Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

After resorting to one of my library’s ebook lending services to read a volume of the Peanuts Every Sunday colour collection I’d never quite got around to buying as a proper printed book, I didn’t rush into the following volumes. That delay could have contained an element of “is it better to look forward to some things than to look back?”, but maybe I should also admit to wondering if that would get to the point where I couldn’t say anything about them here at all (although I suppose I’d managed to say something about the Sunday pages and daily strips together...)

( “I go by the colors of the countries on the map... See? Some are pink.. some are yellow..” )

While I shifted to online ordering of manga in time to not run out of it back when browsing in stores was unhealthy, during that period keeping up with the big hardcovers reprinting Peanuts Sunday pages in colour somehow slipped my mind. When I did think of trying to catch up, the volume going through the second half of the 1980s didn’t appear to be available any more. I told myself I at least had those five years of Sunday pages, and the decade that followed them, in black and white, even if a few had looked to lack something that way.
( “Does ‘wild strawberry’ say anything at all?” )
( “And I’m not sure if ‘fuchsia’ makes an effort to communicate..” )
( “Which really speaks louder, ‘tangerine’ or ‘dandelion’?” )
( “Color the sky blue and the grass green!” )

Announcements there would be an adaptation of the Scott Pilgrim comics animated in Japan provoked some “now that takes me back” feelings. The original comics had been on one of my bookshelves for quite some time, but I can’t remember having read them since they’d been completed and the live-action movie adaptation had come out. Nevertheless, the thought of another chance to revisit the story was a bit appealing. I did wonder a bit about the follow-up announcement that much of the cast of the live-action movie would be returning as voice actors, remembering that old impression Michael Cera’s voice had been absurdly mild compared to my impression from the comics of Scott Pilgrim as a loud individual.
( An unexpected comics detour )

A certain number of bookmarks have accumulated in the iPad reader application for one of my library’s ebook (and other digital works) lending services. If they’re for “series,” changes in their thumbnails reveal new items available there. I did bookmark a recent line of “Peanuts comics,” but haven’t read a lot of them. They did a better job for me of imitating Charles M. Schulz’s hard-to-imitate artwork than some earlier efforts (including the animated specials themselves), but in treading the narrow path of “being like the strip” their stories might not have wound up that interesting. After letting the whole application sit for a while, though, on starting it up I was surprised by the latest thumbnail for that bookmark. It was now the cover of an old reprint book; my thoughts went to the facsimile editions. That in itself wasn’t quite enough to get me to sign out the digital comic (I should have all of the reprint books from the 1960s, to say nothing of the more complete “Complete Peanuts” volumes), but not that long afterwards I checked the application again and saw a different thumbnail. This time, it was one of the old “Peanuts Parade” books from the late 1970s. I’d seen a few of in them my youth (and bought a few used in the years since), but this wasn’t one of them. The facsimile project having jumped so far ahead was enough to get my attention. With the online strips now in the middle of that decade and a desk calendar reprinting daily strips from fifty years ago, the thought of managing a different experience was now enough to get me to sign the book out.

As I worked my way through “And A Woodstock In A Birch Tree,” I went from strips I still wasn’t altogether familiar with to the sudden realization I had seen the middle third of the book as a smaller Fawcett Crest paperback I’d been given years and years ago, getting to familiar stories like another visit from Spike, the introduction of Eudora, and Snoopy cutting notches into his doghouse. After that dose of nostalgia, I did at least get back to more unfamiliar territory with the last third of the book. While conscious throughout of thoughts like “late in the Silver Age” (if there’s such a thing), the unexpected offering did make for a change and remind me I could take any one of the Complete Peanuts volumes off a bookshelf at any time.

As I waited and waited for new issues of Otaku USA to show up in my mailbox in the months after renewing my subscription by phone, I did start to wonder if something had got lost in the system. Having had the chance to begin at the beginning with the magazine’s very first issue and then kept buying it as the other North American English-language periodicals vanished amid the anime industry crisis at the close of this century’s first decade, I’d established something of a habit; with the habit apparently broken by accident, though, I did find myself asking if I missed it all that much. Thoughts of a stack of back issues being a “hard-copy chronicle” only went so far. Confronting that, I also got around to contemplating unsubscribing from the magazine’s email newsletter I might not have quite specifically asked for in the shift from bookstore magazine racks to the postal service. Before I could quite break a habit through my own resolve, however, I did notice the regular inbox arrival promote a North American work of comics about anime fans, with a title recognizable to me but a word I do try not to use. For all of that I did wonder about actually reading the comic, and then I happened to ask myself if it might show up in the multimedia e-lending service offered through my city library. It has almost no “manga,” but does offer a considerable amount of North American comics, which just might provide an alternative to another habit drifted into. I went looking, and Alissa Sallah’s “Weeaboo” was there.
( Another time and place )

I managed to see some reminders that October 2 was the seventieth anniversary of the first Peanuts comic strip appearing in a handful of newspapers. Seventy years feels like a long time, and yet I got to wondering about “rates of change” (and changes I might have missed that matter nevertheless for other people) and what the world had been like seventy years before the strip appeared; for one thing, comic strips hadn’t been around back then. I suppose I did think a bit how I’d managed to find a copy of “The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics,” which had been in my high school library, at a used book sale just a few years ago, and found most of the comics from before 1930 or so hard to get through in large part because their lettering looked so crude.

