Tag / Charles Schulz

by Kilby

Einige Erdnüsse…

Here are a few Peanuts strips to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the “Tag der Deutschen Einheit“. Even before Schulz invented the incessant running gag about Snoopy being a WWI flying ace, he used German surprisingly often (much more than any other foreign language, Spanish included). The strip shown above was published in 1953; the title mentioned in the second panel is a piece by Bach, called “Sheep May Safely Graze“. The other four strips below are all from a story arc that appeared in March 1979.

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Although the word “Fräulein” is technically correct “textbook” German for “miss”, it has now become severely outdated, and is no longer used in normal German conversation, except occasionally for sarcastic emphasis. The standard German form of address for a woman (spoken or written) is now “Frau“, regardless of marital status; girls (and teenagers) are referred to as “Mädchen“.

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Snoopy should not have addressed Lucy as “Deutscher“, because that is the masculine declination. The correct form would have been: “Sind Sie Deutsche?” Nevertheless, Lucy responding with “…all your arms” seems a little excessive: Snoopy has only two of them, so that “both” would have been sufficient.

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The pronouns in the second frame are “I, You, He, She“, each listed in each of the four German grammatical cases: Nominative, Genitive (possessive), Dative, and Accusative. This is the standard order used in all German grammar textbooks, in which the cases are usually numbered, and thus referred to as the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th “Fall” (“case”). Yes, Germans are notorious for excessive orderliness.

The 15 prepositions in the third frame can be translated into English as: from/out, except/outside(†), at/by, with, after, since, from, to, at/on, on(top), after/behind, in, next to, over, under. German prepositions are normally followed by the term declined in a particular “case”, but some prepositions can take either of two cases, depending on the situation, or possibly even a choice of three different cases (but only in very rare circumstances).

P.S. (†) The second word in the third panel is an error, it should have read “außer” (optionally capitalized as “AUSSER“). Schulz was famous for doing all of his own lettering, and in any case this strip predates the availability of handwritten computer fonts, so the most likely explanation for the missing letter is simply a slip of the pen, or possibly a transmission error from wherever he obtained the text.

P.P.S. I think it would have been funnier if Snoopy’s exclamation in the final panel had been “Ich ergebe mich!!“, but I admit that nobody reading an American newspaper would have understood the joke.

by zbicyclist

Sunday Funnies – LOLs – July 6, 2025

As a kid in the back seat, I used to look up after seeing “Watch for Falling Rock” signs to see if there were rocks falling. This, of course, was futile. Drivers on curvy mountain roads should be looking at the road, and looking for fallen rocks, not staring up at the bluff on the off-chance that there’s a boulder coming down right at this very second. Most, but not all, signs I see on the highway now say fallen, not falling.

Mark H. sends this in as a fourth wall breaker, and wonders: “Do cartoon characters count in base eight?”

by zbicyclist

Saturday Morning OYs – June 21, 2025

A couple of movie-related OYs

JMcAndrew sends this in: “IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes have no results for anything called “The Immortal Weekend”. Does Brutus think this is a pornographic movie?”

Maybe just hoping.

Now some food-related:

On group bike rides, you call out a hazard as a courtesy to the riders behind you so they don’t hit it. So, you might call out “road kill” or “squirrel” or “skunk” … or “lunch”.

JMcAndrew sends this in: “Did someone spike it with LSD? Probably should call 911 if all these people were exposed and exhibiting symptoms.”

by Kilby

What’s in a Shirt?

As these first two strips show, Charlie Brown’s shirt had already become an icon just six months after Peanuts began syndication, and Schulz created a number of gags on the topic.

There is danger in innovation:

Nevertheless, the rewards can be satisfying:

Do clothes make the man?

Mark Parisi frequently uses Peanuts characters in “Off the Mark“, and has produced a number of gags based on Charlie Brown’s shirt.

This one is directly from Parisi’s OtM website, because it predates the archive at GoComics:

Reworking the coloration produces an alternative gag:

As this screenshot from one of the TV specials shows, Schulz was well aware of Charlie Brown’s selection dilemma:

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies, LOLs: Superbowl Sunday, February 9, 2025

And so it begins: this is the first Charlie Brown missing the football gag from Peanuts. Here it’s not Lucy, but Violet, November 14, 1951.

The first one with Lucy is a year later, November 16, 1952.

This one gets a geezer tag. The Heidi game was in 1968, 56 years before Jimmy Johnson drew this comic!

by Kilby

Anyone for a Tea Party?

It’s difficult to say which caffeinated drink is more popular; it depends on who and where you are (in America the answer would probably be “cola”).

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I was once offered (hot) tea at a friend’s house (in high school); he dropped a tea bag into a mug of cold water, and put it all into the microwave for a minute or two. Just like Calvin’s attempt, it was a complete failure.

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For several years a German brand of hair care products called “Alpecin” advertised its overloaded caffeine content as “doping for the hair“. This caused a fair amount of controversy, especially when the company later started sponsoring a bicycle racing team.

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, December 15th, 2024

Squirrel(s) have taken up residence in the attic of our condo building. Between the animal control fees, the carpentry repairs where they chewed through a dormer, and trimming the trees further away from the building, this will be an expensive endeavor. And, I have neighbors who scare away the red-tailed hawk who hangs around, so it won’t harm the squirrels. Seeing that squirrel in Whamond’s strip reminds me of a tagline of Bill’s: “GoDaddy and the Squirrel Must Both Die”.

Even in this very early Peanuts strip, Charlie Brown has found his signature style.

When you want to make sure nobody will send your comic in as a CIDU:

This is a combination Public Service Announcement and Christmas gift suggestion. My runner daughter started wearing a fiber-optic vest with chest light like Frazz is wearing a few years ago, and then got me one as a Christmas gift. They’re great for running, cycling, or walking at night. As a driver, I appreciate people who are lit up, so I can see them far ahead.

by Kilby

After Thanksgiving is before Thanksgiving

This cartoon by John Jonik was first published in the New Yorker exactly 41 years ago today, but I discovered it too late to add it to the Thanksgiving collection for 2023.

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The headline above is modeled after a quote by Sepp Herberger, coach of the German national football soccer team: “After the game is always before the [next] game.” Of course, discussing football (of either variety) can sometimes be even more explosive than discussing politics.

Mark H. submitted this XKCD (#2858) last year; although it did get embedded in comments (such as in the No-Politics Zone), it’s still worth a repeat in a post:

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P.S. The “mouseover” or “title” text reads: “An occasional source of mild Thanksgiving tension in my family is that my mother is a die-hard fan of The Core (2003), and various family members sometimes have differing levels of enthusiasm for her annual tradition of watching it.“

P.P.S. The link to the HuffPost article in the second panel still works (I already typed it in, so that you don’t have to).

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In Germany, it’s called “Erntedankfest” (literally: “harvest thanks festival”), and is celebrated on the first Sunday in October, but it is primarily an event for the liturgical calendar (both Catholic and Protestant), and is not (generally) celebrated by families at home.

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Several decades ago, my grandmother just happened to include a leftover bowl of (homemade) mac&cheese on the Thanksgiving dinner table, which resulted in some amused needling from my dad and uncle. However, both my sister and my aunt vigorously defended it, so that for many years thereafter, (fresh) mac&cheese became a standard component of my grandmother’s Thanksgiving menu.

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The final panel reminded me of the last scene in the song “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses.

No cranberries? Frank and Ernest have suggestions: