Peanuts: Search and Destroy

"who broke into the liquor cabinet and made this mess?" "not me!"

If you guys don't read this, nobody will...

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I've finished the first volume, and I've got six more months left of Volume II. I miss Schulz more with every strip and count myself fortunate that I got to read his strips fresh and new every day in the newspaper.

Last night, I hit two strips that were a bit different. One had Shermy going through Charlie Brown's comic book collection: "Wow, you've got Revolutionary War stories, War of 1812 stories, Civil War stories, World War I stories, World War II stories, Korean War stories..." to which Charlie Brown responds, "I'm kinda worried about the next issue."

And Lucy being tethered to a rope going BWHAHM! in her imitation of a hydrogen bomb.

In the first volume, Schulz illustrated a comics rack stacked with titles like FEAR and HATE which I found a bit unsettling for a Peanuts strip. However, I do enjoy the fact that the volumes are being published by Fantagraphics, also home to Hate by Peter Bagge.

My box set of the first two volumes just arrived from Amazon today. I am a happy man.

but it's not hard to interpret the strip as eulogising various unhealthy traits - low self esteem, unrequited love, etc. i sometimes joke that i want to be linus but am more like charlie brown, but i've been wondering recently whether reading lots of peanuts strips as a kid might've instilled some subconscious belief that the misery depicted on a day-to-day basis in the comic was some kind of normalcy, that i may have transposed charlie brown's own anxieties upon my own.

that said, just finished the 1955-56 complete book, and getting ready to start on the 57-58 one. These are still really great strips!

In 2000, it became known that a fan of Peanuts had written Schulz a letter requesting that Charlotte Braun be removed. Schulz wrote back, promising to remove the character but asking the reader if she wanted to be responsible for "the death of an innocent child". The letter included a picture of Charlotte Braun with an ax in her head. The letter has been donated to the Library of Congress.

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LA Locals, currently there is a comics exhibit at the Hammer museum in Westwood. "Chuck" Schultz is on display with many of his contemporaries and even some pre- contemps. Some of it's trite, but others are outstanding in their oblique and darker references. Worth a look since Thursday's admission is FREE! Lichtenstein's Polaroid's are awesome too.

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Oh, golly, I could go on about a particularly fantastic moment in that most recent volume, but I'm a little too tired to right now. Remind me later.

I've just now completed a crucial rite of passage, after about 13 years in limbo. When I were a nipper, we were given a VCR copy of 'Bon Voyage Charlie Brown (And Don't Come Back)', missing the first five and last twenty minutes. As a kid, I absolutely loved it and watched it time after time, memorising the dialogue, artwork and music as I did so. Tonight I watched the whole thing for the first time. It held up beautifully, although the end was a little rushed. Most of it conveyed a certain kind of accident-prone, angst-ridden early youth that I was all too familiar with, although seeing it now, my sympathies switched to Snoopy and Woodstock, who had by far the most whimsical, philosophical, adult perspective on things. One golden moment I hadn't seen before was Woodstock emerging from a fire hose bearing his violin, which he then proceeded to play. One golden moment I'd just missed as a child was that whilst the boys + animals watched an in-flight movie called 'Happy Bunnies', the girls watched one called something like 'Naughty Esmerelda'! Ahem. And what was all that French swearing in the automobile wreck! 'Oooh le con' indeed...

i regret to tell you that "naughty marietta" (which i'm pretty sure was the movie) isn't quite as naughty as one would hope: http://imdb.com/title/tt0026768/

ILX's JD is a true star for repping for late period Peanuts

I can't imagine how hard I'd lose my shit watching Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown today, I can barely deal with first season episodes of Frasier

And what was all that French swearing in the automobile wreck! 'Oooh le con' indeed...

i always thought they were shouting "oooh! le car!" - seeing as charlie brown's request for un pain was phrased as "une loaf de bread".

the gang visit wimbledon too in this one. i still prefer 'a boy named charlie brown' though.

There's also the bit where they can't understand the guy offering them steak and kidney pie.

and yet they can understand teachers who talk like muted trumpets...

Well duh, those are AMERICAN teachers.

Then again I suppose Othmar could be Lithuanian in background or something.

Trombonian.

This I believe.

Peanuts, by Charles Bukowski

Amazingly, not bad as I'd thought it would have been. Brilliant even.