Good Grief, it's a Centennial!
Nov. 26th, 2022 06:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen I looked at the first of the handful of comic strips I read online each day, I was surprised to see a Peanuts homage presented in a different way than the usual references it makes to other comics. Daring its comments, I realised it was part of a distributed tribute to the hundredth birthday of Charles M. Schulz. I had known that day was coming up, but unexpected evidence of the exact date was still enough to get my attention. Heading to a particular Peanuts information site I check every so often turned up an explanation of the event, a link to more of the tribute strips, and a nice bit of personal reflection.
I suppose some of the tribute strips had me considering the schmaltzier side of takes on the original and the daring-the-consensus pushback. Regardless of the way intellectual property owned by big companies is elaborated on now to the point of raising “where are the new ideas?” lamentations, in the end I suppose I have a personal reluctance to be convinced every Peanuts comic drawn while I was alive was “disposable successors to the real stuff.” Those earlier days of the strip hadn’t been altogether unknown to me in my own early days, but I do remember coming upon certain references to extended storylines that remained puzzling voids at least until I started really hunting down old Fawcett Crest paperbacks in used book sales and stores. That might have made accumulating the volumes of The Complete Peanuts more satisfying.
I suppose some of the tribute strips had me considering the schmaltzier side of takes on the original and the daring-the-consensus pushback. Regardless of the way intellectual property owned by big companies is elaborated on now to the point of raising “where are the new ideas?” lamentations, in the end I suppose I have a personal reluctance to be convinced every Peanuts comic drawn while I was alive was “disposable successors to the real stuff.” Those earlier days of the strip hadn’t been altogether unknown to me in my own early days, but I do remember coming upon certain references to extended storylines that remained puzzling voids at least until I started really hunting down old Fawcett Crest paperbacks in used book sales and stores. That might have made accumulating the volumes of The Complete Peanuts more satisfying.