Good thing I kept last year’s PBS airing of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown on my OTA TiVo. This year, Apple TV+ will be the only place showing the cartoon, ending its 55-year run on broadcast television.
Regretfully, PBS does not have the rights to distribute the Peanuts specials this year. We’ll all have to watch for the Great Pumpkin in a different pumpkin patch this Halloween.
— PBS KIDS (@PBSKIDS) September 29, 2022
Anne van der Bijl has died at age 94. “Anne,” as in a Dutch variation of Andrew, was better known by his alias, Brother Andrew. I learned of his passing at the library in, of all things, the print edition of The Economist.
In my “born-again” period during college, I read Brother Andrew’s book God’s Smuggler. It’s his autobiographical account of taking Bibles into what were then the Communist countries of the Soviet Union.
There was also a comic book adaptation of God’s Smuggler, by Al Hartley. Somehow I missed seeing this Spire Comic at the time.
Hartley was a former Marvel artist, who had drawn Patsy Walker for Stan Lee.
The notice in The Economist missed an opportunity to point out that it was economics, not Brother Andrew’s efforts at planting copies of the Bible à la the Gideons, that contributed to the breakup the Soviet Union. The seeds of discontent grew from the public’s awareness of the worldly benefits of 1980’s secular consumerism — plentiful food, blue jeans, CD players, VCR’s, etc. China has since embraced the advantages of Capitalism, independent of Christianity or Democracy.
More than a year after the birth of this blog, during the subprime mortgage mess leading up to the economic meltdown that resulted in the Great Recession, Quentin Tarantino bought the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. Tomorrow morning there will be a meeting of the Cartoon Club, hosted by noted animation historian Jerry Beck.
Saying someone is the GOAT today means exactly the opposite of what it meant for Charlie Brown.
Let’s compare Robert Crumb and Scott Adams. Not by examining their work, but by watching them thinking out loud. They share a problem with political correctness, but that’s about all they have in common.
Note: This video contains some extreme images.
A newspaper chain that heretofore I didn’t know about, Lee Enterprises, has decided to publish a single comics page across all of its papers. It will be dropping a number of comic strips, including Bizarro by Dan Piraro and Wayno, and Snuffy Smith by John Rose. Dilbert is getting the most attention, because there are assumptions about political motives. Michael Cavna at The Washington Post asks, “Is the print newspaper comics page in trouble?”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/comics/2022/09/24/dilbert-scott-adams-lee-enterprises-newspapers/
For more about the effects of the Lee Enterprises decision, Dan’s site and The Daily Cartoonist are always in the Links section of this blog. For a nominal amount of money, comics fans can, and should, be paying subscribers to GoComics and Comics Kingdom.
