The Complete Peanuts

Snoopy Duper

The Complete Peanuts
Volumes 1 - 26
by Charles M Schulz

The Peanuts Dell Archive
by Schulz and Various
Charlie Brown’s sister Sally is a Harry Potter fan.

I didn’t know that but it kinda makes sense since anybody who has done a lot for getting a new generation of children into reading would surely have appealed to Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz... or Sparky, as his friends and family knew him.

The reason I didn’t know this is because I pretty much hadn’t read any of the Peanuts strips after around the mid-1980s. I’d read quite a few of them from the years before that but Schulz was knocking these things out for around 50 years, from 1950 - 2000, on a daily basis so, you know, there was a lot there I hadn’t read. So, sometime towards the end of last year, I decided to remedy that and started reading the entire run in the few spare minutes I had left over each day, getting through a year roughly every few days.

Peanuts has always been in my life in one form or another and it’s also one of the things me and my late best friend Kerry also bonded over quite often.

When I was a kid my parents had a subscription to the Sunday magazine edition of The Observer. I used to mostly only read one thing in this, the full colour Sunday edition of Peanuts which had extra panels than the usual three on the regular daily strips. Then, years later when I was in my mid to late teens at school, I discovered a weird little second hand bookshop off the beaten track about twenty minutes walk away. It was only open on a Thursday afternoon and on a Saturday morning. I used to go there almost every Thursday after school to spend my Saturday job money there (in the days when a second hand book would be priced somewhere between 20p and 30p). I read a lot of things which have stayed with me from this shop over the few years it was still open... almost the entire run of Philip K. Dick novels, around 60 or so of the original Doc Savage novels, the Bond books, the Quiller books, the Modesty Blaise novels, 60 or more Michael Moorcock novels... this shop was a magical gateway to fantasy worlds I still inhabit to this day.

And, of course, I grabbed around 40 or so of the paperback Charlie Brown/Peanuts collections from them. They reprinted the strips in chopped up vertical displays and I just adored them. And, yes, thank you... I was the kind of kid who kept a little book of lists of required titles on me to make sure I didn’t buy any doubles. I used to lend them to my friend Kerry too and my favourite Peanuts memory must be the time when I discovered some new reprint books which were slightly thinner but which were maybe an inch taller and wider than the other Peanuts books. So I took it to school the next day and showed my friend the cover of the one I’d bought the night before... Thompson Is In Trouble Charlie Brown! I knew my friend knew all the Peanuts characters as well as I did, possibly better, so I waited the second or so and then, sure enough, Kerry looked at me and said... “Thompson? Who’s Thompson?” I looked at him nonchalantly as I slowly turned the book around to reveal the back cover. This was a depiction of the character Woodstock holding up a sign and, on that sign it said... “Thompson? Who’s Thompson?” Kerry saw this, groaned to himself and started grinning. I don’t know why I still remember this incident but it was one of the few highlights of my school period.

I fondly remember our last collective run in with the Peanuts gang, as it was literally a few months before Kerry’s death. We went into London one Saturday for a big gallery show on the history of Charles Schulz and his iconic strip. We had a good time walking around those galleries and I am very grateful, in hindsight, that we took the time to go around that thing.

So The Complete Peanuts is a 26 volume collection of all of the Peanuts strips from 1950 to 2000 in chronological order, two years per tome. It also includes Schulz’s earliest versions of the characters from the Li'l Folks cartoons, both at the start and the end of the run here and, also, various comic book and advertisement appearances. These are all reprinted in black and white, as the majority of the strips were. They are handsome hardbacked volumes and each has an introduction from a different, famous personality... so Hal Hartley, Wes Anderson, Barack Obama, Garrison Keiller, Whoopi Goldberg... lots of people have been gathered to sing the praises of the man and talk about his influences on them. The Peanuts Dell Archive takes some (not all) of the various Dell Four Colour Comics from the 1950s and 60s and reproduces them in their original full colour. The interesting thing is that it doesn’t reprint just the few Schulz stories from these comics but also a huge amount of the other writers and artists who worked on these. 