Beyond the first matter of “seventy years,” I did remember it’s been a bit more than twenty years now since the strip came to an end, and supposed that it’s still remembered might count for something. (A while later, though, I did remember it’s closing in on twenty-five years since Calvin and Hobbes reached a conclusion in somewhat different circumstances, and that strip doesn’t have the spinoffs that might help Peanuts be remembered.) With all of this, I wondered if there’d be anything on “The AAUGH Blog,” and went there to notice something different. The “facsimile editions” of the old Holt, Rinehart and Winston books that had appeared five years ago and just got into the 1960s are promised to start reappearing again next year. Beyond that I have a complete set of “The Complete Peanuts” with strips that weren’t reprinted at the time, I’ve managed to collect three copies of “Sunday’s Fun Day, Charlie Brown” (in the tête-bêche Mattel edition) over the years, so I probably don’t need another copy; the thought of “an indulgence” can get to me all the same.

While I’ve known that some web sites are getting more vocal about looking at them with an adblocker active (and have been quieting some of them by turning off Javascript before I head there), just this week most of the comic strip pages I look at every day started pretty much not loading at all. That did nudge me to follow up at last on an article that had turned up in my RSS reader about a “shortcut” to open multiple comics pages at once, but my first discovery was that “shortcuts” only work on my iPad, and my second was that my iPad, using the same adblocker as my desktop Safari, had the same not-displaying problem. With a different adblocker enabled in Firefox, though, the issue became a bit less acute, and I was inclined to reflect on keeping multiple software options open.

It’s possible I was a little slow to order a copy of the latest Peanuts Every Sunday colour reprint book, and while I always take my time reading through them my pace did slacken a little every so often with this volume. Getting into the 1980s, while it means reaching Sunday pages I might actually have read as they were being published (although my family’s newspaper colour comic section was in the Saturday edition, where Peanuts was the sole comic always run with the disposable “top tier” panels included), also seems to move undeniably into the “institution years” many commentators (and not always “online”) make a show of dismissing. I did ponder the back cover blurb mentioning Marbles, one of Snoopy’s brothers. Around the middle of the 1980s I glanced through a nearly-new reprint volume in a bookstore and hit on the strips he appeared in, and his spotty design stuck in my mind (although not all of the spots registered at the time), but this might have been a lucky happenstance: Marbles didn’t appear for long, and only in the weekday strips.
( “This doesn’t taste like mint..” )
( “All we had was vanilla...” )
( “but you can do amazing things with a green felt tip pen” )

After ordering the latest big volume of “Peanuts Every Sunday” from the area bookstore, I once again took my time reading through it. The Sunday pages it reprints in colour get to ones I was alive for, although certainly I’d have first really noticed them in earlier, less elaborate reprint books. Balanced against that personal thought, though, was a certain feeling of melancholy that as this series of books moves into the back half of the comic strip I can imagine certain other people concluding even a “Silver Age of Peanuts” is wrapping up, even if there does seem no insisted-on guide to where the previous lines are drawn. It was also a bit surprising for there to be no introduction; perhaps Fantagraphics has run out of people to say things at last.
( “And it’s orange? This I have to see!” )

After waiting for months, then waiting for a few extra weeks after that, the first issue of the "Star Trek meets the Transformers" comic, news of which had broken through my usual detachment from the modern comics extending both franchises, was promised to arrive at last. I travelled to the closest comic shop and saw a lone issue left on the shelf; whether it had proved popular compared to the Mystery Science Theater 3000 comic I'd seen plenty of issues of a few weeks before or had been deemed not worth the risk of ordering many issues I don't know. After buying the comic and starting to read it I was a bit impressed there hadn't been any time wasted before the crew of the Enterprise encountered the Decepticons; by the end of the issue, though, I was wondering a bit about those comments tossed around these days about the relative ratios of price to content for North American comics and manga volumes. Whether the story would seem to get to "the good guys of both franchises get to understand each other and team up" with the same brisk pace when all the issues are collected in "graphic novel" format, I don't know yet; I can at least suppose we've avoided "the humans (and the alien crew members of the animated series) are reduced to in no time to the tagalong mascots of the Autobots," though. The greater risk, perhaps, just might be "supposing this modern take on something seen when young and impressionable should be somehow profound."

I'd noticed from the preview covers the Autobot lineup included a character not instantly recognisable with familiarity of the formative era the art is reproducing. (I'm inclined to say the Star Trek characters look just like their animated series art; on the other hand, the art of the animated series wasn't very complicated to begin with.) It only took a bit of looking around, however, to realise the female Autobot had been designed in recent years for what seems a steady stream of Transformers comics. Unfortunately, that looking also turned up some whiffs of the noisome mire that can seem to engulf any attempt to expand on "familiar casts." Even if "familiar casts" often seem associated with "familiar properties" these days, that shouldn't excuse the nastiness. In any case, though, in the comic itself there was a female Decepticon a bit more looking around turned up had come from the same stories, and before things were over for this instalment one of the few female Autobots "instantly recognisable with familiarity of the formative era" had also appeared.