Webcomics: S/D

so many ppl who knew Schulz, inc his kids, said the bio was slanted and crappy that I wouldn't rely on it for a full picture of the dude

it's kinda wild all of the newspaper strip writers like guisewhite, ketcham, even schulz for me at one point that i knew as defanged boring comic writers and then when i went back to their original material i totally understood the appeal

The rink's still open, I think.

Schulz gets redeemed for his complete and utter hatred of Garfield.

my dad had old peanuts collections from the 50s and 60s (at one point i could have told you who all the great pumpkin had visited -- one of them was 'boots ruthven') so that's what i grew up with. it's impressive how good it was for as long as it was; watterson otm

Yeah so many of these strips (but not peanuts) were ghastly spectres of their former selves by the time I was a kid. Then when I would see Los Bros talking abt Hank Ketcham or TCJ writers about Gasoline Alley it was baffling to me. Now the proof is out there, though.

peanuts was terrible when i was a kid, but my school library had a bunch of early peanuts comix and so around 5-6th grade i read a ton of the early ones. i would love to buy a bunch of the new fantagraphics ones -- but i have the ketcham fantagraphics volume (so excellent) and they're not super enjoyable to read. too many pages between the hard covers. i'm holding out for a super-sized volume

if i do get some, i'm not even sure which years are best to get. what's considered his best era? 60s-70s?

Of Dennis or Peanuts?

i'd start in the late 50s

every library i've been to has the peanuts fantagraphics collections. just try em all -- start at beginning. early charlie brown is kind of a proto-cartman!

not sure i'd go too far past '70? i'm not one to *blame* woodstock, but he did seem symptomatic of diminishing returns.

not sure where i'd stop, snoopy kinda takes tonal control around the late 60s i think and i prefer peanuts before that but obv snoopy is great so

yeah woodstock is prolly the symbol

it's kinda mind-boggling to me how many years he wrote this thing. who has that kind of longevity today? (dave sim?) even watterson + larson and other modern daily phenoms retired at some point

what year is the "mr. sack" arc from, where charlie brown doesn't want the kids at camp to see that his head has developed a weird rash that makes it look like a baseball so he wears a paper bag on his head and everybody loves him

watterson went out at his absolute peak, too

but i'm still legit moved by the way the lines in the last 15 or so years of peanuts got really wobbly, cuz they were still all his

I'm such a stan that I'd push the shark moment all the way to when Rerun shows up.

re; baseball rash, i'd guess 1973 (if this is the same arc with alfred e neuman)

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lpwg4vC9Ya1qisuj3o1_500.png

xp you are otm! that story's really something i think. the one where he's just sitting on a dock fishing with another kid and telling a longish dullish joke and the other kid says "that's very funny. you're fun to be with, mr. sack." "thank you."

who has that kind of longevity today? (dave sim?)

Cerebus was 26 years, Peanuts was 50. Maggie Chascarillo's 30 years in now.

'mr sack' is from 1973-74. i think ppl tend to overstate the steepness of the 'decline,' though i admittedly have a lot of tolerance for snoopy and woodstock episodes.

i'd still take even '90s era 'peanuts' over most other comic strips of the last 30 years. even at his worst schulz is discernably himself; there's no committee-think in the mentality that could end a strip with snoopy saying 'i'm emotionally bankrupt...you're emotionally bankrupt...we're all emotionally bankrupt...'

oddly I get offboard w/Peanuts at the moment it stops becoming a 4-panel strip

*stops being. sorry, weirdly worded.

I loved the 50s Peanuts but the second 60s volume was enough for me. The 50s is such a psychogeographical landscape, with Charlie Brown constantly questioning his reality in a self-contained funk - it's like French philosophy with pictures. In comparison the 60s just seemed kind of hokey.

rss link here http://beatonna.tumblr.com/

belated thanks! i had a different one and it didn't work.

not sure i'd go too far past '70?

