 2011

You’ll never get through to that stubborn brain

Wonder what Kevin calls her when she’s not around …

Probably that bossy, bratty Alice.

…maybe ski-jump nose…or rooster-hair…

Maybe its time for some hard love toward little persnickety Alice.

When I was younger, we called that “Zoning Out.” Don’t know they call it now… I wasn’t listening.

A.D.D.

Au contraire, I agree with Alice.

Alice is in her own little world.

Did Charles Schultz EVER do anything to equal today’s strip? That “Cul de Sac” isn’t better known is an indictment of America’s popular taste.

Alice…la la la la…I can’t hear you……

Munodi, I don’t dispute the injustice of “Cul de Sac” not being better known, but Richard Thompson is building on a foundation laid by Charles Schulz. “Standing on the shoulders of giants” and all that.

If it weren’t for “Peanuts”, Alice and Petey would be about as interesting as Dolly and Billy.

Why would they be less interesting?

Schulz is great and possibly/probably an influence, but I don’t know that you can say Cul De Sac couldn’t have been done without it.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, en pointe, blah, blah, blah, blah, pirouette.

When the tutu appears, the brain is in neutral.

Oh! Divine!

I got teased a lot for being cross-eyed. Now I know more about why those kids didn’t learn better behavior (at home).

dante, Schulz perhaps was not the first to make childhood angst the driving force behind a comic strip, but that’s like saying Picasso wasn’t the first Cubist. Whether or not “Peanuts” is a direct influence on “Cul de Sac” (and RT has said it IS), Schulz changed the landscape. I’ll say with the same confidence that without “Pogo Possum” there’d be no “Doonesbury”, and without “Barnaby” (as well as “Peanuts” and “Pogo”) there’d have been no “Calvin and Hobbes.”

I used to have a similar argument with a friend of mine about Radiohead and the Beatles. Radiohead does things that the Beatles never dreamed of doing, and if you prefer Radiohead to the Beatles I would never try to change your mind, but if you claim that the Beatles were “bad” that’s simply incorrect, and without the Beatles there would be no Radiohead.

You could of course make the same claim that without Chuck Berry there would have been no Beatles, without Robert Johnson there would have been no Chuck Berry, without Stephen Foster there would be no Lady Gaga, whatever, and you’d be right. Without Desi Arnaz there would have been no “Seinfeld.” In the progression of the Arts there are certain people who simply change the game. It’s different in the sciences, insofaras if Einstein had not figured out Relativity somebody else would have eventually made the same realization. But Richard Thompson is branching from a trail that was blazed by Charles Schulz. That the original “Peanuts” trail is now a superhighway is a strong argument for its continuing relevance, rather than having become irrelevant through over-familiarity.

To her, Mom probably sounds like a trombone playing through a mute.

Chikuku, your comment reminded me of this passage, from Garry Trudeau’s introduction to the first collection of “Calvin and Hobbes”:

Anyone who’s done time with a small child knows that reality can be highly situational. The utterance which an adult knows to be a “lie” may well reflect a child’s deepest conviction, at least at the moment it pops out. Fantasy is so accessible, and it is joined with such force and frequency, that resentful parents like Calvin’s assume they are being manipulated, when the truth is far more frightening: they don’t even exist. The child is both king and keeper of this realm, and he can be very choosy about the company he keeps.

Mom SHOULD be asking Alice WHY she called Kevin a bucket head, rather than accusing her of being mean. A great and common failing of parents…..I know, I’ve been there (I’m a mother of 11)……this is precisely why Alice is zoned out! Can’t communicate when the conversation is one-sided!

I dunno, 55nana11, “why” is often a tough question for young kids. So often, they don’t know or can’t vocalize “why” they do something. Many times, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. If Alice did answer why she calls Kevin a bucket head, it would probably be “cuz his head is shaped like a bucket.”

OK, fritzoid. I’ll buy that.

Hmm – I have to disagree, respectfully, with fritzoid.

It’s not clear to me that science works any differently than other creative endeavors, in terms of having a linear path that forces certain discoveries along a dependency chain. Two Root-Bernstein books (Discovering, and Spark of Genius) are what I’d cite as evidence to the contrary.

Rather, I’d be more inclined to argue that in all creative endeavors, it’s entirely possible to have a perspective, or even a paradigmatic breakthrough, that does not rely upon some series of prior works, merely because of timing.

I think we’d all agree that Thompson’s genius has more to do with putting into text and into graphics certain insights about how people (all of us, not just chronological children) think, feel, and relate to the (internally re-constructed) world around them – and that this is not dependent on how other geniuses, who happen to have come before, may have done it.

Maybe the shape and the shading (and I don’t just mean cross-hatching! ;-) ) of Thompson’s work are influenced and enriched by prior art and artists, but I think it does him a disservice to imply that his conception and conceptualizations of his characters, their situations, and their environments, would be any less textured, primevally evocative, or resonant with us, as much as it does us a disservice to imply we would not be able to appreciate his work had we not first read Sparky, Watterson, Breathed, Larson, et al.

WDave

P.S. Okay, Richard – you owe me five bucks. ;-)

Jeez, if we make it ten bucks will you post lengthy comments here every day?

Gimme $20 and I’ll make sure I never log on.

I acknowledge your position, wdave, and return the respect. Both in the general sense and in this particular, though, I stand by my position.

