Happy Birthday Sparky

November 26, 2022 8:28 AM

In honor of Charles Schulz's 100th birthday, dozens of syndicated cartoonists worked Peanuts references into their strips today.
posted by COD (36 comments total)

This roundup of strips is pretty touching. Also hammers home what a conservative medium comic strips are, all these ancient strips my grandfather read still being drawn with the same basic tone. One thing I admired about Schulz is his decision to not pass on Peanuts to a new writer, the strip ended with him.

My favorite of the ones I read is Bizarro. I'm sad that Nancy didn't do something; that strip now is an exception to the rule that most long term comics are bad.
posted by Nelson at 9:02 AM on November 26, 2022 [15 favorites]

peanuts invents roz chast: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3d/15/a9/3d15a996d685ce0ea34f52837c2d6396.jpg
posted by monster free city at 9:25 AM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

I worked for a company that handled some of the licensing contracts for Peanuts--got a lot of cool merchandise that way. I met Sparky (and he really did want to be called that) in 1989 when the FAO Shwarz opened in Union Square in downtown San Francisco. We had created a display for the front of the store that had fiberglass human-sized Peanuts characters who spoke--including Snoopy! It was a first for him. Sparky was very hands-on in choosing the person who would voice Snoopy and reviewing the scripts, etc.

At the store, his well-known shyness was apparent. He stood off to the side of the display looking pretty miserable. I was asked to keep an eye on him and get him anything he wanted from the buffet (which consisted of miniature hot dogs, hamburgers, etc. with tiny eclairs for dessert). He didn't want anything--which was typical--this is a man who had a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup for lunch every day. He was very good at blending into the background and few fans came up to him.

As soon as the speechifying was over--he took off. We'd exchanged just a couple of words. I think that his ability to stand quietly out of the fray an observe is part of what made his strips so insightful and universal.
posted by agatha_magatha at 9:37 AM on November 26, 2022 [44 favorites]

Oh this is like waking up and having the Sunday Comics unexpectedly dropped at my doorstep, only better because the Boston Globe didn't carry Peanuts, so this is like the OOPS ALL PEANUTS edition.

Whenever I am poking at a generative art AI, I always first give it the prompt, "A screenshot from television of Charlie Brown and Lucy accepting the Eisner Award for best comic strip of 1962." The results are getting weirder and weirder. But Charlie Brown is very tall and does look nice in a tux, according to the AI's mind these days.
posted by not_on_display at 9:41 AM on November 26, 2022 [9 favorites]

Well! Here comes good ol' Sparky Schulz.
Good ol' Sparky Schulz ... Yes, sir!
Good ol' Sparky Schulz.
How I hate him!
posted by chavenet at 10:03 AM on November 26, 2022 [24 favorites]

I had the great pleasure of meeting the man once, while attending the Reuben awards. Simply a friendly, unpretentious, gentleman, pretty much just as he's remembered.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:04 AM on November 26, 2022 [5 favorites]

Thanks! I grew up reading Peanuts, and that was a sweet bit of nostalgia, though I do find myself in agreement with Nelson on the conservativeness of newspaper comics.

It did get me thinking of "Good 'ol Charlie B" by Marina Kittaka, which brainwane posted last year.
posted by sibilatorix at 10:10 AM on November 26, 2022 [4 favorites]

Some of these tributes are lovely! And then there's Marvin...
posted by synecdoche at 10:14 AM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

The main thing I got from this is that I am completely unfamiliar with most comic strips being currently published.
posted by wittgenstein at 10:20 AM on November 26, 2022 [21 favorites]

I'm sad that Nancy didn't do something; that strip now is an exception to the rule that most long term comics are bad.

Yeah, came here to say, this is an era passing by. While it's great he's being honored, there's no mention of any current cartoons that are wonderful for people, such as Foxes in Love or The Awkward Yeti or Fowl Language or ...
posted by Melismata at 10:22 AM on November 26, 2022

The Sally Forth tribute was kind of disturbing.
posted by plastic_animals at 10:40 AM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

This was delightful - some far more effective than others but in total what spoke to me was the purity of the style, the ridiculous originality of the ensemble and the empathy engendered for each character in spite of all their individual quirks and foibles - and all of it in a world of wildly imaginative storylines that required a bare minimum of words.

All irony aside, Polonius was right: Brevity is the soul of wit.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 11:07 AM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm disturbed by how many of these cartoon strips I still recognize. This goes beyond conservatism right into taxidermy! In the case of Mary Worth, significant plastic surgery.

Few of the salutes put much thought into it. I like "Pearls before Swine". When I was growing up, we had a book of the first "Peanuts" cartoons, and I was struck by the difference between them and what the strip had become when I was reading it. Back then it was simple and funny and mildly nonconformist. By the time I was reading it, it had become increasingly self-referential, over-dependent on Snoopy's fantasy life, and existing in a strange duality between hip and square. But that meant that everybody had something to like, and for a brief time, everyone was united in liking it. I don't read comics anymore unless someone leaves a newspaper in the break room, but I don't see any comic that could possibly unite us today.
posted by acrasis at 11:15 AM on November 26, 2022 [6 favorites]

I miss comic strips; our daily paper sucks and has for decades. But the comics were one of the last things that kept me subscribing to it. Eventually the rightwing extremism on the editorial page, the dwindling ratio of actual local news to ads, and shrinking the comics to microfiche size (among other sins) led me to cancel my subscription 20 years ago. I thought it touching that so many strips joined in; it was probably for the best that Mallard Fillmore didn’t contribute. Zippy, on the other hand, never disappoints.
posted by TedW at 12:53 PM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

The main thing I got from this is that I am completely unfamiliar with most comic strips being currently published.

