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How Charles M Schulz created Charlie Brown and Snoopy (2024)
- AntiRush 11mo agoThe Charles Schulz museum in Santa Rosa, CA is a must visit if you’re in the area! https://schulzmuseum.org/ https://schulzmuseum.org/
- arnonejoe 11mo agoThere is also a nice ice rink next door that looks like a Swiss Chalet. I think it’s also part of the museum. https://www.snoopyshomeice.com/ https://www.snoopyshomeice.com/
- kridsdale1 11mo agoIs that the airport?
- mikeg8 11mo agoNo, there is an airport 10 minutes from the museum but the museum itself is closer to downtown.
- andrewstuart 11mo agoI think many people have seen only the commercially exploited peanuts imagery. In fact the comics - especially the older ones are incredibly clever and funny and insightful and there’s long running threads and connections and strong characters. Peanuts the tshirt/hat/poster/cup is crass. Peanuts the comic is genius. It exactly the same with Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. The commercially exploited imagery is crass and dumb. The comics written by Karl Barks were genius and often really entertaining adventure stories.
- lurking_swe 11mo agoSpeak for yourself, i enjoy both. :)
- antonymoose 11mo agoI would think the closest comparison to my eye is the Calvin and Hobbes commercialization? As a child of the 90s, I almost exclusively knew of Calvin stickers pissing on Ford and Chevy logos growing up. The great comic was a pleasant surprise for my teenage self.
- jdlshore 11mo agoWatterson refused to allow Calvin & Hobbes to be commercialized, other than the books. Those crass stickers are unauthorized knock-offs.
- antonymoose 11mo agoAmazing - these were Circle K chain stores selling these stickers. How was this not enforced?!
- whartung 11mo agoIt's not like stickers are particularly difficult to make, or Watterson had an army of auditors combing every gas station or car meet looking for sticker makers. They have (as I understand it) challenged and stopped some folks from doing things, but something like the Calvin sticker was pretty ubiquitous. Even then, some later ones were particularly bad Calvins. I had a vinyl sticker of Spaceman Spiff on the back of my motorcycle helmet. I bought it at a motorcycle race back in the 90s.
- MPSimmons 11mo agoI mean, even originally, Garfield strips had some substance, but Jim Davis really liked money, I think...
- eru 11mo agoGarfield was conceived from the get go as a cash grab devoid of artistic merit. (And that's fine by me, nobody is forcing anyone to consume Garfield.)
- MPSimmons 11mo agoInteresting, you know more about it than I do, I suppose. Do you know of any source for Jim discussing how/why he started Garfield?
- eru 11mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield#History is probably a good start. Wikipedia is a bit coy and trying to be neutral. But even just from there you can see that the author decided to make strips about cats, because Snoopy had already cornered the dog market.
- Angostura 11mo agoSee also Bill the Cat https://www.tumblr.com/thebestcomicbookpanels/185186150961/bill-the-cat-is-introduced-in-bloom-county-by https://www.tumblr.com/thebestcomicbookpanels/185186150961/b...
- stevekemp 11mo agoI have approximately one meter of snoopy books - collections of the comic strip - dating from the 70s and 80s. Now and again I read a few strips, but at least once every month I wear my snoopy watch, and seeing Snoopy on the dial makes me smile every time. I've had more comments on the snoopy dial, and my casio terrorist watch, than any high-end piece in my rotation/collection. I struggle to think of other snoopy merchandise which is common-place, outside watches. (I asked my eight year old son a while back if he knew the names of some characters from Peanuts, while showing him a couple of the cartoon strips, the only one he knew was Snoopy. I was sad to learn he didn't know the name of either Charlie Brown or Woodstock.)
- baobun 11mo agoSee also: The Moomins.
- JoeDaDude 11mo agoFor the dedicated fan, the complete collection of Peanuts strips is available in several volumes. https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/the-complete-peanuts-hardcover https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/the-complete-peanu...
- throaway54 11mo agoPeanuts is also a product of Jazz-era America (50's & early 60's). Joe Cool is a beatnik, not a hippie or a rocker. So a lot of that context & content gets lost as the decades go by. Case in point being the name Peanuts itself, which even to me as an elder Millenial was obscure. No one actually said Peanuts, always Charlie Brown.
- gilgoomesh 11mo ago> Charlie Brown may have been as popular as any character in all of literature Was he? Maybe this is true inside the US but from outside the US, I've always viewed the character as a peculiarly American artefact – something I was aware of but never really read or watched. This seemed to be reinforced by most major Charlie Brown titles seemingly tied to other American customs like Halloween and baseball.
- solarmist 11mo agoI'm an American and I've really never related to Charlie Brown myself, but I've heard Peanuts is huge in Japan and other asian countries.
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- mttpgn 11mo agoThe BBC published this article. I agree with "all of literature" being hyperbolic though.
- eru 11mo agoPeople in eg Germany are mostly aware of the Peanuts, but it's nowhere near as central to the culture as in the US.
- kalleboo 11mo agoSnoopy as a character is popular in Japan, but only as a character design - kind of like Hello Kitty. There is zero awareness of any of the shows or really Charlie Brown himself.
- locao 11mo agoI'm Brazilian, in my middle 40s. When I was a little kid my best friend used to carry a blanket around. Neighbors called him "Linus" for years. But I'm confident it was because of the TV show, not the comic strips.
- emmelaich 11mo agoIt was very popular in Australia. Serialised in newspapers for many years. As a kid, our family owned pretty much every Charlie Brown paperback.
- konfusinomicon 11mo agosnoopy is the perfect dog name
- analog31 11mo agoI'm a musician, and something I've noticed is that children no longer recognize the "peanuts" theme song.
