Cul de Sac (10/18/09)

When I was a kid, my friends and I debated whether or not it was possible to swing in a complete circle, looping around the top bar of a swing set. I was skeptical, although I secretly hoped that such a thing were possible. I would ask my dad to push me as hard as he could and would kick my legs out at the height of the swing. The higher I got, the more excited and nervous I became about clearing the crossbar. I also worried that my momentum wouldn’t carry me far enough, and that I would end up hitting my head on the metal swing set. Needless to say, the only time I saw a swing clear the crossbar when there was nobody sitting on it and my friends and I pushed the nearly weightless rubber as hard as we could, trying to prove a point.

Cul de Sac (9/8/09)

I’ve read a lot of strips that lampoon the back-to-school rituals of children, but very few that depict their genuine fear of entering the classroom. Today’s Cul de Sac does just that, and in a very sweet way, to boot. I was moved by the image of a little girl clinging to her mom’s leg as her teacher emerges from a somewhat scary school building. This strip strikes just the right balance between an adult’s knowing recollection of childhood and a child’s earnest wish to hang tight to the familiar.

Cul de Sac (8/26/09)

What’s the point of an imagination if it’s not used to obliterate the mundane? Why would an artist take pen to paper if he’s not planning to seriously blow some minds? What would possess a cartoonist to start a rumble in panel one if he can’t pay it off with a completely insane toddler stampede in panel two? Fortunately, these questions don’t have any bearing on today’s Cul de Sac, which continues the strip’s proud tradition of rendering suburban childhood in strange and wondrous ways. If Shel Silverstein had been asked to write Peanuts, he might have come up with something like this. It’s the type of aesthetic that makes Cul de Sac a constant source of surprise and delight, and hoists it head and shoulders above its contemporaries on the comics page. Ngyah, indeed.

Cul de Sac (7/21/09)

The bright lights of Chicago make it impossible to see more than a few stars at night, and with urban sprawl in full effect you’d have to drive pretty far to see anything approaching a constellation. I’ve only seen a genuine starry night once but the experience filled me with so much wonder that I couldn’t take my eyes off the heavens. Far from feeling “unnoticed,” I felt intimately connected to a vast universe far bigger than Chicago, Illinois, the United States or even the Planet Earth. Needless to say, I did not throw mulch.

Cul de Sac (7/12/09)

Maybe it’s just me, but I find the notion of holding a conversation with a supermarket cashier to be quaint. I say this even though I’m friends with one of the cashiers at my neighborhood supermarket and am regularly chatting him up as I check out. But unless I know someone personally, I see no need to start gabbing away while he or she is ringing up my purchases. It could be the fluorescent lighting or the insufferable muzak, but it seems to me that the grocer is just not the ideal place to build community.

Cul de Sac (6/11/09)

Whenever I think of cookie-cutter architecture, I always default to frame houses with light-colored paneling, pitched roofs and large bay windows. Maybe that’s because of numerous cultural references from the Malvina Reynolds song, Little Boxes to the opening credits of the TV show, Full House to the second panel of this comic strip. I even see dozens of these clone homes lining a street in Chicago’s South Loop neighborhood as I ride the train to work every day. But when I stroll through my own neighborhood, or others throughout the city, I see a different type of assembly-line-style house: the bungalow. There must be hundreds of Chicago streets lined almost exclusively with these brown brick monoliths. Bungalows are well-constructed – certainly more so than the townhouses built during the last 10 years – but they still personify a crushing conformity that ought to inspire the type of criticism usually reserved for recent construction.

Cul de Sac (6/5/09)

There’s nothing creepier than fake cheeriness, whether it manifests itself in a morning news anchor or on the face of a stuffed animal. The kids in this strip seem to have this poor rabbit pegged. Not only is its grin impossibly wide, but it carries none of the joy of a genuinely happy bunny and doesn’t even suggest the knowing slyness of a Cheshire Cat. Words like “smarmy” and “patronizing” come close to describing this toy figure, but I think the owner of the stuffed animal comes closest when she uses the phrase, “insane with glee.” Maybe “glee” is the wrong word, but the ear-to-ear grin on this rabbit suggests that it is, indeed, insane with something.