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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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Charlie Brown, playa

I have no idea whether the copywriter here thought that Patty was Charlie Brown’s main love interest and Lucy his side-piece, or the other way ’round. But in any case, someone needs be shot for putting unneeded quotation marks within a word balloon.

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Stop by your local comic book store

Hey, I’m going to avoid my usual “gift certificates are convenient last-minute gifts” speech, and instead steer those with some holes to fill to head down to their local comic book store. Those shops have been having a fairly tough year and could use the business – and boy, have …

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Guaraldi via Grohl

For those of you what like covers of “Linus & Lucy” – on this past weekend’s Saturday Night Live, the musical guest The Foo Fighters closed the show with a medley that included a nice, hard-rocking take on that song. You can find it online here (you’ll have to watch …