The AAUGH blog

You may have been hearing a lot about the Comic-Con in San Diego lately. I’ve been attending for a couple decades now, and have watched it evolve from a pretty-big-for-a-comic-convention event to a rather insane pop culture extravaganza, where movie and TV studios are bringing their previews, their stars, their creators, and various freebies to endear themselves to the gathered audience. You can buy an autograph off of Val Kilmer, see the Mythbusters talk about their upcoming season, get taken to a preview of Scott Pilgrim with the cast in the audience, purchase exclusive toys from big-time toy manufacturers… and yet yes, somewhere amidst all of this, the core of comics remains strong.

Each year they generate a souvenir book, which is given free to all attendees. It’s a couple hundred pages, with information on the cons’ special guests, biographies of the recently deceased in the field, things of that sort. But most of the book is focused on the major anniversaries of the year – for example, this year’s has sections on the 100th anniversary of Krazy Kat, the 75th anniversary of DC Comics, Beetle Bailey’s 60th anniversary… and yes, of course, the 60th anniversary of Peanuts. Calls go out for content for thee sections, and most of the pages are filled with tribute drawings, which is true of the 28 pages devoted to Peanuts in the volume. For the most part, those drawings (run one or two to a page) are people bringing their own style to the Peanuts characters, mostly to unimpressive effect, and occasionally just plain weird (is Charlie Brown supposed to look like a stoner on page 134?) Sometimes these drawn tributes get some big-name comics artists on them, but I see none here that I recognize.

Interspersed with the pictures are prose pieces of a page or two each – one on the very human themes found in “Peanuts”, one by Paige Braddock (creative director at Schulz’s studio as well as crafter of the fine Jane’s World comics) on her memories of Sparky, the text of a Schulz speech from the 1970s, and a couple people reflecting on Peanuts in their own lives. One spends half its length reflecting on an Antiques Roadshow evaluation of someone’s Peanuts art collection before giving a brief history of the work.

On nice find in the book is a page of photos of Schulz from his one appearance at Comic-Con, which was way back in 1974. Back then, the show was probably 1% as big as it is now. Had you been there, you could’ve spent some time up close and personal with Sparky.

(One of the Comic-Con program books had a single image that was a collaboration between Sparky, Russell Myers, and Jack Kirby, which is just so frustrating to me. It’s a nice piece – Kirby’s Demon and Myers’s Broom Hilda having a magic battle over the head of a terrified Linus – but it would be so nice for there to be a piece of art that was just Sparky, who is clearly the iconic strip artist, and Kirby, who as the artistic creator of Fantastic Four, X-Men, Silver Surfer, the Hulk, and so many more, is the iconic comics artist. Myers is a talented cartoonist, for sure, but inherently lowers the icon-ness of the thing.)

If you’ve never been to Comic-Con and you get a chance, give it a try. Yes, it’s all those things you think it is… and a bunch of things you don’t think it is. After so many years, I’m perhaps a little burnt on it, have seen what it has to offer… but what it has to offer is a lot.

Various news sources are reporting the death of Art Linkletter, an entertaining man who passed at age 97.

The relevancy to the AAUGH Blog is that Linkletter is the author of two books which Schulz illustrated: Kids Say the Darndest Things and Kids Still Say the Darndest Things, featuring tales culled from a popular segment of the show Art Linkletter’s House Party. The first book has been reissued a number of times, occasionally edited or retitled, as I discussed in this old AAUGH.com newsletter (before the blog was in blog form.) These books are fun finds for the Schulz aficionado, filled with little illustrations, often Peanutsesque without actually being Peanuts.

My apologies to anyone who got emailed a blog entry with an incomplete title and no text; my main blogging computer is in the shop getting smartened up, and I’m having to blog from a quirky netbook.

British publisher Ravette, which has done a lot of Peanuts books over the years, including 40th and 50th anniversary books (You Don’t Look 40, Charlie Brown and You Really Don’t Look 50, Charlie Brown… both of which were primarily reprints of You Don’t Look 35, Charlie Brown) has a 60th anniversary book shipping this fall: Celebrating 60 Years of Peanuts. Hardcover, 128 pages, more info to come.

Oh, and as long as I’m mentioning British books, I should note that The Peanuts Collection has a different publisher in the UK, New Holland Publishers.

Sparky: The Life and Art of Charles Schulz, the new bio for young adults, is now shipping.

The new volume of The Complete Peanuts is the start of the second half of the strip’s run, and (as the foreword by Robert Smigel accurately notes) it really does signal a switch in the series. The strip is less about anxiety, more about silliness. This is not a complete shift nor a permanent one; the strip evolved in the other direction in the 1990s.

The strips here tie in more to pop culture of the moment than in many of the previous volumes. Some of it is material that survives because the reference is still recognizable (there’s actually two separate references to Elton John), others less so (I can’t speak for you, but I certainly don’t recognize the name of characters from the British TV series Upstairs Downstairs.) One pop culture reference here is among my favorite, for totally nerd reasons: Snoopy watching a rerun of Hogan’s Heroes means that the name “Schultz”, spelled that way, appears in the strip. For all the time I see that mistakenly used as the spelling of “Schulz”, it’s funny to see it used appropriately in this context. (By the way, Starting next month the rotating strip gallery in the Schulz Museum will focus on the pop culture references in the strip.)

Romance takes various forms in here, with Linus and Snoopy making odd corners of a love triangle centered on Truffles, who looks like she belongs in a different strip. Marcie actually scorners a persistent suitor of sorts. Notable storylines includes the brief run of Joe Motocross, and the surprisingly long storyline where Peppermint Patty attends obedience school. Snoopy gets a family in this volume, first with the introduction of his brother Spike, and then bring in his sister Belle (and her teenage son, to boot!)

Toward the end of the book, there are lots of references to grandparents. Interestingly, while most of the characters talk about their grandparents in the present tense, Peppermint Patty talks of having had one; just another aspect of her relative parentlessness.

Frieda is cover-featured, which is a strange choice for this particular volume. “Do we still have a chance to win, Charlie Brown?”, “Yes, she does”, and “What kind of work do you do?” – that’s the sum total of Frieda’s dialogue over these two years. In other words, the few times she is used here, she’s used basically as a Generic Character To Say Something. No curly hair pride, no chasing rabbits, no floppy cat.

Take-away thought: a real World War I flying ace would not have been referring to himself as a World War I flying ace during that stage of his career, as “World War I” did not have that name until there was a World War II.

The Complete Peanuts 1975-1976 is available now.

A couple photos which I took for, but which will not be used in, an upcoming project:

I saw this at the local Costco and just had to grab a shot of it. I'd say it's too big for anyone's collection, but I'm sure someone has it.

That kid wearing the You're Looking At A Genius shirt is my very own li'l Ben.