The blog of Richard Thompson, caricaturist, creator of "Cul de Sac," and winner of the 2011 Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Today's Cul de Sac, January 2 2011

Time having somehow gotten ahead of me I'll post this one and work backwards to wherever I left off. Which seems appropriate for a time travel strip.

Science fiction has probably used every possible permutation of time travel, though I'm not sure when the go-back-and-slap-yourself variant might've been tried. I'd meant Petey to be a bit grimmer in his take on time travel but he ended up being kinda cheerfully fatalistic and, in the fourth panel, almost wise. He's obsessive and self conscious enough that, if he was given the power of time travel, he'd undoubtably use it to relive awkward moments and berate himself. But he wouldn't take the extra effort to go back slightly further in time to avoid that awkward moment.

I'd thought about ending this with a future-Petey showing up in the last panel with his hand raised to smack the now-Petey and the now-Petey saying, "What'd I do now?" But I didn't. And yes, I photoshopped the Petey in panel one from panel two. Either I'd screwed up the drawing of panel-one-Petey or panel-two-Petey just travelled back in time.

6 comments:

Stephen said...

I think Petey's hit on something (uh, no pun and all of that).

Many of us want to go back in time to slap ourselves. If we went back further in time and prevented everything, we wouldn't have the satisfaction of calling ourselves an idiot.

Muzition said...

My sister's birthday was yesterday, and I got her the Cul de Sac Golden Treasury book for her birthday. She likes it. :)

arcticcircle said...

I'd go back in time in the hope of being a syndicated cartoonist in the 1980s. Then I would quit in 1999 to become a biochemist.

Muzition said...

P.S. I'm sorry for the nasty comment I left when this comic was posted on Gocomics yesterday.

tetracontadigon said...

So true, so true! Also, I love the sound effect of "smek smek"

Rodolfo Piskorski said...

Aw, I would have liked to see Petey going "What did I do now?" before his future self! This is so Petey-y!