I read all the fantagraphics reprint books a while back and there's a definite drop off in the early 70s. Not that it becomes terrible - if you're a fan it's still enjoyable.

i know i've posted this link on ilx before, so apologies, but here's a review I wrote of the Schulz bio that tries to get across both the good and bad points of the book

http://comiczine-fa.com/?p=822

as for schulz's longevity, there are plenty of newspaper cartoonists with similar or even longer careers (beetle bailey started in 1950, and still has mort walker's name on it today) but what makes schulz exceptional, p much, is that he did the strip all by himself for so long - no other writers, artists, letterers etc. obviously the relative simplicity of the strip made that possible, but even so, what a grind! comics are such HARD WORK

can't think of many comic book artists who can match sim's 300 issues, but obv there are lots of comic bk guys who had much longer careers all told

did mort walker ever have a classic period? beetle bailey (and hi + lois too) has not been worth reading since before i was a kid

do we have a rolling funny papers thread on ILC?

70s beetle bailey paperbacks are perfect toilet reading imho, but i haven't seen the strip in years, so can't speak to its decline in quality. best thing walker ever wrote was a short-lived strip called 'Sam's Strip' in the early 60s, drawn by jerry dumas, that was a comic-about-comic. bill watterson obviously knew it:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-B7W1cuRVTOk/TlC6CZfNYSI/AAAAAAAAAZQ/2pM7HVj0fbY/s1600/SamsStrip2.jpg

Ha, never saw any of those early strips. I only knew about Sam & Silo in the 80s.

i've never seen sam & silo - for some reason, walker's comics have never been at all popular here in the uk - but iirc it's a retooled version of sam's strip without the meta elements? fantagraphics have issued a complete sam's strip, btw, that looks p tasty

S&S were pretty vanilla, nothing you'd ever think Bill Watterson would have been influenced by.

WF i liked that review a lot.

schulz' minimalism (and the ironic adaptation of the entire medium to that minimalism, when pretty much literally no one else can work properly with it) is so magic and spooky; i am not really arteducated but i suspect he was a greater american artist than most of the abstract expressionists or whoever his "fine" contemporaries were. sometimes i reread the paragraph-long intro he gave watterson's first big color collection, which begins "bill watterson draws great bedside tables. i admire that." and goes on to say that he likes "calvin's little shoes that look like dinner rolls". can you imagine what that must have felt like for watterson.

haha, wow. i didn't know about that

sam's strip is great
the dinner rolls bit is legendary.

schultz was clearly a difficult guy.

this thread convinced me to grab a lot of the fawcett peanuts collections off ebay

xp I mean, he's not wrong, but damn dude, lol

haha i've always thought it was like intensely complimentary! to single out little cartoonist's details like that instead of just saying oh childish wonder oh sophisticated wit oh we need the comics more now than ever.

he also compliments the water splashes.

i've seen some really old beetle bailey (early '60s i think) with what seemed like pretty sharp, stinging anti-military lolz -- or anyway a lot sharper than it got later.

schulz is right! i love the way watterson draws little things -- telephones, the covers of comic books, trees.

i can understand why schulz wld admire the attention to detail of someone like watterson - after all, schulz's background was in correspondence course commercial art, where the public wld pay to have their renderings of objects, animals etc graded via the post by schulz and many other 'teachers'.

i read he used to have contests with the other drawing instructor guys where they'd draw a series of parallel lines as close to each other as possible without touching, and he'd get them really close, so that the gap between lines were smaller than the lines themselves.

^I love this anecdote!

schulz drew this in high school:

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/87/243527705_99306dddfc_z.jpg?zz=1

little hitlers

OMG

http://childrensbookshop.com/images/bookimages/68/68044.jpg

there's a larger version of that pic, and the story behind it, in this bk, which is really great and really cheap secondhand. along w/ a nice selection of full colour sunday pages up to abt 1973, it contains a great photo sequence of schulz drawing and lettering a daily, and some terrific pics of him wearing 70s big collared flowery shirts - its still the best single volume peanuts bk, imho (the chip kidd bk favours the late 50s/early 60s stuff, which may suit ppl w/ the same taste as aldo. personally i find some of the design a bit grandstanding, although the bk does contain many treasures, too)