It's your comic, Charlie Brown!

If you've noticed the header on the blog here, you'll no doubt be shocked to hear that I'm a big time Peanuts fan. Actually, you won't as I've blogged on it before and I know everyone takes a lot of notice of, and puts a lot of stock in, what I have to say. I’m like Moses in that regard.

So yesterday evening I discovered that the entire catalogue of Charles M. Schulz's incomparable Peanuts is now available online through Comics.com. How very apt, thought I, as I am currently knee deep in David Michaelis' meticulous (not to mention awfully weighty tome, Schulz and Peanuts: a biography. Delving into every aspect of Sparky Schulz's life – and I do mean every aspect, wink wink, nudge nudge – Michaelis has delivered a must read for any Peanut nut (see what I did there? I don’t even try, it just happens. Genius!)

Needless to say, do yourself a favour and get your grubby little hands on this book and set aside some time, at 650+ pages, you'll need it.

But back to my discovery online for a moment; one of the great things in the way that Comics.com have gone about it is the ability to search by the original date of publishing. That way, you can check out what Charlie Brown was up to the day that you were born. Egotist that I am (remember the Hotel California debate?), I went straight back to the glory days of 1977 and found this:

However, unlike the hullabaloo over whose number one was best, I am happy to concede Jen the point here. Linus’ crazed stalker of January ‘77 beats Snoopy’s insane tennis partner that appeared in May any day.

Comments

Sue said…

Loved the one for my birthday. I didn't realise Charles was drawing Snoopy way back then!!!

14 November 2008 at 17:24

Kris McCracken said…

Sue, Snoopy has been around since the very beginning. He looked a bit different then, mind you...

19 November 2008 at 14:41

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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