The all-time greatest comic strip
I took some time off from blogging. Let’s pick up where we left off, with Peanuts and politics. The Charles M. Schulz Museum has an exhibit called Political Peanuts, running through December 1. And Peanuts Rocks The Vote this year with a nicely designed Flash animation page.
Happy birthday to Amy Schulz Johnson, back on August 5. And speaking of the Schulz family, in this photo there’s an extra swimmer in the pool with the Schulz kids. Who is that?
In yet another prescient political drawing by Charles M. Schulz, John Edwards waits by the phone for Barack Obama to call about a possible Cabinet post.
(That’s a $400 haircut?)
I’ve never been to the Comic-Con in San Diego, but they don’t need me there because it’s the biggest fanboy (and girl) convention anywhere. The fun includes everything from Charlie Brown to Star Wars, and Mark Evanier will be there, of course. If I were attending, on Friday I’d have to run from his panel with EC artist/writer/editor Al Feldstein over to this one:
4:45-5:45 It’s a Great Comic-Con, Charlie Brown — Together for the first time at Comic-Con, Warner Home Video, United Media and the Schulz Estate bring you a Peanuts voice cast reunion in celebration of several great holiday DVD releases this September and October. Featuring Chris DeFaria (Peppermint Patty), Gabrielle DeFaria Ritter (Pigpen), Lisa DeFaria (Peppermint Patty), Sally Dryer (Violet and Lucy), Robin Kohn Glazer (Lucy), Jason Mendelson, Hilary Momberger (Sally), executive producer Lee Mendelson, and Jeannie Schulz, the wife of Charles M. Schulz.
Wow! I’d love to be there. An hour devoted to celebrating the fun of Peanuts, and an opportunity to say hi to Jeannie Schulz and Lee Mendelson.
A couple of posts ago I shook my head in dismay because it seems Doonesbury now has computer lettering, and I expressed my admiration for Charles Schulz having lettered his comic strips by hand even when his hand was shaking. Schulz’s lettering, instantly recognizable, had a lot of style, as seen in this single panel from the book Schulz’s Youth, a must-have collection for Schulz fans of cartoons that he did for the Church of God. Take note of the “CMS” signature.
I can relate to this cartoon, having gone through a very religious period in my own youth. I remember how, as a member of Campus Crusade for Christ, we were warned against the “liberal” members of the Intervarsity group from another school. We occasionally got together for fellowship meetings and to pool our resources for retreats. It seems silly to me now, but even between groups such as ours there were denominations. This is my semi-sneaky way of introducing an upcoming post about somebody I knew in college named Paul Howley.
P.S. Hey, guess what? Take a close look at the enlarged view of that scanned cartoon. I think that’s computer lettering! I’ll check with Nat Gertler, who did the editing and layout.
P.P.S. I asked Nat if the original captions were typeset, and here is his reply.
The cartoons were indeed originally published with typeset captions, with some variation in the font. Since obviously Schulz did not typeset them himself, I didn’t feel the need to keep that aspect of the original edition (and resetting them allowed me some flexibility, like putting the text to the side in some captions rather than beneath, helping things fit the squarish book better.) And while the set type looked fine on the cartoons in their original context (in the midst of a page of typeset articles), I thought that using a font based on Schulz’s hand lettering would be more comfortable visually. (You’ll note that the lettering has the shake in it, despite the cartoons being before Schulz’s health troubles.)
Having said that, there is one cartoon there that has genuine Schulz hand-lettering: page 165. Some of the places this cartoon has been reused have reset it in type; I was glad to have the source with the hand lettering.
–Nat
Thanks, Nat! Here’s the cartoon he refers to…
Another book Nat did that I highly recommend is It’s Only A Game, a collection of comic strips done by Schulz and the late Jim Sasseville, who also assisted on some of the Peanuts comic books.
Since Garry Trudeau returned from his break a couple of weeks ago it sure looks to me like Doonesbury has computer lettering. I really dislike computer lettering for comics. A quick online check shows others also noticing the change, but nothing definitive.
This is how the lettering looked in one of the Sunday strips that was reprinted in May…
…and this is a panel from today’s Doonesbury.
I’d say there’s no doubt that the switch has been made to computer lettering. Yuck!
After Charles Schulz’s right hand started to shake, he held it steady with his left hand when inking and lettering Peanuts. In fifty years he took no sabbaticals and there were no reprinted strips. I’m not saying all cartoonists should be held to such a standard, but Schulz certainly set the standard.
We live not too far from Providence, RI, where the Providence Journal has added Peanuts to its comics page lineup. I used to feel that longtime cartoonists should retire and make way for new talent, but later I decided that the merit of a strip, whether new or old, should be the only determining factor.
It appears the managing editor didn’t intend that notice to be published immediately, because it’s dated Sunday. WordPress has an option to schedule the publishing of posts. I haven’t used it often, but I’ve been thinking about coming up with a series of posts on a single subject and scheduling them to appear automatically as sort of a weekly feature.
And out in Minnesota, one of the “150 Minnesota moments we’d just as soon forget” is the St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press dropping Schulz’s first comic strip, Li’l Folks.
The Charles M. Schulz Museum has an excellent collection of the Li’l Folks panels called Charles M. Schulz : Li’l Beginnings. At that link you’ll find it under the Biographical section of books.
