Category: Charles M. Schulz

The all-time greatest comic strip

Peanotes

The 60th anniversary of Peanuts is only two months away. Here are some related items of note:

  • Rheta Grimsley Johnson has a new book called Enchanted Evening Barbie & the Second Coming: A Memoir. My copy arrived from Amazon a few days ago. When Rheta was married to cartoonist Jimmy Johnson, she wrote Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz, the first authorized biography of Sparky. Rheta recently spoke at the Sixth Annual Clarksville Writer’s Conference in Tennessee.

    • Three deceased Greats

    The 2010 San Diego Comic-Con is coming up soon. Over on Comic-Convention Memories, there are batches of photos taken at the San Diego con in 1974.

    Here’s a pic of MAD cartoonist Sergio Aragonés. No! Wait! That’s not Sergio, it’s Peanuts animator Bill Melendez.

    And here’s his de facto boss, Sparky Schulz, when he was — yikes! — a couple of years younger than I am now!

    With special guest star, director Frank Capra! Frank Capra?? He attended a comic-book convention in 1974??? That was several years after his autobiography, The Name Above the Title, and ten years before She’s a Wonderful Wife — er, I mean It’s a Wonderful Life — was rescued from public domain abuse and rightly hailed as one of the all-time great movies.

    Monte Story School

    Novelist Monte Schulz’s follow-up to his dark, yet rollicking This Side of Jordan is The Last Rose of Summer, which should be out in December.

    Monte has had a long association with the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. His father attended the conference for many years, as did Ray Bradbury. The conference ran into financial trouble and ended up in bankruptcy court. Monte made an offer and now he owns the conference, presumably along with all of the headaches that go with it.

    WRITERS CONFERENCE SOLD: Monte Schulz, son of the late Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz, has purchased the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robin Riblet, on Tuesday, June 8, approved the $27,000 sale. Monte plans to hold the next conference next June. There was no conference this year or last due to prior owner Marcia Meier’s bankruptcy.

    And with apologies to Stephen Colbert, I think the title of this post qualifies for greatest pun of all time.