It’s Only a Game comes to Minneapolis

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While Schulz’s collaborator on It’s Only a Game, Jim Sasseville, would say that the strip was in the same number of papers at the end as when it launched, that doesn’t mean that no papers added it along the way. Here, for example, is the announcement of the feature’s debut in the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune on January 12, 1958, a short ways in the run. It’s not clear whether the paper had just started subscribing to it, or had been subscribing but not running it in the previous weeks. (Papers sometimes did that to keep a strip out of the hands of the competition, or to be ready when they dropped another strip.) This was an above-the-fold ad on what would’ve been the outer wrap of the Sunday paper, so it was not a minor thing. This comics section also had Peanuts on the back page, although they only ran the two-tier version of the Sunday rather than the full three tiers.

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A thing that might have been

In 1958, the vocal jazz/pop band The Hi-Lo’s were riding high. Having released their first album in 1954, they were already working on their eighth… and they wanted to name it after a Peanuts book. As the Washington D.C. newspaper The Sunday Star reported, they were floating the idea of …

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Charles’s Angel

In 1961, Charles Schulz designed a promotional character for the United Fund (i.e., the group that is now called United Way.) He gets named “Little Angel”… or, depending on the press release, “Little Good Guy”. The character appears in promotions for a few years. The reworks of him, which are …

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Up and down, up and down

AAUGH Blog reader D.D., who heads the fine blog The Daily Cartoonist (go check it out), put in the time to find an example of the one eight-panel Peanuts daily in vertically-stacked format, as I mentioned wanting to find in a previous post. Go take a gander at its verticalness! …