From the start, Schulz’s strip had something magical and was addressing things in ways which other newspaper strip characters couldn’t even get near. Schulz’s understated stabs of humour peppered with truisms are also often quite surreal at times and have an almost world weary feel to them at others... which is interesting when you are dealing with characters who are perpetually no older than about six years of age (of course, they always seem to know what year it is too... which is hard for continuity conscious people like myself, who can’t work out why these kids don’t grow up in these panels from year to year).

Although it sets a tone with its lead character Charlie Brown (although it’s true that his dog Snoopy could also be considered the lead character too), things are mostly unchanging for him over the years. For instance, one of the very early strips has Charlie Brown walking along towards a group of kids. One of the kids says... “Here comes Charlie Brown.” Then, when he has passed them by and is out of earshot, the same kid finishes off with... “How I hate him.” So yes, the eternal misfortunes of Charlie Brown start here but, especially in the early days, he’s not always the loser he’s sometime made out to be. A lot of the first few years, for instance, regularly has a strip where Charlie Brown ‘winds up’ one of the other kids and the last panel is often of him being chased away from a scene smiling as he says something along the lines of... “I get my kicks.” Much later in the run Charlie even gets a girlfriend, of sorts and does have some good things happening to him from time to time.

In November 1951, we have the first of what would be the annual tradition of Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown to kick and then pulling it away at the last moment. However, the first time this is done, it’s not Lucy who holds the ball at all but Violet...Lucy came into the strip as a toddler in early 1952. The same month as the first ball kick we get the first sighting of Snoopy’s kennel when a TV aerial is bought for it although, like pretty much all of the characters, Snoopy is drawn a little differently to the way he evolved... he’s not a million miles off from where he would later end up visually but, of all the characters, he’s probably the one who changed the most.

And then, in October of ‘52, a character breaks the fourth wall for the first time, although what with the surreal moments in the strip over the years, this is probably the least subtle it’s ever been done. After getting a stupid answer from Charlie Brown, Beethoven fanatic Schroeder walks off saying... “Sometimes I think I should put in for a transfer to a new comic strip.”

Getting back to Snoopy though, its hard to keep a track of just who owns him in the strip in the early days. It seems almost as if he lives with whichever kid seems to take Schulz’s fancy at the start. Somewhere around late 1955 though, he’s finally and positively identified as being Charlie Brown’s dog. In the early days, Snoopy’s kennel is rarely seen except for having that TV aerial installed and then, a little later, to show an air conditioning unit fitted to the side. After a while, though, we get into the iconic idea that he sleeps on top of his kennel. That being said, during his last few years working on the strip, Schulz began to depict him sleeping in bed with Charlie Brown on a number of occasions. In 1993, however, it’s revealed that Snoopy mostly sleeps on top of his kennel because he has claustrophobia... which is a shame but Peanuts does seem to get a little darker and more cynical as Schulz got older, I think. Lots of famous firsts for this character though, as the years go by including a 1964 reference to him as being a ‘Beagle’, which is something we hadn’t known for the 13 years prior to this. In March 1969 he was also ‘the first Beagle on the moon’ and I remember as a kid I used to have a Snoopy figure in his Apollo Mission outfit. At that exhibition last year, we saw a whole bunch of those in very slightly different variations from various manufacturing runs. In June 1970, as the punchline to a joke, Snoopy is seen wearing sunglasses for the first time, which would later become his Joe Cool alter ego’s signature trademark.

In an interesting use of composition and comic strip semiotics, which was something Schulz was continually experimenting with, in February 1961, Snoopy kicks his dog dish through three consecutive panels, thus exploring the idea of linear time over multiple static moments... something which is probably taken for granted in modern times. Another load of surreal turns include various gags of Snoopy interacting in various ways with the depiction of Schroeder's music, manifest in the air as notes on a set of staves but somehow also a tangible force once Snoopy is in a scene. There’s also a sequence in the strip where Snoopy is promoted to Head Beagle and it’s bizarre in that his whole inauguration is televised. And, of course, there are his various flights of fancy from the troubled First World War fighter pilot who is constantly being attacked by The Red Baron to a surreal version of the Foreign Legion as he leads a group of the bird Woodstock’s friends through the imagined desert.

