Peanuts (Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Charles M. Schulz)

Like this one.

Ironically, Peanuts itself seems to just be running the regular Saturday comic (it's the one where Snoopy goes to visit Spike and they miss each other along the way, so Spike has Thanksgiving with Charlie, while Snoopy discovers the coyotes eat bunnies.

Which also raises the question: does Spike eat bunnies too, then?

Edited by Redmess on Nov 26th 2022 at 10:48:02 AM

Optimism is a duty.

Here's a (long!) list of all the comics celebrating Charles' 100th birthday.

Edited by Redmess on Nov 30th 2022 at 12:28:20 PM

Optimism is a duty.

Drop dead. Wow. This feels like a parody comic, and yet it is an actual Peanuts panel.

This seems like pretty strong language for someone who never goes beyond "good grief".

Comics like this always make me wonder what the story behind it is. Was Schultz a bit exasperated at someone he knew constantly dropping "drop dead"?

Optimism is a duty.

It was kind of a running joke for a while, in the strip's last decade or so, to have Sally take up some phrase, call it her "new personal philosophy," and then keep repeating it. I can kind of see this as related to that.

Yeah, this is probably what evolved into that.

Optimism is a duty.

Huh, Peanuts is set in Indiana. I never realized. Is there anything else in the comics specific to Indiana?

Optimism is a duty.

It's not, specifically. Schulz based the setting on where he grew up in Michigan, and sometimes he mentions places near where his studio was in California, but he never specified exactly where it was. As far as I can remember, he never said anything about it being in Indiana, and he didn't have any ties to Indiana himself.

Sally's just doing a report on the state of Indiana in that strip. She doesn't say she lives there. When she says "This great state" she's just referring to the state she's talking about, not the state she lives in.

Edited by Robbery on Jan 23rd 2023 at 9:56:35 AM

Oh, I see, I wasn't sure.

Optimism is a duty.

Just a heads up -

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Following some discussion about content leaks and spoilers over on the moderation policy thread, MacronNotes unearthed the forum spoiler rules (in a 2012 post). Not something I'd ever read before.

These are pretty much what you'd expect - don't post unmarked spoilers for very recent releases, don't post unmarked spoilers for off-topic stuff (people may not expect film spoilers on a Marvel Comics thread etc.) and identify the source of your tagged spoilers.

(I think we're all following them anyway?)

A comic-specific summary of these rules has just been posted in a new Comics "Spoiler Policy" thread here.

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I'm crossposting this to the most active Comics threads, so apologies if you see it more than once!

Yeah, we can't have anyone posting unmarked spoilers for Peanuts! They could give away the shocking twist ending!

Yeah, it doesn't seem too likely a problem for this thread, does it? But I tried to be consistent in posting it where tropers who'd already had the welcome message would see it.

A notorious Peanuts strip◊ is one that gives away that It Was His Sled. Schulz apparently got a lot of hate mail for it.

That's almost as bad as spoiling that Tyler Durden is Kyser Soze!

I’ve never seen Citizen Kane.

Especially mean since it's the only interesting thing about the whole movie.

If you're a film buff and like looking at interesting shots and camera work, you should give it a watch. Otherwise it's not a very remarkable story.

Edited by Redmess on Mar 16th 2023 at 8:31:19 PM

Optimism is a duty.

I've seen it, and I enjoyed it.

If you like b&w 40's era character studies, or think you might, give it a watch. Knowing what "Rosebud" is won't really ruin anything for you. It's more about having it brought home to you why that was his last word.

Interesting to note that it was the first film Welles directed, when he was 25. He gave himself a crash-course on filmmaking and even had notecards handy with the definitions of camera techniques (like "pan" and "crane shot" and such).

Sure, it's a character study, so if you enjoy those, you'll enjoy Citizen Kane.

And I agree, It Was His Sled is rather missing the point of the movie. It's not about the twist, it's understanding why there is a twist, and what it means.

Optimism is a duty.

Up to 1982, and at this point, some parts of the comic start to feel a bit tired. The last couple of Great Pumpkin comics felt entirely perfunctory.

Speaking of Linus, he seems to have switched to lawyer quotes instead of bible quotes at this point. Interesting change.

Oh, hey, it's Marbles, another lost brother. Not terribly interesting, and he seems to be here just to make fun of Snoopy's flying ace fantasy. Again, there is a certain tiredness to the material.

Optimism is a duty.

I just noticed something: for at least several years in the early 80s, Linus' blanket doesn't make a single appearance, it seems.

Optimism is a duty.

I read an interview once, close to when Schulz retired, where he talked about how the strip changed over the years. He said that he ultimately just didn't care to do the blanket-jokes anymore, so he quietly had Linus grow out of his blanket (kind of a jab at the reactionary attitudes of Lucy and the "blanket-hating grandma"), and that he thought it was funny that hardly anyone noticed when it happened. It never completely goes away, but it becomes a lot less common and stops getting focus. It's easier to catch if you read the collections; I can see it being a development that gets missed if you read the strip day-to-day.

Another change you might note is that Charlie Brown mostly stopped angsting about how no one liked him. His main problem actually changed to his being flustered by having so many girls interested in him (most often exemplified by Peppermint Patty and Marcy, but with others thrown in as well). Lucy toned down considerably as well, and most often got shown being a half-way decent big sister to Rerun. Schulz said once that he regretted having introduced all of Snoopy's siblings, except for Spike (I didn't care much for Spike myself, but whatever). Spike became for Schulz what Fearless Fosdick was for Al Capp and all of Calvin's alter-egos (Spaceman Spiff, Tracer Bullet) were for Bill Watterson—a way to do a completely different strip within the strip when he felt like a change of pace.

Spaceman Spiff has another twist - it was the original idea for his comic. I can't say I care much for it myself, and I think it would quickly run out its welcome if it was a full comic, but it works well enough as the occasional imagine spot.

Schultz seems to also get a bit tired of the Flying Ace stuff in the 80s. I guess that's just par for the course for a long runner like this: authors can literally grow out of their own ideas.

Optimism is a duty.

I know a lot of people have felt that the strip wasn't as sharp in the 80's. Schulz did get to start playing with format, as he finally got a firm commitment that Peanuts would always be presented horizontally and not re-arranged into a cube. He started doing 1,2, and 3 panel strips occasionally. He also started experimenting with gray-tones and dot patterns (not always successfully, but that's the nature of experimentation). He started devoting more space to Spike and Peppermint Patty and Marcie, too. Most people think of the strip as it was around '65-'75, which has generally been the version presented in the tv specials, and by the 80's Schulz had moved past that version; the 80's version isn't as different from the "classic" iteration as the "classic" iteration was from the 1950 version, but it did have some significant differences.

There is a Marcie and Patty gag about "turtle headaches", which is apparently where someone gets a headache from going back to sleep by pulling their head under the covers.

Except, apparently, it is a real thing.

Optimism is a duty.

Why does Charlie insist on writing letters with a fountain pen, when he could have just use a ballpoint pen? It's not like they didn't exist yet, either, they were invented in 1888.

Optimism is a duty.

Fountain pens were in much more common usage until the 60s, before which ballpoint pens were, if I understand things correctly, prohibitively expensive. They started coming into greater usage just around the time Schulz was writing those strips (he was likely basing the strips of his own memories of trying to write with a fountain pen). Besides, if Charlie Brown had access to a ballpoint pen, there'd be no joke. I believe eventually Schulz dropped the "pencil pal" bit and just made those strips about whatever it is Charlie Brown was actually writing about.