Bad balloons
- By : Nat
- Category : Classic finds
Oh, I’ll admit it, I’m a format geek. I find the silly little things that have to be done while putting together a book of comics interest… and after I’ve spent a few days in a row figuring out just what shape each word balloon in the new issue of my comic book should be.
As a practical matter, sometimes Peanuts strips have to be reformatted to work with a certain book layout. Peanuts was actually designed and promoted to newspapers in the early days as being able to be layed out as for panels stacked vertically, four stacked horizontally, or two rows of two. (Some early Peanuts test strips have recently surfaced, covering the early gags in three panels rather than four; I suspect that it was switched to four specifically to allow the two-by-two panel arrangement.) I’ve always thought the Fawcett book editions did an effective job with their layout, leaving some panels whole, overlapping others, and removing the outlines and extending the background on others.
At the moment, I’m looking at a book where the adjustments are more problematic. Charlie Brown’s World (a new addition to the AAUGH.com reference lirary) is a miniature hardcover published by Hallmark in 1971. All the strips are colored, run two panels per page, and the panel borders are dropped. That last is trickier than it sounds, because Schulz used the panel borders as part of the word balloons. In some cases, you could simply leave the balloons open, but with the color backgrounds used in this book, there has to be somewhere where the white of the balloon ends and the color of the background begins.
So someone else completed the word balloons, badly. As you can see in the example picture of an original panel (found in Complete Peanuts: 1959-1960) compared to a reformated panel, shaky lines are added to Schulz’s smooth lines, and a lot of extra space is generally left at the top of the balloon, giving the words a leaden effect.
Today, such image editing would be done using a computer; the wise touch-up artist would probably simply copy portions of Schulz’s balloons and rotate them, leaving them with a line width and general style matching the original parts of the balloon.
I got the book at a nice price; the fellow seling it was an AAUGH.com fan, so he offered me a deal. (Thanks again, Joel!) On the other hand, I recently had a frustrating collector’s disappointment. On eBay, I found a complete set of the Latin translations that Hallmark offered decades back, even with the box (which I’d never seen offered before.) So I placed a small bid, so that eBay would send me the daily update of my auction status. I reckoned that by the last day of the auction, I’d have figured out how much I was willing to bid, and when I saw that daily reminder, I’d place my real bid. Only for some reason, eBay didn’t send me that reminder on the last day, so I forgot about the auction until it was too late, and someone else got a bargain, paying less than half what I would’ve bid.
Ah, well. You can’t get all the Peanuts books at once. (If you could, what fun would collecting be?)