Talking of Woodstock, this character was in it for quite a few years hanging out with Snoopy until he finally reveals his name in June 1970. Other firsts include the 1966 first appearance of Peppermint Patty and the August 1968 arrival of Franklin.

The strip is often whimsical and understated but it always feels right and you sometimes get the feeling that the worlds problems are being debated in this parallel universe of Schulz’s work. And, as I said, the strip does get quite surreal, quite a lot... and that’s not just used for Snoopy’s character. For instance, there’s a running joke starting in 1974, which carries on in subsequent years, of Sally developing a kind of conversational relationship with the bricks that make up the school building. Or there’s that time when Peppermint Patty is held back a year but her old desk in the other class is haunted by the sound of her snores. And, considering that the Peanuts gang were on practically every greetings card you could find in the 70s and 80s, it’s interesting that, when Snoopy wants to send The Red Baron a greetings card, he considers buying a Garfield Birthday card for him.

Another thing I like is the constant stream of movie references that make their way into the strip from time to time. There’s many a mention for Citizen Kane, for example but there are also some great throwaway lines like this one in reference to Alfred Hitchcock...”I don’t trust birds anymore since I saw that movie.”

As I read these beloved strips I realised that it was also a microcosm for the way the world has grown and the attitudes of people over the years. I mean, there’s something really jarring when you get a Harry Potter reference in a Peanuts cartoon and, frankly, realise that in 1993, Lucy is using a mobile phone. And the metatextual nature of the strips can sometimes creep up on you without you knowing it, such as the three daily strips in 1997 promoting a real life concert of Peanuts music at Carnegie Hall. And, considering my profession as a graphic designer, why did it take Schulz to clue me in with a very in-your-face reference, about Etaoin shrdlu? No... you google it the same as I had to.

The Dell Comic Archives are interesting in that they show people and artists who weren’t always 100% in step with Schulz’ style and even the one that Schulz worked on himself for the comic books were somewhat different to the meanderings of his daily strip. I don’t think it’s necessary the extended stories that brought about this change in this material... after all, Schulz had a lot of running stories going on  for a few weeks when he got into an idea... I just think that a different version of the medium for a specific audience obviously had different needs and this changes the tone somewhat.

I’d  never realised, for instance, that Schulz’ daily Peanuts newspaper strips also quite often delved into the realm of political satire like other newspaper cartoonists often do. My favourite one was a running strip in the... I think... 1970s where Charlie Brown is trying to get a dog license from his local post office for Snoopy. Each day he ends up being given the wrong thing like a fishing license until, on the last day, he gets the right one. On the last day he says something to an ‘out of frame’ Snoopy along the lines of... “No, she says you don’t need a license for that.” The last panel shows Snoopy walking out with some kind of assault rifle. I think that Schulz, who served in the Second World War, made pretty clear his sentiment on the foolish notion that anybody had the right to bear arms in his country and I’m really pleased he did this.

On February 13th 2000 a special strip appeared. The last one. Charlie Brown is seen talking on a phone with the phrase, “I think he’s writing.” Panel two is Snoopy on his kennel typing “Dear Friends...” The third panel is also him writing and a heartfelt message from Schulz which I’ll quote here fully...

“Dear Friends,

I have been fortunate to draw Charlie Brown and his friends for almost 50 years.
It has been the fulfilment of my childhood ambition.

Unfortunately, I am no longer able to maintain the schedule demanded by a daily comic strip, therefore I am announcing my retirement.

I have been grateful over the years for the loyalty of our editors and the support and love expressed to me by fans of the comic strip.

Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy... how can I ever forget them...

Charles M. Schulz”

Charlie Schulz passed away the day before this strip ran... and if you’ve just spent months reading his entire run, well... trust me, it’s a very moving moment.

