Richard Thompson Interviewed

Over at The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon has posted a great interview with Richard Thompson, the creator behind Cul de Sac and Richard’s Poor Almanac, among other projects.

The interview provides a look at the daily routine for a creator balancing multiple ongoing projects and the struggle to keep things fresh. It also provides a few funny examples of the relationship between a creator and his/her editor, as described below.

Nowadays my editor, Ann Gerhart, doesn’t ask for a rough, or even any idea of what I’m doing, so I guess we’ve reached a level of trust, or maybe nobody’s reading it still. The only complaint I ever remember getting from Gene [Weingarten, a former editor of Thompson’s], whose motto is that he edits for humor but not for taste, was when I used the phrase "fart-catcher" to describe a presidential aide twice in as many weeks and he found that excessive.