Category: Charles M. Schulz

Over at this link on Cartoon Brew, Monte Schulz says…

It seems as if my essay and the others will appear in the April issue of The Comics Journal. I hope you will all find my 36,000 words to be both informative and entertaining! And I hope to never have to write about the biography again! I think it’s a decent essay. It offers a lot of information, and it is not a re-hashing of what I’ve written on here. It’s all new.

So the issue of TCJ coming out in April is the one to get. We’ll be on the lookout, for sure. And just a little while ago, Monte added this comment…

Actually, Bill Melendez adored my father and could not have cared less whether Dad drank or not. That’s just another example of something David wrote that was either false or misleading. Bill and my dad were truly great friends and Bill is distressed over some of things David quotes him as saying in that book. In any case, had you ever seen my dad and Bill Melendez, you’d have known how fond they were of each other, and of Lee Mendelson, too. They made a great team back then.

If you haven’t read the David Michaelis biography Schulz and Peanuts, and you’d like to flip through the book at a store just to get a sense of what Monte is talking about, give page 384 a try. Read to the end of the last complete paragraph on page 385. Posthumous psychoanalysis.

According to Editor & Publisher, the original art for the Peanuts comic strip for December 22, 1952 was auctioned recently for almost $32,000. Note the use of “Tschaikowski,” which is how “Tchaikovsky” is spelled in Germany.

New England is close to losing the Super Bowl, and I only have time to post a couple of frames from the Coke commercial with Charlie Brown beating out Underdog and the other cartoon character whose name I can’t recall because I don’t watch the show.

P.S. Well, that’s it. With 35 seconds left, New England has lost. Grrr…

This is Peanuts from the day Monte Schulz was born…

… and this is Peanuts from exactly nine months before. POW indeed!

Click to see complete comic strip

“It all started when my oldest son, Monte, was in high school and was involved with an art class where the project was a coat-hanger sculpture. He was telling me about it one day while we were riding home in the car from school, and he said that he was going to transform a coat hanger into the figure of a baseball pitcher. It sounded like a good idea to me, and I was anxious to hear about the final results.

“Several weeks went by before he mentioned it again, and this time he told me that the teacher had handed back the projects and he had received a C on his coat-hanger sculpture. I remember being quite disturbed by this, because I could not understand how a teacher was able to grade this kind of project. I thought about it as the months went by, and finally translated it into the Sunday page where Sally expresses her indignation over receiving the same grade for her piece of coat-hanger sculpture.”

– Charles M. Schulz

Charles M. Schulz is still on our minds here at DogRat.com, and Monte Schulz is still soldiering on over at Cartoon Brew, responding to readers who are just now reading Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis. He says today is his deadline for an essay, some 70 pages long, about the biography to be published in The Comics Journal.

My buddy D. F. Rogers recently made an impulse purchase of a Peanuts Classic Edition reprint of the 1967 book, Happiness Is A Sad Song. A copy of this was a fixture in my sister’s room for many years. One of the “Happiness Is” items that Dennis pointed out is this one, which is also a favorite of mine.

Ignoring the fact that Charlie Brown isn’t in a child safety seat, it’s a very nice sentiment. In 1972, Charles Schulz expanded on the idea in this Sunday comic strip. Click the panels to see the full page.

For Dennis and myself, the best expression of happiness is this one…