The last volume in the series of The Complete Peanuts contains a long afterword by his widow, Jean Schulz, which talks a lot about their time together and, as you can imagine, it’s very touching. I couldn’t think of a nicer way to finish up this series and I found the whole experience both joyful and sometimes very sad. The Complete Peanuts is, as far as I am concerned, worth its weight in gold and if anyone is a budding strip cartoonist, I think you can learn a lot from reading through some of these volumes... strong lines, brevity, not over reaching but teasing out an idea... this is all good stuff. An absolute recommendation from me to anyone who wants to read something often gentle but never unswerving or dodging the bullets... a strip that tackles issues head on and with the right balance to make sure some of these insights really stab home. As well, of course, as being a whole lot of fun. I’ll aim to read through these again in my remaining lifetime, for sure.

It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

 

The Beagle Has Landed

It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
USA 1966
Directed by Bill Melendez
Watched on YouTube

I rarely watch anything on YouTube, it has to be said. I much prefer owning the stuff I watch rather than streaming or renting from a source which can just turn around and deny me the ability to watch what I want, when I want it any time it likes. However, I thought I’d make an exception this year because Varese Sarabande has just reminded me this gem of a cartoon exists by releasing the first CD issue of the soundtrack. Now, it has to be said, I did try and order a UK DVD or Blu Ray of It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, only to find that this thing seems to be totally out of print over here. Now normally in that situation I would just order the US edition but, alas, I knew that if I’d gone down that route then it was probable I wouldn’t even receive it until after Halloween this year... which kinda defeats the object. This is definitely a seasonal TV special and soundtrack and playing it past 31st October just seems like really bad luck, to me.

I remember that I never saw this one as a kid. Halloween, it has to be said, was not something that children in the UK in the 1970s or before... or even the 1980s for that matter... really participated in or knew much about. Trick or Treating was not a thing over here until maybe the mid to late 1990s and the way it’s mutated into some kind of aggressive tricksterism...as well as a totally cynical exercise in merchandising scary, seasonally appropriate merchandise to the kids and their financially challenged parents... is probably not something I should go on about at length here.

So yes, I was certainly aware of Halloween as a kid from only one source... The Observer magazine that got delivered to my parent’s door every Sunday. This used to run the Peanuts strip in colour near the back and, every October, you’d get the odd Halloween installment published. That was my only exposure to Halloween, not to mention The Great Pumpkin and so the bizarre culture shock I experienced when, in later years, I saw Halloween rise in popularity over here, spreading like a virulent celebration of destructive anarchy, made me wonder if our country had become just another state of the USA. I used to watch and love the odd Charlie Brown specials on TV as a kid (and later) as did everybody but I don’t know if this one even got shown on UK TV, truth be told. According to the IMDB it was only ever broadcast in the US and in Finland for some strange reason so... maybe it really never aired over here.

Anyway, I found myself with a spare half an hour for lunch and I found a few versions of this on YouTube. A couple were questionable in quality but I did quickly find an HD version and away I went.

It’s a little crude in style but most of those early Peanuts cartoons were and they were no worse for it. They’ve always been about the little pearls of wisdom that Charles M. Schulz used to inject into his strip and all of the ones I’ve seen (although I’ve seen nowhere near all of them) are primarily about promoting strong messages of right versus wrong. They are sometimes quite surreal (another reason to like them) and certainly very cynical at times but they always have a lot of heart in them and I suspect that’s why they’re so well loved around the world.

It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown tells the short story of what happens when the Peanuts gang go trick or treating while Linus and Sally (who has a crush on Linus, if you recall), spend all night in the ‘most sincere’ Pumpkin Patch that Linus can find, fruitlessly awaiting the appearance of this peculiar figment of Linus’ imagination. There’s not much to write home about in this one, it has to be said but... it is a slice of pleasant, heart warming Charlie Brown goodness once again and, in terms of the animated specials, it also has a couple of firsts.

For example, this is the first time an animation had been done of Charlie Brown attempting to kick a football and landing on his back after Lucy pulls it away from him. Even in this first animated manifestation, though, it’s already being treated by the characters as a running joke.

