From the Bookshelf: Schulz's Youth
Jul. 3rd, 2007 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmer"The Complete Peanuts," with its promise of reprinting all the Peanuts comics strips, may have helped touch off a whole series of efforts to reprint other bits of "Schulz-iana." In the last little while, I've noticed and managed to get a book collecting the "Li'l Folks" cartoon panels Charles M. Schulz drew for a Minnesota newspaper in the late 1940s before getting his big chance, a smaller volume reprinting a little-known sports-themed cartoon panel "It's Only A Game" that ran for about a year in the late 1950s (of which a little more later), and some small books of adages featuring the Peanuts characters reprinted from the 1960s. It may, I suppose, be a sign of a completionist urge, yet one cheap enough to not bother about searching out vintage printings. In any case, though, I've recently managed to pick up another book, titled "Schulz's Youth." I think I've noticed some pointing out that the title might be a little misleading: it's not drawings from Charles M. Schulz's own youth, but a series of cartoon panels featuring teenagers he drew in the 1950s and 1960s, interestingly (or oddly) enough for the small market of his church's magazine. Jerry Scott, writer of the modern comic strip "Zits," contributes a brief foreword to the book commenting that Schulz's youth have good posture and are very polite... and I did have to wonder if their being good churchgoers had a little to do with that.
In any case, even if where the cartoons were drawn for is added to the possibly obvious oddness of characters not children by Schulz, the book is still quite interesting. The teens, who have a tall, thin, stretched-out appearance compared to the occasional Sunday school class or even the actual adults, are still clearly kin to the Peanuts characters. There's a sort of main character too, and although he doesn't seem to have a name (unless it's mentioned in passing in one cartoon), you can see his design changing over time. The religious content of the cartoons varies, but they never seem preachy to me; it's possible that with an apparent main character, I interpreted some cartoons as statements about individuals, not suggestions at universal directives. (I did notice a number of cartoons about the book of Revelation and about ministers talking about the end of the world, though, which reminded me of a Peanuts sequence some years later where Peppermint Patty gets scared at a summer camp...) There are some cartoons without overt religious references altogether, and the whole package fits together well. I don't have the feeling that this was somehow Schulz's "hidden side" coming out, although it did perhaps change my thoughts about wondering just when the religious references began to pick up in Peanuts itself. I had wondered if they were somehow inspired by "The Gospel According to Peanuts," but perhaps they may have been a response to Schulz becoming too busy to draw these cartoons.
The book was put together by the same publisher who made up the "It's Only A Game" volume, which was also interesting but had an ambiguous surprise in it. It turned out that only a short while into that cartoon (of which one out of every three panels was about bridge), Schulz handed the work over to an assistant, Jim Sasseville. Sasseville was working from sketches by Schulz and did a good job imitating his style, and yet it's not quite the same thing... perhaps I thought it was just a bit of a "bait and switch." Still, while both books have their oddities for someone who might think they know all about Peanuts, they also have their particular charms.
In any case, even if where the cartoons were drawn for is added to the possibly obvious oddness of characters not children by Schulz, the book is still quite interesting. The teens, who have a tall, thin, stretched-out appearance compared to the occasional Sunday school class or even the actual adults, are still clearly kin to the Peanuts characters. There's a sort of main character too, and although he doesn't seem to have a name (unless it's mentioned in passing in one cartoon), you can see his design changing over time. The religious content of the cartoons varies, but they never seem preachy to me; it's possible that with an apparent main character, I interpreted some cartoons as statements about individuals, not suggestions at universal directives. (I did notice a number of cartoons about the book of Revelation and about ministers talking about the end of the world, though, which reminded me of a Peanuts sequence some years later where Peppermint Patty gets scared at a summer camp...) There are some cartoons without overt religious references altogether, and the whole package fits together well. I don't have the feeling that this was somehow Schulz's "hidden side" coming out, although it did perhaps change my thoughts about wondering just when the religious references began to pick up in Peanuts itself. I had wondered if they were somehow inspired by "The Gospel According to Peanuts," but perhaps they may have been a response to Schulz becoming too busy to draw these cartoons.
The book was put together by the same publisher who made up the "It's Only A Game" volume, which was also interesting but had an ambiguous surprise in it. It turned out that only a short while into that cartoon (of which one out of every three panels was about bridge), Schulz handed the work over to an assistant, Jim Sasseville. Sasseville was working from sketches by Schulz and did a good job imitating his style, and yet it's not quite the same thing... perhaps I thought it was just a bit of a "bait and switch." Still, while both books have their oddities for someone who might think they know all about Peanuts, they also have their particular charms.