When I was a kid I really enjoyed playing baseball, despite the fact I wasn’t very good at it. I lost the love of the game in my teens, but I still love “Charlie Brown’s All-Stars.”
Category: Charles M. Schulz
The all-time greatest comic strip
Christmas, forty years later…
This is the 40th anniversary of my parents moving us to Massachusetts. Christmas of ’68 is indelibly associated in my mind with $1 Peanuts books and the Beatles record called “The Beatles”.
I don’t listen to the White Album every Christmas, but I’m glad that Fantagraphics made it possible to revive the Charlie Brown tradition by publishing The Complete Peanuts. I posted a picture of last year’s books, and I’ll start a new tradition by showing you this year’s books. One of them has a serious printing defect, but all of the pages are there so I don’t mind.
We enjoy getting a few new ornaments every year, and Carol bought this one with Snoopy and Woodstock.
Gene Colan wins Sparky Award
The Sparky Award, given by the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, is named after Charles M. Schulz. This year the Sparky Award has been given to none other than Gene Colan. As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, Gene is seriously ill, but he’s been feeling well enough for a trip to California. After Gene’s been back home for a few days maybe I’ll give him and Adrienne a call to offer my congratulations.
One of the first Web pages I ever composed, back in 2002, was about Gene Colan. You’ll find it at this link.
Happy birthday, Sparky Schulz
Today, Charles M. Schulz would have been — yikes! — 86. Twenty years ago, there was a series of Peanuts animated cartoons called This is America, Charlie Brown. I’ve seen most of them and they’re a very good introduction to American history. Unfortunately, the videos are out of print, but they’re available on Netflix. I have some of them on good, ol’ LaserDisc, including “The Mayflower Voyagers”, five minutes of which you’ll find on the embedded video player. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!
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AF #15 in LOC
Something I meant to mention months ago is the anonymous donation to the Library of Congress of the original art to the 1962 comic book Amazing Fantasy #15. That particular issue includes the first appearance of Spider-Man, by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.
And a few months ago a new book about Ditko came out from Fantagraphics, the outfit that is handling The Complete Peanuts. (Here’s the set I’m hoping to get from Santa this year.) STRANGE AND STRANGER The World of Steve Ditko, by Blake Bell, rated a review in the New York Times.
Peanuts On Disc and Online
The brothers Schulz can be heard talking about new Peanuts media — Monte on a DVD, and Craig on NPR.
The new “Peanuts Motion Comics” sound like fun. Unfortunately, I don’t have iTunes.
Charles Schulz was from Minnesota, of course, so it’s no surprise that a TV station there highlighted the animated Peanuts comics. (Note that the clips were taken from TV specials.)
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