Jack Applin submitted this “Edison Lee” last year as a CIDU, but Comics Kingdom refused to produce it, until I remembered to change the URL from the old “.net” to the new “.com” address. Ooops.
… Jack commented: “Sure, the Rankin/Bass special. But what’s this about a finger in a nose? It wouldn’t BE in the special, if he were edited out.”
The humor is mostly just slapstick, but “nose” is probably a reference to the line in “The Night Before Christmas” (and the elf just messed up while “…laying his finger aside of his nose“).
Speechless Santa. Fill in your own dialogue. (GoComics posting error on 12/15. It’s clearly a GoComics error, becauseArcamax shows the dialogue. GoComics corrected the error a day later.) It’s oddly meta, because panel 3 in the actual dialogue accuses Santa of not keeping up with the latest technology.
Steve B. sends this in. “Thought this was clever. Not sure everyone will get this if they don’t pay attention to the news.”
Mark H. send this in, noting “It took me a while”.
Radio has certain requirements. Sports announcing, too. Dead air is the enemy. Some of the most painful examples to me are long bicycle races (4+ hours) that end in a sprint stage. So until the last kilometer, not much is going on if there’s no breakaway. But 4 hours must be filled with announcing, regardless. Particularly painful if there’s only one announcer, not two.
A quick look around my dwelling shows 6 books that I’m partway through but intend to finish, a couple of which I haven’t make any progress on in at least a year. (Not counting ones I don’t intend to finish, or haven’t started.) Should I invoke a statute of limitations on these 6?
The first “Peanuts Day” retrospective ten weeks ago seemed to be reasonably popular, so here is another collection of Peanuts references and parodies, in honor of what would have been Charles M. Schulz’s 102nd birthday.
โฆ This “Cleats” strip was published early in the 2004 season, back when Kevin Brown was still a popular new acquisition for the Yankees, months before he became the notorious losing pitcher in game 7 of the ACLS (which at one point the Yankees had led 3:0). Kevin Brown retired just 16 months later, before the start of the 2006 season; I think Charlie Brown would have understood how he felt.
โฆ Only one of those three characters on the wall is actually missing.
Mark Parisi frequently references Peanuts in “Off the Mark“. To his credit, he produces extremely accurate renditions of all the characters:
Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it:
Various cartoonists seem to enjoy letting Charlie Brown have his moments of retroactive glory:
Snoopy finally gets his due as well:
If Charlie Brown had only known what was really happening:
Finally, one bastion of sanity in a lunatic world:
P.S. All of the previous appearances of Pumpkin Spice at CIDU were posted by Bill in the Fall of 2019; three of these presented some fairly hideous pumpkin spice flavored products (some real, some fictitious); click on the link if you are interested in seeing them. (Please note that the whole “pumpkin spice” collection will be presented in reverse chronological order, so you will have to scroll down past this one to get to Bill’s “spicy” material.)
P.P.S. – Edit: both links have been corrected, thanks to deety!
Scott Adams was certainly not the first author to draw a comic featuring an Etch-A-Sketch, but this classic Dilbert strip (correction: from 1995) remains the standard against which all other attempts must be measured:
This Rose is Rose strip was published nine years earlier (in 1986), but to her credit, at least Rose can tell the difference between the devices:
As computer technology progressed, more recent comics were able to use tablets (instead of laptops), which made the misidentification more believable:
Here’s a handy guide to distinguish between the two:
Of all the strips showing kids using an Etch-A-Sketch as a “real” computer, this Jump Start is my favorite:
Not everyone is so pleased by the idea of image impermanence:
The Off the Mark at the top already appeared at CIDU (on May Day 2023) but Parisi also drew two other comics that are notable for incorporating pseudo-authentic Etch-A-Sketch artwork into the drawing. The first one is truly superb, especially for including the masterful meta-pun on “line”:
This final Off the Mark comic has a fatal flaw (morbid pun intended). The “sketchy” artwork is actually its best feature, but it would have been even better with a pair of round knobs on the monitor. The tragic defect is that the author did not bother to properly credit (or apologize to) Andrรฉ Cassagnes, who was still alive when this comic was published in 2008 (he died just five years later).
… P.S. Today (23-Sep-2024) would have been the inventor’s 98th birthday.
I thought this one would have been even better if Snoopy had delivered the letter (while wearing his signature bowler hat), but that would have dated the action to at least eight years ago.
