Category: Charles M. Schulz

The all-time greatest comic strip

Monte Schulz moves into ‘The Big Town’

After the craziness of the Iowa straw poll, where the ostensible winner lost and the GOP front runner didn’t participate, KRUU-FM in Fairfield, IA does something more reasonable and interviews novelist Monte Schulz.

[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Aug/monteschulz.mp3|titles=Monte Schulz interviewed on KRUU]

According to Amazon, Monte’s next book, The Big Town, will be out in February. Nice cover!

I’m comfortable having a couple of non-fiction books going at the same time, but novels I prefer to read all the way through to avoid spoiling the mood, and I’m starting Monte’s current novel, The Last Rose of Summer. Monte has a knack for defining distinctive characters, and in the first book of his 1920’s Americana series, This Side of Jordan, Chester is as chilling a cold-blooded killer as any villain you’d never want to meet. The funniest moment in the story for me is Monte’s nod to his father that I wrote about at this link.

United they fall

The house that Sparky built is no more. United Media, home of UFS and NEA, has closed. Peanuts had been syndicated by United Feature Syndicate, but is now handled by Universal. From Peanuts to Garfield to Dilbert, United Feature Syndicate was a marketing powerhouse for decades, with NEA carrying a stalwart selection of comics, including its leading strip, Arlo and Janis. But now, Universal has them all.

Technically, King Features was the first syndicate to publish a drawing by Charles M. Schulz. It appeared on February 22, 1937. It was a submission Sparky made to the popular feature Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, about his dog Spike, who wasn’t a picky eater.

The caption reads, “A hunting dog that eats pins, tacks and razor blades is owned by C. F. Schulz, St. Paul, MN.” I don’t know where the “F” came from — his middle name was Monroe — and I doubt any dog would survive eating razor blades. Schulz’s original submission supposedly was, “eats pins, tacks and screws.” The word “screws” was changed to avoid it being taken as a verb.

Author Monte Schulz has a humorous reference to his dad and Spike on page 231 of his novel, This Side of Jordan.

“Jeepers, it must be swell to ride all over in a circus wagon. You ain’t got a sideshow for a kid whose dog eats tacks and razor blades, do you?”
“Naw, we ain’t got nothing like that.”
The newspaper boy lowered his head and kicked at the dirty pavement. “Aw, gee whiz, me and Spike never get a break.”
“Tacks and razor blades?”
The newspaper boy nodded. “Pins, too!”
“Kid, you’re almost as big a fibber as someone else I know.”
The boy’s face reddened. “If you got any tacks or pins on you, we can prove it. He rubbed his dog’s neck. And how!”

Blackbeard’s treasure

Bill Blackbeard was to comic strips what Forrest J. Ackerman was to science fiction — a lifelong, compulsive collector who wrote and edited articles and books about his hobby. Blackbeard’s singular passion was comic strips, and he saved millions of them by rescuing tons of newspapers. They’re all now in the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University. Blackbeard died in March, but the news wasn’t widely known until this past week.

At the other end of the comic strip game is the original art market, with Charles Schulz originals commanding premium prices. Heritage Auctions has a Schulz original being sold by the family of the real-life Frieda.

The piece predates Peanuts, but you can see where his work was headed. Its significance is that it seems to prove that Schulz didn’t adopt the four-panel format by choice. The art has only three panels, and Sparky wouldn’t return to doing that until February 29, 1988. Enlarge the image above and you will see that in his early work Schulz inked mostly with a brush, and not a pen as he would later do.

A big admirer of Schulz is cartoonist Jimmy Johnson, whose strip Arlo and Janis has been a favorite of mine for many years. It was introduced in 1985, the same year that Calvin and Hobbes premiered. Arlo and Janis began on July 29, and this photo of Jimmy ran in some of the papers that carried the new strip. The caption reads, “Arlo and Janis Day are anti-Yuppies, the young upwardly mobile who don’t glory in it, says their creator Jimmy Johnson.”