Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #28

Oh, you comicking booksters!

Here's two pieces of comicky news for you guys.

1. This pilot for an animated show based on Plastic Man is making the rounds on the internet. It was created by Tom Kenny, aka Spongebob, and Stephen Destefano, an amazing cartoonist who did a lot of Ren & Stimpy work. It seems to be largely based on Kyle Baker's hilarious take on the character.

2. People are really getting into commenting on the new Spider-Man character, Miles Morales, who assumes Spider-Man's costume and superhero identity after Peter Parker dies in an alternate continuity universe. This isn't just fiction, it's non-canonical fiction. I was interviewed on NPR about this and you can still listen to it here and read more about it here. I'm suspect of shit like this being pandering, but if it works it works. Making Nick Fury look exactly like Samuel L. Jackson in the Ultimate universe made sense and worked. This could work too. Comics are an important art form and I think they deserve more time in the spotlight, but this is one of those cases where it seems like the world's lost its mind. Our country's going down the drain. Why is this news?

So that's the news.

The Complete Peanuts 1981 -1982
Charles Schulz
Fantagraphics

This week I am talking about the new volume in the Complete Peanuts series from Fantagraphics. I expected that the quality of the Peanuts comics would be waning by now, but I'm still laughing at the jokes and recognizing the personalities of characters I know in the gang. The introduction is by the cartoonist behind For Better or For Worse, which I always found really boring, but everything else about this book is pretty great. It's a beautifully designed, thick, brickish volume with lots of memorable storylines. The strongest one involves Peppermint Patty believing that she witnessed a butterfly turn into an angel and everyone thinking she's an idiot. Snoopy's brother Marbles is introduced. Marbles can communicate with Snoopy but he still finds Snoopy's behavior strange. Sally goes away to Beanbag camp and comes back adorably pudgy. Marcie admits to Charlie Brown that she's always loved him and in the same breath acknowledges that he could never love her. Snoopy plays more mixed doubles tennis tournaments with an awesome meanie named Molly Volley, and they compete against Crybaby Boobie and Bad Call Benny. All in all it's a beautiful two years worth of Charles Schulz's creative output. It'll make you laugh, it'll make you think.

I am very excited to present a brief interview with Charles Schulz's son, author Monte Schulz.

VICE: The contents of Peanuts 1981 – 1982 is strong throughout, and the standout series of strips is clearly the butterfly miracle story. That's the one in which Peppermint Patty is tricked by Marcie into believing that a butterfly that had been sitting on her nose and fanned off had in fact turned into an angel. She tells everyone about her religious experience and they laugh at her. Do you have any insight into what inspired this story?
Monte Schulz: No, I don’t remember the genesis of that particular story, but my father was always interested in theology and philosophical questions. For several years when we first arrived in California, he taught Sunday school at our local Methodist church, not so much to evangelize his personal experience with the New and Old Testaments, but, I think, to engage in theological dialogue. His office held several volumes of Bible commentaries and studies of both Testaments, and, of course, copies of the Bible itself, in both King James and Revised Standard translations. Among his friends over the years were Robert Short, author of The Gospel According To Peanuts, and Father Lombardi, a Catholic priest with whom Dad played golf. He loved engaging both these men and other church people in conversations illuminating Biblical and theological topics, but he also held firm to his own beliefs, which were both traditional and fluid.

During his youth, he belonged to the Church of God, yet maintained later in life that he was a humanist. His favorite quotation from the Bible came out of Hosea and says that God desires mercy, not sacrifice. He believed in a personal understanding of theology, and that point of view directed his use of the Peanuts characters in expressing and discussing a variety of philosophical conundrums.

What do you think of the comics contained in this volume? Do you remember what you thought of them at the time of their creation?
The early 80s were a strange time for us. In 1981, Dad underwent quadruple bypass surgery after feeling in poor health for most of the previous year. The idea of surgery terrified him, but the medications he’d been taking had left him so debilitated that surgery became the option he was forced to consider. So he had the procedure and survived, and found a wealth of material from the experience, which he poured into his strip. Even before leaving his hospital room, he drew his characters on the walls, took a get-well phone call from President Reagan, and discovered a new strength of purpose after having undergone that traumatic experience.

I think that stressful time in his life gave him new enthusiasm about simply being alive and healthy. Also, he and Jeannie built a home together in the foothills above Santa Rosa, finally solidifying their life together. Dad traveled quite a lot, back and forth to France and England, and those experiences inevitably found their way into the strip, which took on a more expansive and varied tone, and I believe this volume proves that out.

It's often assumed that Charlie Brown was your father's surrogate, but did your dad have anything in common with Snoopy?
I’m not sure there was any specific surrogate for my dad, at all. Certainly there are elements of Charlie's personality and point of view and sensibility that could have been found in my father, but the same can be said for many of his characters. In, Snoopy, though, I guess we could argue that his sense of wonder and imagination is given room to expand and travel in an extravagant direction. Like any of us, Dad had a silliness and fun and foolishness that he drew into Snoopy, and I think that’s how this character evolved. I think Dad realized it was possible for Snoopy to be more than a real dog, just as in our lives we find now and then the opportunities to be more than our everyday selves.

This book introduces another sibling of Snoopy's—his brother, Marbles. Marbles seems even more aware of how weird Snoopy is than the human children. When introducing a new character do you know if there was a lot of consideration given to the balance of the cast? Was Marbles added on a whim to serve the jokes that your father came up with?
Yes, it seems to me that most of the characters arose out of Dad’s need to expand situations within the strip, or to give voice to something occurring to him out of blue skies. I don’t think he had a carefully considered plan of characters. That’s not really how he thought. He just let his imaginations travel in many directions, and if he thought an idea seemed funny, he’d usually let it find expression. And if the idea of Snoopy having a brother or a cousin allowed something funny to occur, he’d create that character.

Likewise, the idea of an opposing neighborhood baseball team competing against Charlie Brown’s gang gave appearance to Peppermint Patty and Thibault, just as having the characters play tennis allowed him, or compelled him, to create a Molly Volley.

What's your reaction to Fantagraphics’ Complete Peanuts series as a whole?
I’ve always felt the Complete Peanuts were the best commercially licensed product to come out of the Peanuts strip, because these books are the strip itself. Before I knew anything about Fantagraphics or had ever spoken with Gary Groth, I loved how those books were presented. They’re lovely. I was thrilled. And I’ve been impressed by the introductions to each volume, by the variety of personalities and what each has had to say about my father’s work. It’s been fantastic.