โฆthis one was rotten:
This “Bacรถn” comic (17-May-2024) was the third Friday in a row that Millsap attempted Peanuts-based satire (the other two weren’t much better). I never really liked Woodstock (nor the haphazard way that Schulz chose names for his newer characters), and it’s not the blood and gore that bothers me here. If a cartoonist is going to “borrow” characters for a gag, then it’s not enough duplicate the artwork: the characters need to retain their personalities, too. Snoopy never showed the slightest bit of hunting instinct in all five decades of Peanuts, so this comic is simply a dud.
… let’s eat these anyway (in no particular order):
Although not sophisticated, the joke is still quite good, in particular because the artwork is truly excellent.
It should be obvious that the gag can be reversed:
The rendering here is not quite as good as in the Brevity strip, but the motley collection of extras is nice addition, and the anger in the squirrel’s face is much better than having it utter one of those traditionally lame comments.
Then again, “…there was a third possibility that we hadn’t even counted upon…”:
… and they were all immediately eaten. Here again, the artwork in the first panel is extremely good, even if Charlie Brown’s head is a little bit lopsided.
One last crack at a real legume:
… I’ve never had any allergy problems with real peanuts, and I read and enjoyed the strip every day for decades (until it started to lose steam in the mid-1980s), but I had a major adverse reaction to the movie: it played far too much havoc with the character relationships (Schulz was lucky that they didn’t make that thing until 15 years after he had passed away). My kids never read the original strips, so they didn’t notice the alterations: they liked the movie just fine, and have watched it several times on DVD.
… Operations: As we have seen above, cartoonists periodically borrow Schulz’s characters to produce derivative material (which of course would never have worked within the context of the original strip). I have no idea how the executors of Schulz’s estate treat the concept of “fair use”, but they must be reasonably tolerant, since comics such as these keep appearing all the time.
This Off the Mark panel has already appeared at least twice at CIDU, Bill reposted it in December of 2018:
This Foxtrot strip was published while Schulz was still alive:
Lucy seems to be at least as popular as Charlie Brown for “guest” appearances and references:
… The “50” was probably intended as a reference to his birth year.
… now we go to another place: These comics do not “borrow” from Peanuts; instead, they comment on the strip and its characters.
… Watterson once wrote (in the Calvin & Hobbes 10th Anniversary Book) about how surprisingly melancholy Peanuts was.
… Some running gags work better than others. Schulz may have occasionally re-used other jokes, but he made a special effort each Fall to ensure that each new “kickoff” strip was different from all the rest.
Even Ted Rall took a break from his usual political commentary to reflect on Schulz’s pending retirement:
I’m sure that Tom Wilson II composed this next comic as a friendly tribute before Schulz retired:
… but since it was published just four days after Schulz died, it was left with a strange aftertaste.
Peanuts in politics: I was very surprised to discover the following two Peanuts-themed gems in Herblock’s archive at the Library of Congress. The first one was published on Oct. 27th, 1967:
In his signature, Herblock describes himself as an “old Charles Schulz fan“.
The second one was published a year later, on Sept. 5th, 1968:
The dialog for “Hubert” Brown reads “All right now, gang — heads up — we can win this old ball game“, and Herblock noted below his signature “You’re a good man, Charlie Schulz“.
It’s worth noting that at the time when these these two cartoons were published, Peanuts was nearing the height of its popularity (and quality), even if its worldwide marketing and financial zenith were still to come. Just eight months after the second cartoon, when Apollo 10 was launched to orbit the moon, the callsign selected for the Command Module was “Charlie Brown“, and the Lunar Module was nicknamed “Snoopy“. If engineering problems had not delayed the fully functional Lunar Module (later used by Apollo 11), Thomas Stafford might have made history by reporting, “Houston… Snoopy has landed“.
Finally (saving my personal favorite for last):
P.S. With the exception of the “Mutts” tribute strip featured at the top of this post, all of the comics appearing here were “spontaneous”: none of them were composed for either of the two major events that were organized in honor of Charles Schulz and Peanuts.
The first of these tributes appeared on Saturday, 27-May-2000 (four months after Schulz’s death). It’s easy to find them: simply navigate back to that date in just about any syndicated comic available online. Alternatively, a footnote in Wikipedia provides a fan’s collection of links to many (but not all) of the tribute strips.
The second tribute appeared on another Saturday (26-Nov-2022), in honor of the 100th anniversary of Schulz’s birth. Simple navigation works here as well, but an “official” collection of these cartoons is available at the Charles M. Schulz Museum‘s website.
P.P.S. Comics Kingdom has an “Editors Dispatch” that offers all of the King Features strips that participated in the centennial tribute (and it also provides the Museum’s link to the non-KF strips).
Comics I Don't Understand 