AAUGH: The First Peanuts Strip

Peanuts launched with just four panels, and the AAUGH Blogger, Peanuts specialist Nat Gertler, spends fourteen minutes poring over those panels. Oh, well, including asides about popcorn.

To follow along, you can see the strip on the GoComics site. Alas, that version is colorized, so it’s not the pure experience. A smaller but appropriately black-and-white version can be found on the Wikipedia page about Peanuts. Or you could simply open up your copy of the first volume of The Complete Peanuts to the first strip. (If you don’t have a copy, you should. I invite you to go buy one!)

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Schulz/Peanuts history
Old newspaper finds: Peanut of the Year, 1956

In 1956, the Minneapolis Star newspaper ran a contest for “Peanut of the Year”, asking parents or kids themselves to submit letters of 150 words or fewer of whey a certain 5 to 10 year old was like a Peanuts character, or deserved to be part of the cast. The …

Schulz/Peanuts news
See some Schulz originals in Indiana

The Anderson Museum of Art in lovely (I’ll assume) Anderson, Indiana has an interesting exhibition coming up next month…. It focuses on artists from Indiana, and look at all the cool things it covers, There’s Garfield! And Baby Blues! Blondie! Marvin! But… there’s no Snoopy. What’s it doing on this …

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Charlie Brown in Repo Man

My snoopysense went off while watching Repo Man, the offbeat punk sci-fi flick from 1984. About seven-and-a-half minutes in, titular star Emilio Estevez is silhouetted in a doorway, and on the door across the hall, there’s Charlie Brown! That’s part of a line of banners from the 1970s… in fact, …