The other famous first here is that this is the first time we get to see the animated Snoopy playing around as the World War One flying ace, in pursuit of the Red Baron. Most of the classic elements of those flights of canine fancy are in place here already such as, even when he’s doing a loop the loop, you never see anything other than the top of his dog kennel standing in for his Sopwith Camel and both the flying sequence and his progress returning home behind enemy lines is done with a deft touch which carefully rides the line between Snoopy’s imagination and what’s happening in the real world. The only thing which seems a little false here is that instead of Snoopy’s inner voice narrating his adventures... you never get to hear Snoopy’s thoughts in the cartoons... we instead have the surrogate voice of Charlie Brown narrating on the soundtrack. This almost but, doesn’t quite, work and it seems a bit false. I think this was something they dropped in later shows but I’d need to watch more of them to find out how quickly this element was ditched from the franchise.

The whole show is, of course, scored by the late, great Vince Guaraldi and this is always one of the best reasons to watch the early, classic Peanuts shows. This one has some nice variations on his famous Linus And Lucy theme going through it too which, frankly, I'm really looking forward to hearing when I can get around to giving the new CD a spin. It's good jazz scoring from a truly remarkable composer.

And that’s me more or less done with It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown which, frankly, any fan of the Peanuts gang will surely love. I say more or less because there’s a little epilogue to my review here. When the end credits were rolling I noticed that the cartoon was released in 1966, which rang a little alarm bell in my head. I remembered that a couple of years ago I bought a DVD called The Peanuts 1960s Collection, which is also now sadly out of print and which I haven't had a chance to watch yet. When I looked at the box when I got home I realised that It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was on this all along. So I really needn’t have spent so much time and energy trying to get hold of this one and neither did I need to resort to YouTube to watch it. Sometimes the things you want are right on the end of your nose so, the moral to take away from this story, I think, is this. Whatever you do, don’t get as old as me... it’s no fun.

Lucy

Every Which Way But Lucy

Lucy
2014 France
Directed by Luc Besson
UK Cinema release print.

Warning: There are some spoilers here but I’d be very surprised if you hadn’t already worked everything out just from the trailer, to be honest.

I’ve always held the films of Luc Besson in high regard. Ever since I first saw Subway on TV many decades ago and had a look at whatever other films he’d done at the time. I remember introducing my friends to his work... The Big Blue was a big hit with them. I also remember seeing Nikita on the weekend of its release at the Lumiere cinema in London and going back another four times because I was so blown away by it. Besson still wasn’t that well known in this country but for us he was one of the big stars of the directing scene back then.

Besson doesn’t direct as much as he used to. He produces some very exciting action films and keeps his hand in now and again so... the prospect of seeing a brand new movie directed by him and scored by his old collaborator, Eric Serra, was an exciting one.

Alas, I have to say that I really wasn’t as impressed as I hoped I would be. The film tends to take up the naivety of some of his later projects (The Fifth Element springs to mind) and throws it up in the screen in such a way that the innocence of the content almost feels offensive. I’ll get to that in a little while but, from what I can see, the high octane action film promised by the trailer delivers at a certain level but is full of disappointment... at least for this viewer. There are three very serious problems to it, at least to me, and I’ll address those right now.

Number one is the trailer itself.

It’s a great trailer, actually, promising a story of a girl, played beautifully by the always gorgeous Scarlett Johannson, who accidentally accelerates her brain power beyond the 10% humans are mythically supposed to use (I think that’s actually an error by current thinking) and this gives her special, evolutionary powers. She goes to give her knowledge to a professor studying such things played by Morgan Freeman and all kinds of action hijinks ensue. Freeman, of course, has already been in a film which similarly covers the high speed evolution of human kind earlier this year and you can find my review of that film, Transendence, right here.

