Richard Church Thompson (October 8, 1957 – July 27, 2016) was an American illustrator and cartoonist best known for his syndicated comic strip Cul de Sac and the illustrated poem "Make the Pie Higher". He was given the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year for 2010. Cul de Sac In 1982 Thompson began working at the Washington Post, and he was the newspaper's unofficial staff artist by 1985. Thompson provided illustrations for Joel Achenbach's Washington Post column and Gene Weingarten's column in The Washington Post Magazine. The weekly, watercolored incarnation of his comic Cul de Sac launched in The Washington Post Magazine on February 14, 2004. The strip focuses on a four-year-old girl, Alice Otterloop, and her daily life at preschool and at home. It was published in more than 70 newspapers by the fall of 2007. It was distributed nationally as both a daily and Sunday strip by Universal Press Syndicate. The first book collection of Cul de Sac strips, published in 2008 by Andrews McMeel, includes the pre-syndication Washington Post strips in color, as well as a foreword by Bill Watterson, who praised Thompson's work: {{quote|I thought the best newspaper comic strips were long gone, and I've never been happier to be wrong. Richard Thompson's Cul de Sac has it all—intelligence, gentle humor, a delightful way with words, and, most surprising of all, wonderful, wonderful drawings. Cul de Sac'''s whimsical take on the world and playful sense of language somehow gets funnier the more times you read it. Four-year-old Alice and her Blisshaven Preschool classmates will ring true to any parent. Doing projects in a cloud of glue and glitter, the little kids manage to reinterpret an otherwise incomprehensible world via their meandering, nonstop chatter. But I think my favorite character is Alice's older brother, Petey. A haunted, controlling milquetoast, he's surely one of the most neurotic kids to appear in comics. These children and their struggles are presented affectionately, and one of the things I like best about Cul de Sac is its natural warmth. Cul de Sac avoids both mawkishness and cynicism and instead finds genuine charm in its loopy appreciation of small events. Very few strips can hit this subtle note.}} In 2009, Andrews McMeel published a second Cul de Sac collection, Children at Play, featuring a foreword by Mo Willems. Richard's Poor Almanac Thompson's cartoon series Richard's Poor Almanac appeared weekly (usually