Category: Cartooning

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.

Complete Peanuts, \'67-\'70

We enjoy getting a few new ornaments every year, and Carol bought this one with Snoopy and Woodstock.

Peanuts Christmas Tree Ornament

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.

Beatles song titles hidden in ‘Emma’

Last summer I did a post on the anime called Emma. The second season is now out on DVD, and we’re watching it. Tonight we spotted a moment in a show where a ledger is being shown, but then we realized that instead of being an accounting of financial transactions, it’s a bunch of Beatles song titles. I’ve tried to make them legible in this image.

\"Emma\" anime

Jan’s Earth Mother Perspective

DogRat comment writer Jan, Arthur Godfrey fan and very nice person, has a blog. Jan needs some encouragement to keep writing, so go there and leave some nice comments. She’s on Blogger/Blogspot, and you’ll need an account with either that or Google to sign in.

http://folktress-mythoughtsonline.blogspot.com/

Jan, my suggestion is to just keep writing. A lot! Sheer quantity is the way to go, whether or not you think anybody is noticing. I don’t know how Google bloggers keep track of how many people are out there, but being my own webmaster I can see that in November I had over 7500 different addresses on the Internet accessing DogRat. But of those people, how many leave comments? An infinitesimally small percentage.

Happy birthday, Sparky Schulz

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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