Peanuts - Classic Or Dud?

Hello ILC - I thought you needed to know about this: http://3eanuts.tumblr.com/

Maybe you already do.

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lirx7nTe8p1qisuj3o1_500.png

(I hope that works - I haven't been here in a bit.)

I keep expecting the novelty to wear off, but I'm digging it more and more instead. I have to resist the urge to reblog damn near every one of them. The best ones just underscore the brilliance already inherent in Peanuts - I think the effect is very different from Garfield Minus Garfield, for instance.

I hate to confess this, but it took me a half dozen strips before I realized the joke had already been removed, and I was trying to find the despair in the first two panels out of three.

that blogger is seriously misreading Peanuts if he think the closing jokes "conceal the existential despair" of Charlie Brown's world. a lot of the power and tension of the strip comes from the way Schulz combines his dark observations of human nature with traditional comic strip goofiness without diluting either element. erasing the punchlines makes the strip less funny and less profound, which is suitable for tumblr but not for me.

now excuse me while I go through old Scooby Doo episodes and replace all the Scooby Snacks with pot brownies. Scooby and Shaggy were such stoners, amirite? and Peanuts is really depressing when you think about it.

unregistered otm, this is a shitty idea by a terrible reader

Hm, I think that's a bit harsh, although I sort of agree.

Actually these make me want to read the original strip -- I feel like I'm missing something pivotal here, whereas the Garfield strips at least created a joke (albeit a black one) that wasn't there before. Which is to say, Garfield does conceal its despair, while Peanuts clearly (clearly!) doesn't.

Oh yeah, I think the "conceals its despair" stuff is off, but also irrelevant. The blogger's not doing what he thinks he's doing - if nothing else, removing the fourth panel just isn't going to have the same effect every time, and it's more obvious in some than others that something's been cut off. That just doesn't make the effect any less interesting to me.

Just makes me want to reread all those strips, really. Like I totally forgot about Linus having to loan his blanket to his grandma when she was quitting smoking - what a great storyline for a comic strip! And god, how about that dialogue? "Well, it was on account of a blanket which I don't have, and I passed out four times on the way to school, and that sort of held me up and..."

best peanuts thread possibly: Peanuts: Search and Destroy

yeah, there are a ton of great blanket storylines from that era -- there's the one where lucy takes the blanket and buries it in the yard, and another one where she makes it into a kite and lets it fly away! and then a really bizarre one where it comes to life (?) and starts attacking lucy.

was flipping through the latest 'complete' volume, from 79-80, the other day, and it's got some of his best later stories -- in particular a very weird one where the kids go to a summer camp which turns out to be a fundamentalist christian camp! remarkably subtle and well-done satire, espec considering the low reputation of these later strips.

Stevie D pointed this out to me last night: Space 1026 is proud to present This is a Love Letter, a collection of personal letters from Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schulz to native Philadelphian Tracey Claudius.

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So I'm working my way through the Fantagraphics books, I'm on 1963 at the moment, a great year, a few that I remember as a kid from the paperbacks or Snoopy Treasury etc:

There's this one weekend panel.

Charlie Brown is outside holding a clipboard with Schroeder and he's talking about putting Linus in left field, Schroeder asks him if he is sure, so CB bats a ball way up, Linus spots it from his porch, runs inside, takes the time to help Sally build an Empire State Building out of blocks, runs upstairs, leans out the window and catches the ball. Schroeder turns to CB and says, so what about *right* field?

Nothing special right? Point is I'm certain I've never seen the staircase in Linus' house before, just seeing that extra bit of detail made me so happy.

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2900338-4/fulltext

great article

and there is something mildly upsetting about seeing this familiar yet deeply sad situation spelled out so precisely:

The sources of Snoopy's pain are not hard to find. He was taken from his family as a puppy, without his consent or choice: adopted into the family of a little girl called Lila, whom he loved very much, he was returned to the puppy farm because the family could not keep him. Charlie Brown is his second owner: in his resentment, he cannot even remember his owner's name (“It's kind of a complicated name…I have trouble with complicated names”).