Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

It got my attention when Titan Comics started printing facsimile editions of the original Holt, Rinehart and Winston Peanuts collections. When, after a hiatus, they printed a few more facsimiles that got my attention again. The Hoopla application managed to inform me of yet another revived collection, one that took an odd jump forward in the chronology. Now, another collection has shown up there, and it’s another odd surprise.
( Format change )

Having marked the last time I revamped my home page with a post here just might have wound up a nagging reminder of how much time has passed since then. Beyond the problems of “linkrot,” the home page did just happen to contain a comment about “new promises of even newer Star Wars movies.” After a long time, I did start to wonder about whether I could reshape the home page into “narratives of how I became interested in some of the things I post the most about on this journal”; some time later, I had the body text written and the HTML formatted. Even if I’d led off with a casual comment about “Web 1.0,” I had picked up a further trick or two with CSS.

My old comments about Marathon slipped out altogether from my “old computers” section; wondering if I could mention one more thing on the page, I decided to say something about Peanuts for all that I don’t go to very many links on that subject. I also went to the point of reformatting my old Saga Journal essays, trying to make up for how I don’t go to very many Star Wars links now either. As for the links to other subjects, I decided to cut out editorializing, even managing to think this might make it a bit easier to revamp them in passing.

When 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.

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.

Newspaper comic strips have taken lumps for years, but I have to admit turning to the comics page remains one of my best parts of keeping myself up to date with a daily paper. In the past few weeks, though, I had to bid farewell to two of the strips that had managed to stand out a little there in these latter days. “Pajama Diaries” was a family strip pretty much from the mother’s perspective featuring two teenaged girls, the older of which had left for university not that long before the comic ended. When it ended, though, its site began re-running it from the beginning, and in really realising how much the kids had grown up over its length I did think the early strips were interesting too. “Retail” ended a few weeks later with the department store its characters worked at finally going out of business and not a lot of time to set up where they would go from there. As much as it featured “inconsiderate customers” and “unpleasant upper management” (not to mention a tincture of the bog-standard “geek” opinions I unfortunately kick back against from a few of its characters), though, the travails could be interesting too.

In the mood I was left in, I stumbled on a short ebook on one of my library’s lending services about Calvin and Hobbes and read it, taking some note of its author acknowledging the loneliness Calvin’s imagination was a hedge against even if I wondered what else might seem to cast the slightest shade on my own reactions to that strip compared to “everyone else.” To seek out another perspective I headed to a “comics news” site I have bookmarked, only to find an obituary for its curator several months old. In that troubling state, though, a weblog I still have in my RSS reader that had looked at the earliest Peanuts comic strips posted a rare update that mentioned a comic called “Haircut Practice.” The four-panel comics I’ve looked at in it have their own bearing on all the comments over the years about “minimalist art” in Peanuts, but so far as “part-parody, part-homage” goes there was something a bit intriguing for me. I’ve had problems for years getting into closely focused “webcomics,” but can wonder about keeping up with this one.

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!” )

"The Complete Peanuts" may be more than complete, but the spinoff project to release the Sunday pages in colour is still under way. It did take me a while to get the latest volume of "Peanuts Every Sunday." I had ordered the previous large and pricy volumes from amazon.ca, but this time the wait for the listing to offer physical copies had stretched on until at last I ordered it through my local bookstore, which with my discount card was cheaper than going through an online reseller. In any case, I had a definite interest in this volume. The second half of the 1960s, as I understand it, were "the phenomenon years" for Peanuts, where all the developments of the fifteen years before added up to more attention than most comic strips get as the television specials added up along with the magazine covers, followed by appearances on stage and screen and going to the moon, with the World War I Flying Ace more or less leading the way.
( 'I scan the air carefully searching for the Red Baron.. I *must* bring him down!' )

The computer-animated Peanuts movie that just happened to align with the comic strip's sixty-fifth anniversary seemed to get good notices, including some from people I supposed to be other Peanuts fans, but where I had bought a Blu-Ray of The Lego Movie I waited on The Peanuts Movie until I was surprised to see it turn up on Netflix. This could have had something to do with how, aware as I am of how "drawn animation" has helped shape perceptions and form mental images of the Peanuts characters, a good number of the TV specials and the four feature-length movies made years ago preceded me by enough that I'm only aware of their storylines through their storybook adaptations. It just might be that, with certain small elements condensed out along the way, they kept striking me as veering between "ultimately outright depressing" and "perhaps lightweight." (As a small example, when I finally had the chance to see "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," its concluding minutes didn't seem quite as bleak as the storybook had somehow left me thinking.) Still, I wound up taking a chance, and there were things about The Peanuts Movie I did get to mulling over.
( There was a big surprise )

The "next volume preview" at the back of what I'd supposed the penultimate volume of The Complete Peanuts surprised me a bit by putting Sally on the cover of the collection to come. Some years ago I had seen a seemingly official anticipation on all the cover characters that had said the series would end with Charlie Brown, as it had begun and as it had included a Charlie Brown from each decade, and so far as I can remember the list had seemed accurate up to that point. Some months after that, though, I saw an explanation of sorts in that plans now included a twenty-sixth volume featuring "comics and stories," things Charles M. Schulz had drawn outside of the regular strips. This, of course, would mean an even number of volumes in the series and the opportunity to put the actual final days of the strip in one more consistent-sized boxed set. In the piece I saw the explanation in, though, there was also the comment the introduction to the last regular volume would be by President Obama, and that was in a strange way reassuring. I did wonder all over again about what I'd heard of Schulz's personal politics for all that he'd seemed to have kept them out of the strip (in a collection of interviews with him I once bought, a wide-ranging late interview included him remembering how depressed he'd been when Dewey hadn't defeated Truman after all and criticising Bill Clinton's policies, even if Clinton has provided a back-cover quote for the last several volumes, and in an earlier interview he had been contacted by people associated with Adlai Stevenson's 1956 campaign, supposing anyone writing such an "intellectual" strip would surely support that candidate; Schulz had to turn them down and explain he was an "Eisenhower Republican"), but I could suppose that no matter how careful Obama would be in his comments (his introduction wound up just one page long, and that included the usual page-wide graphic at the top) he wouldn't cluck and sigh that Schulz could have enjoyed his retirement and maintained the respect of those whose opinion counted (just like the commentator's) by having quit long before. Now, I just had to see what my own opinion would be.
( 'Dear Harry Potter, I am your biggest fan.' )

I spent this week working through the 1976 summer break of Creative Computing (or at least I'd like to gather that computer magazine took a two-issue break in the middle of that year, the better to not have to hunt down two rare early issues). Along the way, I did manage to mark the continued development of microcomputers and indulged myself by including a page other than a cover (which, for BYTE, had reached past simply coloured drawings to the point of the Robert Tinney paintings long associated with it).

BYTE, May 1976
Artist and Computer
BYTE, June 1976
Popular Electronics, July 1976
BYTE, July 1976
Good Grief!