Attending to Alice

I think it took Richard Thompson a few strips after his enforced layoff to get back in the swing of things over at Cul de Sac, but he's back to knocking them over the wall on a regular basis. 

This is the opposite of Saturday Night Live Syndrome, where, a few seasons in, you learned to watch the first show of the season because they'd have had three months to think of great stuff for that one. After that, you could tune out, because they'd come up with nothing inspired on only a week's notice. (And later, even a whole summer wasn't enough prep time.)

No, this is more like the thing football and hockey players say, that the game doesn't really get started until they get hit the first time. You see them sometimes, smacking into each other in warmups, but that's not the same thing. You've gotta be out on the field.

Well, Richard is back out on the field and has gotten into full stride and Alice is her regular self, a paragon of manic, self-centered humanity, forever captured in that precious moment between the time awareness kicks in and before the social filters have been installed.

And, as she is in that moment of being just a little bit too old to still get away with feeling the world was built for her personal pleasure, her father has apparently decided to use the "Teaching by Tweaking" method, and why not? Push her buttons and at least get a chuckle out of the experience.

The alternate interpretation is that he genuinely believes the news would be more interesting to children if it were delivered by baby ducks. I say this mostly because I am in professional competition with a lot of people who seem to think children, indeed, absorb information better when it is cute.

Which creates its own sort of Junior Grade Echo Chamber, because, if you always address children as if (A) they were somewhat dim and (B) you had been smacked in the head several times and then given amphetamines, they will come to think that children's media is supposed to feel like that, and that anything delivered in a sensible, conversational tone is not intended for them.

But Alice's parents continue to try to expose the kids to things that aren't entirely aimed at them, and, whether her dad is genuinely hoping to make the news palatable or just amusing himself while trapped in the car with Alice, she's getting the message that perhaps the universe is not centered precisely on her.

(I note that her older brother's response to that revelation is to remain in his room as much as possible and avoid all external stimuli. He's not the first kid to take that route.)

The Otterloops are not an average family. If they were, Alice would be watching Disney Channel DVDs in the back of the car while Petey sat zoned out on his ear buds, and they would never have to worry about the restaurant with the boat on the wall because they'd never go anywhere that served food on plates rather than wrapped in paper as God intended.

Theodore Roosevelt famously said of his famously headstrong daughter,  "I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both."

Mr. Otterloop is not required to run the country, which leaves him the option of taking listeners' calls about the sewer moratorium in the voice of a baby duck.

I think that's a reasonable tradeoff and one I would have chosen myself.

 

Speaking of things aimed at kids ...

Can't find any record of a novel, but Harry Bliss was a finalist for Kindergarten-to-Second-Grade Book of the Year for his book "Bailey" in the Children's Choice Book Awards. They don't give out exact vote totals, but when 900,000 young readers chime in with their votes, "finalist" is pretty good.

I recently read an interview with an author who has cranked out (excuse me, "published") over 250 children's books in less than 20 years.

Harry Bliss has not.

And I'm not saying you can't publish more than a book a month without sacrificing a little quality along the way, but I will come down firmly in favor of this admirable proposition:

 

And finally: 

  Team Cul de Sac effort is coming to a crescendo, with the book on sale and the art auction about to begin. Be there or be square.

Comments

[Gilda Blackmore]

I love it that you so wholeheartedly love Cul de Sac. Me too.

[Mike Peterson]

There have been cartoons that remembered what childhood was really like -- rather than simply copying the Funny Brat character that originated before the Little Rascals trode the boards. Calvin and Hobbes is the best of these, but Frazz and Big Nate come immediately to mind. There are others.

But Richard remembers what it FELT LIKE to be a kid. That's pretty special.

[MisterFweem]

The only cartoonists I've ever read who really understand children are Richard Thompson and Charles Schulz.