Category: Charles M. Schulz

The all-time greatest comic strip

Johnston Flood

Lynn Johnston’s “modern classic” family comic strip, For Better Or For Worse (It’s not “For Better Or Worse”!), is in reprints, and the Boston Globe, which I still get as a newspaper, carries it. Since Lynn isn’t producing new daily strips, on her web site she writes comments about the old ones. Tuesday, she explained that she will soon be the age that Charles Schulz was when she met him. Lynn says that she’ll be speaking at the Charles M. Schulz Museum, and she mentions that she stays in touch with Jeannie Schulz. Jeannie can be heard in this recent audio interview. (And, no, I didn’t forget Monte Schulz’s birthday on February 1. I wished him well on Facebook.)

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Feb/Airtalk_CharlesSchulz.mp3|titles=KPCC: The Legacy of Charles Schulz]

Last September, Lynn did a video podcast interview. You’ll find it here in six parts.

Peanuts and nut cases

The 1975-to-1976 volume of “The Complete Peanuts” has a thoughtful and sincere appreciation of Charles M. Schulz, in a foreword by cartoon comedy bad boy Robert Smigel. His “TV Funhouse” series began on “The Dana Carvey Show”, before moving to “Saturday Night Live”. Smigel’s outrageous parody of 70’s Saturday morning cartoons, “The Ambiguously Gay Duo”, features the voices of Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell, and Colbert also did some of the writing. This is the first episode, “It Takes Two To Tango”, from September 28, 1996. Watching this makes me wish Colbert would bring back Tek Jansen. Note: this is a PG-13 cartoon! It starts after a brief comic bit by Carell about a dedicated athlete.

It’s the post-Christmas blahs, Charlie Brown!

  • Another Christmas, another 2-volume box set of Fantagraphics’ “The Complete Peanuts”. With the release of the strips from 1977 and ’78, the series now covers the time from when my parents got married, through the first full calendar year after I graduated from college.

  • Time Magazine has an interview with Lee Mendelson, the producer of the “Peanuts” cartoons.

    http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2039669,00.html

  • With Monte Schulz’s new book, “The Last Rose of Summer”, being published soon, here’s something of interest that Monte co-wrote with his dad — the TV movie, “It’s the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown”, from 1988, starring Monte’s kid sister Jill.

The Beeb on Sparky

It’s hard to believe it’s already been three years since the controversial biography Schulz and Peanuts, by David Michaelis. You have until next Tuesday to listen to a BBC Radio 4 feature on Charles M. Schulz.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/vrvdm/

I’m a bit surprised to hear Jeannie say, “David did a marvelous job…” Russell T. Davies, who brought Doctor Who back from hiatus, chimes in with the factoid that long before the Tardis, Snoopy’s doghouse was much bigger inside than it appeared outside.