Richard Thompson Interviewed
Over at The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon has posted a great interview with Richard Thompson, the creator behind Cul de Sac and Richard’s Poor Almanac, among other projects.
The interview provides a look at the daily routine for a creator balancing multiple ongoing projects and the struggle to keep things fresh. It also provides a few funny examples of the relationship between a creator and his/her editor, as described below.
Nowadays my editor, Ann Gerhart, doesn’t ask for a rough, or even any idea of what I’m doing, so I guess we’ve reached a level of trust, or maybe nobody’s reading it still. The only complaint I ever remember getting from Gene [Weingarten, a former editor of Thompson’s], whose motto is that he edits for humor but not for taste, was when I used the phrase "fart-catcher" to describe a presidential aide twice in as many weeks and he found that excessive.
We're rereading Cul de Sac since it's been syndicated. They wanted to start from the beginning, which we've already seen. I get to that point in The Washington Post Magazine and start reading and think "Hey, I've read this before!" I'll be happy when he gets to the new stuff.
I just wish the Washington Post would pick up his daily strips. They're all new and I still prefer reading comics on newsprint to the web. Though not all the Sunday ones are old, either.