Category: Charles M. Schulz

The all-time greatest comic strip

Meet Joe Motocross

Meet Joe Motocross

Monte Schulz pointed out here on DogRat last year, that his brother Craig — and only Craig — was a dirt bike rider. Once again I refer you to the Coffee Lane portion of the documentary “Good Ol’ Charles Schulz,” where you can see both Craig and Monte.

Craig has an article in the October ’08 Racer X Illustrated, and he tells about riding dirt bikes.

The sound would travel for miles, and like a mating call, it would summon my buddies to head on over to my place to practice. My parents must have received plenty of phone calls, but I never heard of any complaints.

I’m struck by the fact there is something of a similarity in the contrast between Monte and his brother Craig, and me with my brother Jeff, who also rode dirt bikes. This picture of Craig could almost be one of my brother from that same period of time. Maybe I can get him to send one so you can see what I mean.

Craig Schulz

Guess the Cartoonist

I wonder if this cartoon was inspired by the famous photo of the Times Square kiss on V-J Day? Can you name the cartoonist?

I’m as good as anybody at recognizing the work of somebody I’m familiar with, but looking at this I see no hint whatsoever of his later style. He was a successful, well-known contemporary of Charles Schulz. In fact, for about the first ten years of ‘Peanuts’ he was more successful than Schulz.

Peanuts Rocks The Vote

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?

The Schulz family on Coffee Lane, Sebastopol, CA

Use The Force, Charlie Brown!

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.

Liturgial Lettering

Charles M. Schulz in \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…

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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.