I’m not familiar with the books you mention and of course can’t read them in time to respond to your use of them, but what sort of examples do they cite? What examples are you thinking of in the artistic fields? The only way I can imagine advancement/innovation arising in a vacuum is if the creator exists in a vacuum. Otherwise, the innovator has to “reinvent the wheel.” It’s absurd, of course, to suggest that RT was unaware of Sparky’s work, as (for example) Newton and Leibniz were mutually unaware that the other was inventing the calculus. Apart from having predated “Cul de Sac” by 50 years, “Peanuts” strode the world like a colossus, and in many ways set our expectations for how children in comic strips think and behave. But Schulz himself made no secret about how big of a debt he owed Percy Crosby and “Skippy.”

If Richard had been born in 1925, I wouldn’t doubt that he’d still have been a marvelous cartoonist. But whatever he would have come up with, I can’t imagine that it would have closely resembled “Cul de Sac”, at least in terms of character, plot, or pacing (in fact, without “Peanuts” paving the way, I doubt there’d have been an audience for “Cul de Sac” in its present form).

(Aside no. 1: I once read a sci-fi story about a future society wherein children who’d been identified as having musical talent were raised in isolation, with access to all sorts of musical instruments but no exposure to ANY music by anybody else. The central character became a huge star, creating entirely-original pieces for piano and performing them, still in isolation, for select audiences of high-paying music lovers. Everything was going fine, until somebody accidentally exposed him to Bach and fugues. He kept it hidden as well as he could, but it became immediately apparent to the aesthetes that he had been “contaminated”, and he was punished by having one of his fingers cut off. The negative reinforcement didn’t work, though, and he started playing fugues for nine fingers. Another finger, then eight-finger pieces, another finger, and so on, and at the end of the story he was playing in a piano bar before adoring audiences made up of the general public, happily picking out Bach-influenced variations with his two remaining fingers.)

(Aside no. 2: I can’t cite an authority for this, but I once heard that there’s evidence that the wheel itself (at least the “wheel-and-axle”) was only invented ONCE (in Mesopotamia or someplace), and that every culture that had wagons, carts, chariots, or wheelbarrows got them through contact with some culture that already had them.)

(Aside no. 3: about 15-20 years ago, I started developing my own comic strip with an eye towards syndication. The acknowledged precursors for my strip were “Krazy Kat”, “Pogo”, and (of course) “Peanuts.” It took place in the Southwestern desert and had an animal cast, but the central figures were a coyote and his young human friend. However, just as I was refining my concept, “Prickly City” made its debut, which superficially was my own strip, down to the details of background design, the coyote desperately wishing for the power of flight (there’s actually foundation for that in traditional Coyote stories) and crazed rabbits. I can honestly say that “Prickly City” in no way influenced my original inspiration, but it has certainly influenced me since, in that I’ve had to throw out half of my concept just so it’s NOT seen as a knock-off.)

Heck, pretty soon we’ll have to pay Richard to read our comments! ;-)

I, too, read that SF story. The musical genius’s “parole officer” knew he’d heard Bach because suddenly, everything Bach-like disappeared from his playing. I think it ended when he was singing (what we’d now call “viral”) songs while working on a chain gang.

Back to artistic examples of non-influenced creativity. I don’t know that I have any to cite, not being an art historian. So maybe it’s just my intuition that suggests creative discovery shouldn’t have to be reliant on prior work. Maybe that’s too broad? Would you accept the premise that, say, a surrealist sculptor might work independently of surrealist painters? Of course, a Magritte would do both – and many sculptors and painters both start with sketches.

I’m rethinking my position here, and I have to concede that with better communication channels, it’s harder to claim ignorance of the work of others – particularly well-known exemplars of prior work. Hmm … yeah, I’ll give you this one. I’m thinking of today’s “graphic novel” comic art, and how the Moore and Gibbons’s Watchman can’t be ignored as a source of innovation for the artistic format (especially the “Fearful Symmetry” chapter!), nor Gaiman’s work as storytelling craft (especially the seamless 5-level nested story-in-a-story of “World’s End,” whose upper levels hearken back to Chaucer’s use of the “travelers trading stories” vehicle).

So let me go back to the part of your original post that bugged me. It’s the way you stated that if there were no Beatles, there’d be no Radiohead. I know that’s not your literal meaning, but could you say that sure, there’d still be a Radiohead, but maybe they’d be operatic (if there were no Beatles)? But then, it’s tough to draw the line at what a “reasonable” supposition might be to an impossible hypothetical. There’s the equivalent of nature v. nurture in there – what parts of your creativity would be the same, if you’d been raised in a different environment shortly after birth? What parts of any creative person’s output would be roughly equivalent, if their prior influences had been different? I think it’s a reasonable question to ask – some artists are deconstructionist by nature, others synthetic. What exactly the elements are that they decompose things into, or the shape of the structures they combine things into might be different in each instance, but the processes or end feeling would be, I think, quite similar.

For example, DaVinci’s science and his art have similar themes (from what little I know of them; I could be way off base here), and so if an impressionistic painter instead were (re-)born an impressionistic musical composer, I’d expect the same end result feeling from viewing their painting, as I would from listening to their music. Even though the composer might never have seen the prior painting art that the painter would have had.

I guess what I’m saying is that I think if Richard had devoted the same number of years towards writing short fiction, that have gone instead into his comic art, I’ll bet that I’d still get the same feeling of, “Dang, when it comes to capturing s comic, w00t!

WDave

That is what I do. Blah Blah Blah Do you understand? ’Uhhhh Yuhhuh?"