Pacing the Peanuts comics book stories
- By : Nat
- Category : Comic book Peanuts
On the Peanuts comic book stories I’ve written, I’ve tried to make them, well, as Peanutsy as possible. I may want the individual gags to feel fresh, like you haven’t heard them before, but the experience of reading them should ideally feel like you are experiencing more of what you’ve experienced before. I realize that I’m never going to create something that makes you respond “oh my gosh, that’s Schulz!”, but if I can avoid pulling you out of the work with the feeling “oy vey, is that not Schulz”, then I’ve succeeded. I was not trying to create a different way of looking at Peanuts.
Most of the scripts I’ve turned in have been for 3 to 4 pages, but there are two very different ways that I’ve approached pacing those short stories… and you can see them both in issue 15 of the Kaboom Peanuts comic book, which was released today (he says, as he types this several days in advance and counts on Armageddon not hitting before Wednesday and thus making this post a lie).
“Press It”, the story at the end of the issue (drawn, by the way, by Jeff Shultz, no matter how you see the name spelled in the credits) is one of the stories that I thought of as a somewhat elongated Sunday strip, with minor bits of humor in each panel as the story rolls to some larger conclusion in the ultimate or penultimate panel (Schulz often used the penultimate panel to deliver the big gag of the strip, leaving the final panel for reflection on it.)
“Joe Stockcar”, in contrast, was written very specifically as if it were a week’s worth of four-panel daily strips , meant to read as though you were coming across this storyline in a Peanuts strip collection. Thinking of each page as being made up of 3 tiers of two panels apiece, a four-page story has 24 panels… the same as a Monday-through-Saturday run of the four-panel format that the strip used for most of its run. The first panel of each “strip” reintroduces the setup for the series, at least as much as you need for that strip. The whole run has a story that goes across it, but you should be able to read any one strip and get the gag. That gave me a Peanutsy rhythm that I felt comfortable with.
As I’m writing this, I still haven’t seen the finished story. I certainly expect that artist Andy Hirsch will have done something besides all identically-sized panels, to take advantage of the possibilities of the comics page, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the dialogue was reworked by the editors to avoid some repetition. But sticking with that format allowed me to feel comfortable with the pacing, and that I was delivering something appropriate.
One limitation with either of these approaches is that you really can’t take them much beyond 4 pages. A Sunday-page approach starts feeling like it’s too long and padded, while a daily strip approach gets too much into the repetition of the same information, and doesn’t permit complexity because it would have to be reintroduced too often. Because of this, for the longer stories I wrote, I tried to think of them as animated Peanuts specials. There, you can have a lot of set pieces, individual scenes that may not be carrying the central plot information, but still intertwine into a larger narrative.
As to whether I achieved being Peanutsy, that’s more for you to decide than me.
