Peanuts and My Writing

[ever_seeking]

I used to read Beetle Bailey because it sorta reminded me of the Gilligan/Skipper dynamic. And I loved Gilligan's Island. Mind Beetle wasn't as clumsy or stupid as Gilligan, just lazy, but....

And sister to Hi of And Lois fame.

[Dr Ray Palmer]

I'd say where Peanuts usually hit me were in the Charlie Brown/Lucy exchanges or the rare bit about the red headed girl. Otherwise, it's too cute and too sweet for me, which is the same overall attitude I have towards the Simpson's, which I like when it hits bittersweet notes but which I find overall to be too warm and silly.

Peanuts did turn into a completely different strip sometime in the '80s and, while it still had its charming moments, lost the bite and, well, existential despair that drove it in its first couple of decades. Rerun was sort of the harbinger of treacle for the strip. The more you see him, the sweeter and more cloying it gets. It's weird, because the characters' struggle for meaning and control in their lives was such a major theme in Peanuts from the '50s through the '70s, and when Rerun was introduced, in some ways he most literally illustrated lack of control and being pulled along by forces outside yourself because we usually saw him strapped in a baby seat on the back of his mother's bike being taken from place to place with no say in the matter. But he reacted to the situation in a softer way. He didn't have Charlie Brown's despair or Sally's rage/terror or Lucy's fury. He was just sort of ... there. And cute. And boring. And as he kind of took over the strip in the '90s, it continued in that vein.

[Spiffy]

I always appreciated Peanuts, but neither of the daily papers we got carried it, so my relatively early experience with it was in the paperback collections in the '60 and it was never one of the formative ones for me.

I have to admit, I have never known anyone who lived somewhere (in the US, I'm presuming) where Peanuts wasn't in a local paper. Well, maybe these days, since more papers don't carry comic strips at all, and despite its success any Peanuts printed in a paper now is old material, but I mean someone who's clearly of an age to discuss the likes of B.C. and Pogo and Lil' Abner.

You know, I agree Bloom County was mindblowing. But I absolutely can't re-read most of it (like Doonesbury). Peanuts, and C&H, are infinitely re-readable, I think. B.C. probably falls to that side too, although Pogo probably falls to the side of getting dated.

[RachelEvil]

I used to love comic strips. Now I buy collections of a few, Pearls Before Swine and Get Fuzzy, mostly. But the impact they had seems mostly to be gone.

There are still many excellent comic strips.

Just none of them are in newspapers anymore.

[Ravenwing263]

Peanuts did turn into a completely different strip sometime in the '80s and, while it still had its charming moments, lost the bite and, well, existential despair that drove it in its first couple of decades. Rerun was sort of the harbinger of treacle for the strip. The more you see him, the sweeter and more cloying it gets. It's weird, because the characters' struggle for meaning and control in their lives was such a major theme in Peanuts from the '50s through the '70s, and when Rerun was introduced, in some ways he most literally illustrated lack of control and being pulled along by forces outside yourself because we usually saw him strapped in a baby seat on the back of his mother's bike being taken from place to place with no say in the matter. But he reacted to the situation in a softer way. He didn't have Charlie Brown's despair or Sally's rage/terror or Lucy's fury. He was just sort of ... there. And cute. And boring. And as he kind of took over the strip in the '90s, it continued in that vein.

I think it's pretty that I grew up in the nineties, and I remember seeing a lot of Rerun. But the strip is still syndicated in my paper, has been ever since it ended, and I don't see a lot of him.

[CutterMike]

I have to admit, I have never known anyone who lived somewhere (in the US, I'm presuming) where Peanuts wasn't in a local paper. Well, maybe these days, since more papers don't carry comic strips at all, and despite its success any Peanuts printed in a paper now is old material, but I mean someone who's clearly of an age to discuss the likes of B.C. and Pogo and Lil' Abner.

You know, I agree Bloom County was mindblowing. But I absolutely can't re-read most of it (like Doonesbury). Peanuts, and C&H, are infinitely re-readable, I think. B.C. probably falls to that side too, although Pogo probably falls to the side of getting dated.

When I was a kid, there were a number of newspapers in the area. Boston alone had four daily newspapers-- the Globe, the Advertiser, the Record-American and the Herald. Eventually the Herald (Now a Murdoch property) ate up everything but the Globe.

My folks got the Globe and a more local paper, the Lowell Sun, every day and the Advertiser (later subsumed into the Record-American) added into the mix on Sundays. The only one we never got (except when my conservative grandfather was visiting) was the Herald.

Guess which one carried Peanuts?

[Tobias M]

I still read Doonesbury well into adulthood, but I think it was in 2005 that the Guardian started running The Perry Bible Fellowship that I finally found another title I enjoyed as much. Every Friday I'd skip through the supplements just to find out what the latest comic was.

[scs]

Okay, if I'm being TOTALLY HONEST, I know Garfield was gigantically successful and thus influential, and so its importance can't be denied. I just hated it ALL of the time, whereas with Doonesbury, that one I just hated some of the time.

The first year or so of Garfield was tremendous. Darker, funnier, meaner, and a metric shitload uglier. In a lot of ways Garfield was a dark mirror of all the other funny animal strips, and as such it was tremendous. Two or three years later it had become what it once satirized. If you can find the first book or two, you'll be both surprised and entertained by what it originally was.

Even early on, though, I was all about the adventure strips. Hal Foster"s Prince Valiant, Dan Barry's Flash Gordon, Milt Caniff's Steve Canyon, Saunders and Overgard"s Steve Roper, and Frank Robbins' Johnny Hazard. My favorite, though, was the western strip Rick O'Shay by Stan Lynde. . . . [[long appreciation of Lynde & Hipshot elided ]]

Lynde was and is seriously underrated. But he must have lots of fans out there, because his wonderful memoir Rick O'Shay, Hipshot and Me is still in print. Recommended.

There are still many excellent comic strips.

Just none of them are in newspapers anymore.

Well, yes and no. #9 Chickweed Lane both started in the papers and still appear there. Chickweed was never carried by a lot of papers, in no small part because author Brooke McEldowney refused and refuses to bow to the lowest common denominator. A couple of years back he had enough success with his online strip Pibgorn that he could take even more risks with Chickweed. He aged his characters overnight and shortly after started a year-long arc that's now been collected into one of the best GNs around, Edie Ernst, USO Singer/Allied Spy. From the number of collections he's bringing out at Pib Press, I strongly suspect the web is now far more important to him than the papers.

Frazz started in the papers, and they still seem to be the main venue for it. When Jef Mallett started it, he was deluged with the same two questions over and over: Are you a pseudonym for Bill Watterson? Is Frazz a grown-up Calvin? The answer to both is no, but you don't have to read much of the strip to see why the questions keep coming up. I hear that Mallett makes a nice little appearance in the Bill Watterson documentary as well.

[Weeto]

I have to admit that I love Dilbert and Hagar The Horrible from the strips still being published.