The Mighty Alice

This fifth collection from the newspaper strip Cul de Sac continues the adventures of four-year-old Alice Otterloop as she copes with preschool, her grandma’s dog Big Shirley, the threat of volcanoes, and her neurotic older brother Petey. Especially playing against Petey’s glum inertia, Alice’s creative imagination sometimes makes things more intimidating than they are but also always much more cheerfully weird than anyone would have guessed—as when she and her friends speculate on what lives in the mountains of dirty snow in the back of a supermarket parking lot. Closer in spirit to Calvin and Hobbes than Peanuts, the strips actually work better here than in the daily paper, since it’s easier for readers to appreciate Alice’s zigzag, grandiose thinking as it moves through a week’s story arc. The results are both mind-boggling and laugh-out-loud funny. Thompson won the Reuben Award as cartoonist of the year in 2011, and he continues to be an insightful poet of the comics page. (May)