One of America's best comic strips comes to a premature end

Here's some very sad news for comics fans: Richard Thompson is retiring his comic strip Cul de Sac as he continues his battle against Parkinson’s disease, according to The Washington Post’s Comic Riffs blog, which is written by Michael Cavna.

Cavna reports that the 54-year-old Thompson, “widely acclaimed among his peers as the best all-around comic-strip creator working today,” will call it quits on Sept. 23, ending what has been an eight-year run for Cul de Sac. 

“The last year has been a struggle for Richard,” according to his distribution syndicate, Universal Uclick. “Parkinson's disease, first diagnosed in 2009, has so weakened him that he is unable to meet the demands of a comic strip. For a time, he worked with another artist, but the deadlines became too much of a task.”

Cul de Sac debuted as a weekly strip in The Washington Post Magazine in 2004, and Universal released it as a daily in 2007.

In a recent interview with Cavna, which you can read here, Thompson had this to say about how he decided to drop the strip:

I’ve known for a year or more that I was working on borrowed time. My lettering had begun to wander off in 2009, but that could be fixed easily enough. But when Alice’s and Dill’s heads began to look under-inflated last winter, I figured I was losing control of the drawing, too. When I needed help with the inking (the hardest but most satisfying part of drawing the strip),well that was probably a tipping point. Parkinson’s disease is horribly selfish and demanding. A daily comic strip is too and I can only deal with one at a time. So it was a long, gradual, sudden decision.