Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson for March 20, 2011

Alice, all innocense…

Pink puppies?

Vicious ones. The toad zombies don’t stand a chance.

His first graphic novel will be dedicated to his inspiration and silent partner: Alice.

Pink puppies are the worst. Never turn your back on them.

hahahahahahaha

all due respect and it’s a good strip, but I’m not sure about it being the comic strip of the year—- not as long as Pigs before Swine is still in the competition

One question, though, nighthawks. If he chose, could Richard Thompson do what Stephan Pastis is doing? I think he probably could. Could Stephen Pastis do what Richard Thompson is doing? I doubt it.

That’s the age-old bugbear of arts competition. By what objective standards can you compare the works of two (or more) creators who aren’t even trying to do the same thing? That’s why there’s more second-guessing over, say, the Oscar for Best Picture than there is over the Super Bowl trophy.

The ancient Greeks gave Olympic laurels to poets and playwrights as well as to athletes, and if a tragedy by Tracheotomes won out over a satire by Getalodades, there were no doubt mutterings of discontent among those who simply prefer satires to tragedies.

On the subject of today’s strip, has anybody here read The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino? The fundamental trick of the book (which is a series of discrete stories, with a framing device) is that narratives can be told simply by laying out cards sequentially from a Tarot deck. The King of Swords might represent (obviously) a powerful warrior king, the 9 of cups might represent a feast, the 10 of coins might be the discovery of treasure (while, say, the 2 of coins might represent a small financial transaction), the 2 of swords might force your protagonist to fight a duel (or some other one-on-one conlict), the 8 of rods followed by the Priestess might be a journey through a forest to consult an oracle, and so on.

In Calvino’s stories of course the sequences were carefully plotted out, but I always thought an interesting Creative Writing exercize could be made along those lines. Lay out a random sequence of perhaps 15 cards (for ease, you might weight the deck to favor face cards and the Major Arcana), and develop a storyline wherein each card provides a major plot point (or change of setting, or something; there’s a lot of latitude). The first draft would be just a bare outline, but allow for perhaps two rewrites, each of which can be progressively removed from the source cards but in which, looking backwards, you can still trace the original (random) sequence. That the original sequence was random would force you to improvise, like telling a bedtime story to a child who keeps insisting you work in highly-specific details as you go along. I’ve never actually TRIED this (I don’t own a Tarot deck these days), but it would be interesting to see if it worked…

It’s a literal storyline that he’s following.

Does Scott McCloud know about this?

Good one, Alice.

love the spring stuff at the blog

Ghost writer Alice.