This exit, Cul de Sac: Proof that the comic strip is far from dead

If you’re a cartoonist who is publishing a collection of comic strips in book form, you can’t do any better than to get Bill Watterson, creator of the legendary Calvin and Hobbes, to write the foreward.

That’s just what happened to Richard Thompson back in 2008 when Andrews McMeel Publishing released the first collection of Thompson’s strip, Cul de Sac. A second collection was issued last year.

Set in the sometimes frightening suburb from which the strip takes its name, Cul de Sac revolves around self-absorbed spitfire Alice Otterloop, her older, misanthropic brother Petey, their parents and Alice’s friends from the Blisshaven Academy, a preschool.

Four-year-old Alice is inquisitive about her world and perplexed by her surroundings, yet she rules her small domain. She is highly imaginative, frequently outraged and always keenly observant, in the endearingly daffy way of a young child. Her friends often reflect on their surroundings with comments that seem surprisingly mature, yet cockeyed.

In one strip, for example, Alice asks her father why a sapling in their yard is staked. When he jokingly tells her the tree must be held in place so it won’t chase her, Alice stares at the tree, sticks out her tongue and angrily announces: “You can’t get me.” To which one of her friends responds: “Taunting the inanimate is cruel.”

“I thought the best newspaper comic strips were long gone,” Watterson writes in the foreword to the first collection, “and I’ve never been happier to be wrong. Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac has it all - intelligence, gentle humor, a delightful way with words, and, most surprising of all, wonderful, wonderful drawings.”

Impressive praise, considering the source.