Recurring Themes
- Mr. Otterloop's car
- The car is tiny (and also TARDIS-like), and a recurring visual and verbal gag is how impossibly small the car is. Alice says it is "half cuisinart".
- Manhole cover
- Alice and her friends use a manhole cover in a nearby vacant lot as a soapbox for performance art or to declare opinions.
- Shoebox dioramas
- Petey is slowly documenting the history of man through the medium of shoebox dioramas which he keeps beneath his bed.
- Big Shirley
- Big Shirley is a large, friendly dog that belongs to Alice's grandmother. Alice is completely terrified of Big Shirley, once even abandoning her precious toy bunny Polyfil to save herself from the dog's slobbering clutches.
- Little Neuro
- A strip-within-the-strip, a parody of Little Nemo. Petey's favorite reading, a strip about a little boy who hardly ever stirs from his bed.
- Sports
- On several occasions, Petey has reluctantly played soccer on his mother's insistence. His lack of athletic skill and social awkwardness has resulted in multiple out-of-body experiences.
Read more about this topic: Cul De Sac (comic Strip)
Famous quotes related to recurring themes:
“America is the world’s living myth. There’s no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We’re here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)