Gained in translation

Hebrew Peanuts

So last night I was looking at the Peanuts strips in the Hebrew language primer Olam Gadol – Bet (what, weren’t you?), and I find the above strip. Now, Hebrew reads from right to left, so obviously they reordered the panels so that the first one is on the right. But looking at it, I had a little bet with myself – I bet that they had flipped each panel, that Charlie Brown had originally faced the right, because it would flow better that way. I planned to look it up when I had the chance.

As it turns out, today I opened up Celebrate Peanuts to the right page to see the original strip (October 7, 1953), saving me a fair bit of hunting. And I saw that there had been a more significant change, one which should have been obvious to me from the first… originally there were no word balloons at all!

(Note: this post has been edited, as the original version used a now-disabled service that provided the image of the strip.)

Classic finds
Charles M. Schulz: Pinko scum?

As with most of my history finds, I found the column when I was looking for something else, something only related because they both had the term “comic strip.” But there it was… George Boardman, PhD, was telling the world that there was a problem with socialist propaganda on America’s …

New releases
Peanuts Storybook Treasury

The Peanuts Storybook Treasury slams 18 of the Simon Spotlight storybooks from 2015 through 2021 into a single hardcover volume. In order to get them all into 304 pages, it cheats just a little bit, skipping over the covers and individual copyright pages, and occasionally combining what had been two …

Classic finds
A set completed and a mystery solved

Twenty years ago when I first published a collection of It’s Only a Game by Charles Schulz and Jim Sasseville, I proudly announced that it was the first reprint collection of the strip ever! But then I saw at auction a little pamphlet that looked like this: and I later found …