Guest Cartoonists and Final Strip
In 2012, Thompson took time away from the strip in order to receive treatment for Parkinson's disease. During the hiatus several other cartoonists stepped in to draw the Cul de Sac characters. The guest artists were Michael Jantze (The Norm), Corey Pandolph (The Elderberries), Lincoln Peirce (Big Nate), Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine), Ruben Bolling (Tom the Dancing Bug) and children's author Mo Willems.
Upon Thomson's return to Cul de Sac on March 26, 2012, it was announced that children's book illustrator Stacy Curtis would become the inker of Cul de Sac.
On August 17, 2012, Thompson announced that due to health issues he would be ending his work as a comic-strip creator, with his final Cul de Sac being published on September 23, 2012. While Thompson had originally planned to draw a final strip for the comic himself, one day before its previously announced publishing date he posted a message online, stating, "Spoiler alert – i couldn’t draw a new Sunday so tomorrow’s is a repeat too. Sorry! I’ll do better next time." That strip was a rerun originally published on February 18, 2007, which had also appeared on the back cover of the first book collection, Cul De Sac: This Exit in 2008. In it, Petey explains to Alice how comic strips are "a mighty, yet dying art form."
Read more about this topic: Cul De Sac (comic Strip)
Famous quotes containing the words guest, final and/or strip:
“Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it’s damn hard to smile.”
—Judith Guest (b. 1936)
“The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor? How many who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld. Think of the amount of suffering which a single strand had witnessed! The ancients would have represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)