Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Enjoy this or face the wrath of the pangolin

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Mike Peterson Published: November 3, 2010 1 minute 0 comments

One of the delights of Cul de Sac is that, unlike the characters in other strips about imaginative little children who live in their own dream world, Alice is not withdrawn, unpopular and ignored by her peers. I do not believe that this means that, unlike other cartoonists, Richard Thompson spent his formative years being carried about the classroom on the shoulders of his cheering admirers. I believe it means that he remembers kids like Alice who somehow managed to impose their will upon others, despite the fact that they, too, were just little kids living in a little kid universe.

Nothing in Cul de Sac ever makes me wish I were six years old again, but it often makes me realize that I wasn't the only person who grew up feeling that the world was a pretty strange place full of odd but interesting possibilities and who turned out to be (a) relatively normal and (b) perfectly right.

But I often feel a lot more like Dill than like Alice, and I think that, while I hesitate to use the word "intentional," Dill carries a great deal of the narrative point-of-view in this strip.

There is a bit of Linus and Lucy at work here, from that period in Peanuts when Linus believed everything his big sister told him, despite how clearly and innocently wrong she was about most things. The two differences being that, as demonstrated here, Dill can see through her facts but can't get past her self-confidence, and that Thompson doesn't draw a Charlie Brown universal observer in the corner of the final panel, holding his stomach in pain.

Later on, in Peanuts, Lucy's wrongheaded willfulness became more deliberate, and Linus became aware, to his frustration, not just that she was wrong about things, but that she was gaming him. The characters were still very funny, but the aspect of childhood they then reflected was considerably darker and less innocent than anything in Cul de Sac.

While Charlie Brown has always been known to be Charles Schulz's doppelganger, I think the semi-mystified but accepting Dill is closer to being Thompson's. Poor Sparky always was that kid in the last panel, holding his stomach in pain, even when he didn't bother to draw him. There isn't any pain in Cul de Sac, just a sense of bewilderment.