Braddock says goodbye to Jane’s World
Paige Braddock, the Chief Creative Officer over at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates and quite a cartoonist on her own, has been doing her own strip for decades. I haven’t read all of “Jane’s World” but the chunks that I have read are quite enjoyable, and I always mean to …
Snoopy makes many turns to the left
Coming to the racetrack this fall is another Snoopy-decorated race-a-ma-jig. Everybody’s favorite beagle… well, not everybody’s favorite, surely some people love their own dog more than they love Snoopy, it’s understandable… but the favorite beagle for the largest number of people, making him the most favoritest beagle, he will be on …
Peanuts as bird droppings
Comics history buff Steven Thompson (not to be confused with pop culture buff Stephen Thompson, son of comics history buff Maggie Thompson; the world often confuses me) pointed out this 1970 ad for the Dayton Daily News. The paper tried using the Dayton Daily News Bird, crafted by comic book …
there is erroneous information on the Internet
I was doing a little research, looking up forgotten hotelier the Reverend Caleb Nimmo for an utterly unPeanuts-related project. One of the genaeology websites, Ancient Faces, had a rather barebones listing for him. The only data they really had for him was birth date, death date, and one location where he …
More North Korean football references
Thanks to a post by comics writer Dan Mishkin, I’ve managed to add to more examples to this array of the “Lucy pulls the football away” concept being applied to the recent discussions with North Korea. And that, of course, is just its use in cartoons. There’s plenty of …
Peanuts in Vegas
I’m back from my trip to Las Vegas. The Licensing Expo is an odd experience, with brands both big and small trying to find new outlets for their trademarks. You can be talking to someone who is trying to get some new milage out of once-diseased consumer brands like Ken-L …
Political footballs
I have long wanted to do a nice long write-up on how well the Lucy-pulls-the-football-away gag has integrated itself into the political discourse; how it is used by legislators and commenters alike. I think there’s a great piece to be done on that, as it is one way that Peanuts …
When you look at the world through Peanuts-colored lenses
Some days, it seems that I cannot get far away from Peanuts, no matter what I’m doing. For example, at the moment I’m working on an article about some mid-1960s cartoon books about Jewish women who run brothels. Really, there’s more than one of these – at least six. It …
Spike was a secret Trekkie because of… MURDER!
Dadgummit, I was so proud of my theory why those two July 1978 strips were originally drawn with Spike watching Hogan’s Heroes, yet were edited and run in newspapers with Spike watching Star Trek instead. The dates! The companies! It all fit together!!! But sometimes Occam whips out his razor …
Which Peanuts character is a SECRET TREKKIE – and why has it been covered up for decades?
If you’ve read through a lot of Peanuts books reprints strips from the 1970s, you’ve probably come across installments where, in the final panel, Snoopy’s brother Spike is watching Hogan’s Heroes: Yes, these would be comic strips drawn by Sgt. Schulz, the World War II veteran turned cartoonist, depicting dialogue …