I didn't have a spare 21 minutes this morning to spend watching this profile of Richard Thompson, the creator of what I once called "The Best Comic Strip Being Drawn Today." But I did anyway. It's a terrific overview of his work and an honest, unsentimental glimpse of what Parkinson's Disease has robbed him (and us) of.
The film calls him a "cartoonists' cartoonist," which I've always thought was a sort of slippery phrase in any context (Comedians' comedian? Writers' writer? Surgeons' surgeon?). What does that mean? In this case, it means to me that Richard does things I wish I could do, as well as things I don't understand how anyone could do. He's the very model of "working hard to make it look easy." The film touches on him doing 17 drafts of a cartoon that looks like it was scribbled out in two minutes. I am agape.
Asking for 21 minutes of anybody's time is asking a lot, but this was worth mine.
The Art of Richard Thompson from GVI on Vimeo.
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