- karlgkk 11mo agoNewspaper comics haven’t been relevant to anyone 30. By the time you were old enough to read them or care about reading them, smartphones were in the scene.
- pastor_williams 11mo agoMy kids watch and love the Peanuts TV specials. They also love the Peanuts movie that came out a few years ago.
- kaladin-jasnah 11mo agoI'm college age and grew up reading newspaper comics. Then we stopped getting the newspaper since it became too expensive and then our local paper stopped doing print copies...
- xp84 11mo agoSad, but true. I was born in the 80s and had a dad who read the paper religiously, so getting that section with the comics every morning was super important to me!
- anthk 11mo agoTo me nerdy webcomics were the natural shift, from SBMC to XKCD, and some of them in Spanish such as Bilo y Nano.
- thrdbndndn 11mo agoSnoopy or Peanuts in general is (was) very famous in my country (at least for my age) but I only read it in comic. So no idea what the song is about, unfortunately. I don't even know it has animation version.
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- FiddlerClamp 11mo agoInterestingly, Peanuts started with a focus on Shermy and Violet as the 'straight men' and young(er) Charlie Brown as the comic upstart. Snoopy shows up fairly soon, but he doesn't even seem to be CB's pet for the first while. It's fascinating to see Lucy, Linus, Schroeder and Sally grow from tots or babies to the developed characters we know today.
- randycupertino 11mo agoThere was a long read article that came out a few years ago called "How Snoopy Killed Peanuts:" https://kotaku.com/how-snoopy-killed-peanuts-1724269473 https://kotaku.com/how-snoopy-killed-peanuts-1724269473 about how Peanuts lost it's edge once the "cute" popular dog was introduced, whereas prior it used to be more subversive, philosophical/theoretical with darker material.
- PakG1 11mo agoIt's too bad that there are probably meant to be so many example comics in that article, judging from how it's written, and what's really there is just ads where the comics are probably supposed to be. Wonder what happened.
- randycupertino 11mo agoKokatu was part of Gawker which was killed by Peter Thiel (who went after Gawker media by funding lawsuits against them after they outed him as gay). https://medium.com/@celestineriza/how-peter-thiel-took-down-gawker-without-saying-a-word-for-9-years-cd8bfc62c97e https://medium.com/@celestineriza/how-peter-thiel-took-down-...
- efnx 11mo agoHonest question here - is this getting downvoted because it’s untrue, or something else?
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- c420 11mo ago"Snoopy Come Home" wrecked me as a kid, just absolutely flattened me. Looking back on it now, it’s wild to consider this level of depression was aimed at children. I’m not knocking it; honestly, I kind of treasure how hard I cried over it. And that’s before you even touch the whole anti-segregation angle running through the story.
- gedy 11mo agoHa same here, I remember bawling my eyes out watching it on TV, to my parents bemusement as to what was the big deal.
- golson_kindmind 11mo ago“I'm talking only about the minor everyday problems in life. Leo Tolstoy dealt with the major problems of the world. I'm only dealing with why we all have the feeling that people don't like us." I felt that in my bones.
- BrandoElFollito 11mo agoIn France we recognize Snoopy and people would call the whole "world" of the comics "Snoopy". "Peanuts" is unknown. I am 55 for the context. We would somehow recognize Charlie Brown, but not by name. The other characters are basically unknown. The reason is that Peanuts was not part of the mainstream comics books we were reading as children. Threre were two kind of them: proper books such as Astérix, and thick "anthologies" such as Pif which were a set of what Americans call "strips".
- kulahan 11mo agoDoes anyone simply not get how this comic got so popular? I've never read a strip from this comic and once felt anything interesting. It's not a Calvin and Hobbes, it's not a Howard the Duck, it's just... I dunno, cute? I guess people like it because it's kinda cute? I know, I'm being something of a Bah Humbug, but I legitimately cannot see the draw of this comic. It reminds me of Family Circus - no story, just vaguely cute things grannies would seemingly like to see?
- DuperPower 11mo agoits super nihilistic and depressive, its the best on making your feel bad
- emmelaich 11mo agoIt touches all the emotions and experiences, somehow being relatable to adults and kids at the same time. Its deepness and universality probably won't be apparent unless you read many of them - preferably the best, maybe one a day.
- j_m_b 11mo agoIt might have been more like C&H or Far Side at one time, but by the time of the 80s when I first started reading the funny pages, Peanuts was just another mundane strip.
- nick_ 11mo agoThe only comic worse is Garfield. I have no idea how anyone enjoys either of them.
- Angostura 11mo agoI see you've never met 'Andy Capp' popularly serialised in UK papers, together with Peanuts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Capp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Capp
- detourdog 11mo agoI totally agree about Andy Capp. The only interesting thing I ever heard about Andy Capp was from Jean Shepherd. He said the Andy Capp title was a cockney accent pun for Handicap. Apparently Andy was a cockney horse race fanatic. That tidbit did make the strip any funnier to me.
- Scubabear68 11mo agoAs a child of the 70s and 80s, Snoopy was a very big deal, but Peanuts was kind of secondary. I remember around 2nd grade or so Snoopy Joe Cool was a big deal and I had the t shirts and thermos and lunchbox. There are of course the Peanuts TV specials, they didn’t have much impact on me personally other than to solidify a like of both Snoopy and his side kick, Woodstock. For me as a kid, Snoopy and Stocky were the only interesting ones.
- LightBug1 11mo agoThe best thing the brand has done is put it on the Apple TV screensaver ... I'm endlessly entertained and relaxed by it.