My publishing work, my curiosity, and my interest in the work of Charles M. Schulz are not three separate things; they all meld together in various ways. For a long time, I only knew of the newspaper comic strip Little Folks by Tack Knight because Tack’s trademark on the title kept Charles Schulz from naming his daily syndicate strip what he wanted (“Li’l Folk”), and so it got saddled with the name that he didn’t like at all, “Peanuts”.

But curiosity drove me, so I sought a collection of Little Folks so that I could see what it was like, but no collection had ever been issued. As such, it fell to me to make one. Just released is Little Folks: Dailies, 1930, collecting all the Monday-through-Saturday strips from the first year of the run (and as it started early in the year, that’s almost 300 strips.) Now, I’m not saying this is some hidden masterpieces — it’s a competently-done jokey kid strip of its time. But if you think it wasn’t reasonable that this could be confused with Peanuts, the dailies had a couple interesting features: the strip was almost always four evenly-sized panels (not common at the time), and adult faces and voices never appear (again, in the dailies; the rules were different for the Sunday strip once it started.) So in some aspects, these are two similar kid strips we’re talking about.

The Little Folks strip didn’t last long, leading some to suggest that perhaps trademark should not have mattered, as you only get to keep trademark protection if you’re actually using the trademark, However, despite not being in the papers, there were efforts to bring Little Folks to television — no, not as an animated series. Also, not as a live action series. Really as an inanimate series: in 1949, initial efforts were done to put the strip on the screen simply by putting the strip on the screen, one panel at a time, with dialogue voiced by Lucille Bliss. (This was about the same time that she was voicing one of the evil stepsisters in Disney’s Cinderella and decades before she would voice Smurfette on The Smurfs.) If you’ve seen me do my presentation on the Charlie Brown’s Career Education filmstrips, the effect would be a lot like that.

Anyway, if you’re curious, the book is available not just  on Amazon in the US, but also at other US-baed online bookstores and special-orderable through your favorite local US bookshop.

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