Peanuts: Search and Destroy

It's been a year since the pandemic started, so let's do a "Peanuts" thread on the character who most fully embodies this strange time: Spike. pic.twitter.com/bxDngEI9vg

— Luke Epplin (@LukeEpplin) March 14, 2021

Good thread. I should read the later Peanuts; I stopped buying the Fantagraphic volumes after 73/74, thinking the later strips were sort of mellow and lame, but there's probably a lot going on there (even in the sense of "not a lot") that's worthwhile.

i have a real fondness for some 70s Peanuts just because those comprised a fair number of the little cheapie paperbacks we had lying around. i remember the sore-loser tennis champ "Crybaby Boobie" and, much more essentially, the "Mister Sack" storyline where Charlie Brown briefly becomes a beloved summer camp hero by putting a paper bag over his head and dispensing kindly advice to younger campers.

looking at the Fantagraphics site, I guess "Mister Sack" is from 73/74, while Crybaby Boobie is from 77/78, a period which even their ad copy struggles to really enliven. seems like Spike is really the major development that whole decade. still, i remember all this stuff... maybe it was heavily mined for the Charlie Brown & Snoopy Show? the prominent use of Rerun seems like a tell. apparently 79-80 has the long "Charlie Brown in the hospital" storyline which i think is pretty widely admired?

i will rep for 70's peanuts for sure.

yeah '80s is the fallow period. presumably vast wealth and nigh-universal t-shirt and greeting card success made his brain get soft, then he got old and cranky enough to turn weird in the '90s.

📅 Today marks the 60th anniversary of Lucy’s “The Doctor Is In” sign first appearing on her psychiatry booth on 5/4/1961. ⁠🎟️ Sign up for Saturday's FREE EVENT, "The Doctor Is In: Exploring Mental Health Through Comics!" Register: https://t.co/bwNPpq9cXN pic.twitter.com/Hue3Q4qLiH

— Charles M. Schulz Museum (@SchulzMuseum) May 4, 2021

Going back to that previous discussion, it was weird being born in the latter half of the 70s. I really got into Peanuts when I was 9-11 and was checking out old collections from the library and I remember many times being really disappointed by what was in the daily paper when compared to those collections, which I believe were heavily weighted towards the 70s.

Yeah, I got into Peanuts via old, yellowed paperbacks of '50s-'70s material sitting around my grandparents' house. It seemed like a whole other world from what was in the newspaper.

Finally bought the last Fanta slipcover set once I realized it has apparently gone OOP (didn't realize until it arrived that the post-2000 odds & sods book features all the Li'l Folks comics!), so it may be time to finally plow all the way through this opus.

My folks have an framed original strip in the guest bedroom, signed by Schulz; god knows where it came from.. not sure if it's worth anything as there were so many of them

it is worth something.

quite a bit i would imagine, depending on the era and who is in the strip

https://safr.kingfeatures.com/api/img.php?e=png&s=c&file=Qml6YXJyby8yMDIxLzA1L0JpemFycm9faHQuMjAyMTA1MzBfMTUzNi5wbmc=

that is a strange panel for a nationally syndicated comic strip! cannibalism, peyote and dynamite on a plane!

It never occurred to me the Fantagraphics series would go out of print, it would be like Moby Dick or the Bible going out of print

I wonder if my local comic store still has any copies on the shelves

hahaha, just noticed honey-roasted snoopy in the back! that is maybe the funniest nationally syndicated comic strip i've seen in a long time!

About 1,500 copies were sold within 11 days, and then sales slowed down to less than 300 the next year. After three years, the first edition was still available, almost 300 copies of which were lost when a fire broke out at the firm in December 1853. In 1855, a second printing of 250 copies was issued, in 1863, a third of 253 copies, and finally in 1871, a fourth printing of 277 copies, which sold so slowly that no new printing was ordered.[129] Moby-Dick was out of print during the last four years of Melville's life, having sold 2,300 in its first year and a half and on average 27 copies a year for the next 34 years, totaling 3,215 copies.

anyway Moby-Dick and the Bible both now out of copyright, whereas Peanuts will be entering the public domain in…what, 2070?

Copyright terms are a death sentence for culture basically

Intriguing:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/05/31/charles-schulz-hagemeyer/

https://i.imgur.com/lcQKMMN.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/1mh2KL1.jpg

Not at all like Lucy

I mean besides the obvious fact that Lucy's last name is "Van Pelt" and an unmarried grownup Lucy would not be named "Miss Hamhock"

It never occurred to me the Fantagraphics series would go out of print, it would be like Moby Dick or the Bible going out of print

...the slipcases only have a handful of sampled drawings of characters on them. Tip them gently up and shake carefully, and over 1,400 actual readable comic strips will slide out into your hand!

those strips are so odd. i knew schulz had thought of doing other types of strips over the years, but seeing him do that kind of workplace humor is just bizarre. and the characters are pretty unappealing. the humor is sexist in a standard 40s/50s way that schulz generally managed to avoid. (also, it's a little funny that schulz hated the name "peanuts" so much but apparently had no problem calling a strip "hagemeyer.")

the slipcases are neat but i gave up on the idea of trying to collect them a long time ago. tbh i haven’t been in a rush to pick up the volumes i’m missing, i feel like these would be the last fantagraphics books to ever go out of print.

They are redoing all of them in softcover, as well as doing larger-format volumes of colourized Sunday strips.

also there are still close to 17,000 more comics in the hardcovers than on the Christmas gift boxes, I promise

(the Sundays books have been running for eight years already, with only one volume left, and Bagge has recreated the colours using the original Schulz/UFS palettes - she's not adding gradients and lens flares)

https://i.imgur.com/5D6iRQN.png

Hey, can anyone help? I have this memory of a strip where Snoopy stays indoors and plays pool or billiards and listens to music on a rainy day, does anyone know how I would find such a thing, it's a weekend panel, I'm pretty sure.

not quite the same thing but: https://anaventures.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/dreary-fall-rain.gif

is it this one?

https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1968/11/03

oh nice! this is an oldie but a goodie, deserves to be seen

https://i.imgur.com/hJkFnXO.png

file under "pictures of people who seem to have figured out how to live"

thunk click plunk

Yes! Thanks so much KM!

Oops, and JD!

yep, JD found it, i just like to run everything through imgur so we'll have a pretty image to look at on here (until imgur gets bought out by another company and turned into photobucket)

I think it must have been in the 'Snoopy Treasury' book I had as a kid.

Lord, please give me the confidence and precision of Charles Schultz drawing a rainstorm.

late era classic
http://i.imgur.com/TWg0RPi.png

hahaha

Wow

This made me go and leaf through my 1967/68 book, I love those Fantagraphics editions so much.

You’re reminding me that I need to return to my handful of FG editions

I bought the slipcase editions as they came out, then individual ones and then my purchasing of them kinda tailed off.

I'm up to around the mid-eighties I think, not sure if I need to go further, but I would like the rest.

I am committed to getting them all now that I only have like 6 or 8 to go

Charles Schulz in 1987 on why he hated his strip being titled Peanuts. pic.twitter.com/tIiZyhvl5X

— Minovsky (@MinovskyArticle) December 9, 2021

Lol at "Peanuts and his dog."

surely even schulz had to concede that he probably wouldn't have gotten into the louvre with a strip called "li'l folks."

What awful news.

https://fox5sandiego.com/entertainment/charlie-brown-voice-actor-dies-at-65/amp/