Yet also an unexpectedly large number of quite familiar ones.
(seriously - B.C.? Snuffy Smith? Really??)
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:25 PM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

It cheesed me off just a bit that the Garfield strip had the Born-Died date notation, rather than keep it to a simple celebration of Schulz’s birthday.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:08 PM on November 26, 2022

Home at Mom's and the local paper does a Saturday-Sunday edition and there were just the Sunday comics today.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 2:51 PM on November 26, 2022

This is great--for a lot of these, it's probably the first time I've ever laughed at these strips.
posted by box at 2:54 PM on November 26, 2022

My own tribute to Schulz from a year ago when I was going through a horrible time with workplace bureaucracy.
I am old enough to remember the weekend funnies in full colour with one strip taking up a whole page. God I miss that.
Those early Peanuts strips are so dark at times, and they also hold up extremely well.
Happy Birthday Sparky!
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 3:21 PM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

They missed Nick Galifianakis in the advice column in The Washington Post. But his was published on the 25th.
posted by bendy at 4:25 PM on November 26, 2022

It was really fun to take a look at these.

I'd never heard of Macanudo, but I really liked that one, and now I think I'm a fan of that strip as well.

Thanks so much for posting this, COD! It's really nice to remember Schulz this way.
posted by kristi at 5:49 PM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

Am I out of line to link to John Kovalic's Dork Tower? He republished his 90th birthday tribute from 2012 and it's really heartfelt...
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 6:23 PM on November 26, 2022 [4 favorites]

Well that was a good read. It was also good to reintroduce myself to a few of the modern day comics that I knew existed, but also be amazed that some have been rebooted, like Alley Oop. And which authors have continued which strips, or switched authors, or have their kid now drawing the strip... I grew up reading the comics every day when I had a newspaper subscription, until I dropped mine, and now I just don't read strips unless they're anthologized and available at the library. So, thanks for posting this! It felt like I was dipping my head back behind the newspaper when I was a kid.

So the real reason I started this comment: my question is, I know the Finnish one had a good droll dry punchline, and I laughed at the literal-ness of it. But I also sensed some commentary about something going on in Finland that I know nothing about... am I off, or is there some deeper joke going on in there? Otherwise, it was a dead on Snoopy-as-novelist tribute as-is.
posted by not_on_display at 8:26 PM on November 26, 2022

We had created a display for the front of the store that had fiberglass human-sized Peanuts characters who spoke--including Snoopy! It was a first for him. Sparky was very hands-on in choosing the person who would voice Snoopy and reviewing the scripts, etc.

Wait, whaaaaat?? Snoopy didn't just make those sped-up gobbledygook noises? What did he say? What did his voice sound like? Snoopy's not supposed to talk!

Looking at these tributes, I was mostly struck by how many old strips are now being produced by the kids (or grandkids) of the people who started them.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 8:54 PM on November 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

Good grief
posted by Phanx at 4:49 AM on November 27, 2022

What, no Haircut Practice?
posted by whuppy at 5:16 AM on November 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

I was mostly struck by how many old strips are now being produced by the kids (or grandkids) of the people who started them.

This situation is the premise for the 1999 novel The Funnies by J. Robert Lennon. The fictional comic strips and artists in the novel appear to be inspired by some real ones.
posted by JonJacky at 10:22 AM on November 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

The Tank McNamara one. Sometimes simplest is best.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 11:09 AM on November 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Haircut Practice isn't daily these days, and either the schedule didn't line up or Adam Koford's tribute is yet to come? Of course, Haircut Practice is entirely a tribute to Peanuts, so maybe it'd be redundant.
posted by JHarris at 3:31 PM on November 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Outside of this post, this links to one of my favorite Peanuts send-ups: R Sikoryak's "Good Ol' Gregor Brown". (From the 100th Anniversary of "The Metamorphosis" via Literary Hub.)
posted by not_on_display at 4:21 PM on November 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

Interesting to see that Dilbert wasn't included. I wonder if it's because Scott Adams wasn't interested in participating, or (as I suspect, given his recent history) whoever was organizing this collaboration didn't want him involved.
posted by jklaiho at 12:45 AM on November 28, 2022

Metafilter's own Scott Adams!
posted by Nelson at 7:43 AM on November 28, 2022

"Metafilter's own Scott Adams" who tried to use a sock puppet to surreptitiously support his own arguments and called the site a cesspool.
posted by JHarris at 9:07 AM on November 28, 2022 [5 favorites]

At risk of derail, but, I wrote the Mefiwiki page for Scott Adams, and I'm usually entertained by the sheer escalating "oh yeah I *meant* to do that" dumbassery on display. I don't think I'd clocked that the account was disabled. Is that new?
posted by Pronoiac at 11:42 AM on November 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

I don't know if it's new, but maybe the notice is? After plannedchaos was exposed I presume the account's usefulness to Adams was at an end. Maybe they didn't disable the account themselves, but it was done by the mods at some point. This happened far enough back in Metafilter's past that I'm not even sure account disabling was offered back then?
posted by JHarris at 3:56 PM on November 28, 2022

Anyway, since we've been mentioning our favorite Peanuts homages, I'm partial to the H.P. Lovecraft-styled pastiche The Great Old Pumpkin, from Strange Horizons and read early in the history of the sci-fi podcast Escape Pod. (Disclaimer: long ago I maintained a blog dedicated to closely examining the early run of the strip. I wish there were three of me so I could keep maintaining it.)
posted by JHarris at 3:58 PM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]