Unfortunately, the trailer pretty much shows the entire essence of the movie as, like the film itself, it counts up to the point where Lucy gets in touch with 100% of her brain capacity, and it’s pretty obvious to see exactly what the ending of this movie is going to be... just from the trailer. In fact, my cousin in Australia, where it had an earlier cinematic release, saw it a few weeks ago and I told him how I thought it would end based on the trailer and he basically said I didn’t need to watch it now. So, yeah, if you’ve seen the trailer you can pretty much predict how it’s going to end.

However, figuring stuff like that out doesn’t put me off seeing a movie because it can still be darned entertaining and, to be honest, a lot of movies are so predictable these days.

And in some ways, the movie does live up to the trailer in terms of the brilliant action and the superb performances all round. Eric Serra’s score is another great work and exactly what you would expect from him for a movie like this... although unless you like downloads (and I don’t have enough room on my computer for downloads) it has to be said that the only place you can buy the score CD at time of writing this review is from France... although, when I ordered it from French Amazon yesterday, it seemed to be a lot cheaper than it would have cost to purchase it over here so it’s maybe worth going on there if you like the score to this movie. I always enjoy Serra’s scores to Besson’s films... even if I don’t always like the film.

There are other problems with this, though, which I found far more problematic.

I said about the movie being naive but, perhaps, childish may be a better word. What it really is, however, is damned patronising. I thought I was probably alone in feeling that the delivery of the plot points was condescending but it turns out my friend who saw the film with me was made even more angry about it. Basically, every time somebody seems to make the slightest plot point in this film, we directly cut to a visual metaphor of what they are talking about. Talk about being spoon fed. It’s like even the most simple plot point is capitalised, emboldened and underlined in red pen and the director seems to be taking this tack all the way through. It doesn’t take long for it to become a truly insufferable technique.

At least when a director like Nicholas Roeg cross cuts to a relevant visual, it’s not a straight demonstration of the point that’s already been made... in fact, with Roeg, you often have to work hard to establish what metaphor he is trying to make and what consequences the disclosure of the little flashes of information will have on his characters. But in Lucy it’s just like somebody drawing an illustration after the fact. It really does insult the intelligence of the audience to the point where it very quickly became a distracting tactic. Not a fan of this “beyond dumbed down” approach at all, I’m afraid. It’s not like the central concept of the movie is in any way challenging so this really is just too much decoration of the cake, so to speak. So it would be safe to say that the editing style really grated with my mindset throughout the entire running time.

My final problem with the movie was in the ability, or lack of, in making me worry about the final fate of the characters. There’s no suspense there, partially because it’s pretty obvious what is going to happen to Lucy at the end of the movie but, mostly because Besson makes a mistake which has been the bane of some comic book writers for years. When you have a character who’s pretty much omnipotent, like Superman for example, you don’t worry about him being in peril and, therefore, don’t really care about what or who he goes up against in the course of a story. You know he’s going to be fine by the end of it. This is why the writers have to invent clauses to their original character set ups, such as Kryptonite, to have something which they can then bring in to put the hero under actual jeopardy. In Lucy, Besson makes the mistake of having a character who becomes completely able to handle herself and pretty much any situation within the space of the first half of the movie.

Consequently, when Lucy is facing down loads of mobsters and getting into car chases and gun fights, you have no worries that her life is in any way in peril. And so, of course, you don’t care what the writers throw at her... you know she’s going to be able to handle it without even trying. And so the film lacks a certain amount of suspense needed to give the action sequences the edge they really needed. This is not an easy problem to solve but I’m sure they could have had a stab which would have made sense within the confines of the story set-up if they’d have given it a try.

And so, my final thoughts on Lucy are that, while it is a pretty slick entertainment with good performances all around, excellent music and an interesting concept to play around with, the maddening, patronising execution of said concept is quite jarring and you will find yourself seething with anger and popping out of the spell of the movie at certain points throughout, I suspect. Not my favourite Besson by a long chalk but it certainly tries hard (perhaps too hard) to give us something we’ve not quite seen before in this particular wrapping paper and I just wish I could recommend it more. However, all this is swept aside when it’s got Scarlett Johansson shooting people and causing carnage... so if you are happy with that kind of level, then maybe go for it.