Cul de Sac Reviewed by A.V. Club

Reclusive cartoonist Bill Watterson wrote the foreword for the first collection of Richard Thompson's Cul De Sac (Andrews McMeel), and that's apt, because Thompson's strip is the best thing to happen to the daily comics page since Watterson retired Calvin & Hobbes. After spending a couple of years developing Cul De Sac as a weekly in The Washington Post, Thompson launched the strip as a syndicated daily last September. The comic follows the adventures of the suburban Otterloop family, and in particular Alice, a perpetually wired preschooler who spends her days bossing around her classmates, her afternoons trying to comprehend her finicky older brother Petey, and her evenings befuddling her well-meaning parents. Though sassy-kid strips aren't exactly a rarity, Thompson has a knack for heightening the mundane details of post-toddler suburban life—chirpy teachers, eccentric children's-book authors, enormous fast-food-restaurant play structures, and so on—until they rise to the level of absurdity. The first Cul De Sac book contains the original weeklies and the first few months of dailies, though the strip doesn't really find its rhythm until the dailies start. It doesn't take long for Thompson to figure out how to work in gags about the pile of snow (known as "Old Mount Soot") that rises in the grocery-store parking lot every year, and how in school, "neatness plus creativity equals art." Once Thompson gets into a groove, he produces one of the few strips around where nearly every individual panel is standalone delight… A-

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