I wrote about two Peanuts books that you might want to check out.

I wrote a bit about Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron, Fantagraphics' collection of Schulz's strips on that particular subject, for School Library Journal's Good Comics For Kids blog.

I wrote about Peanuts: A Tribute to Charles M. Schulz, Boom Studios' big hardcover collection of 40+ artists paying tribute to one of history's greatest cartoonists, for Comics Alliance.

Meanwhile, at Good Comics For Kids...

Snoopy meets Hachiko...and Gojira! That's probably my favorite panel of Vicki Scott's new original graphic novel, Peanuts: It's Tokyo, Charlie Brown!, for the obvious reasons. A Snoopy/Hachiko or Snoopy/Godzilla meeting would have made for a great comics panel, but both in the same panel?  One could hardly ask for a better panel in an original graphic novel about Snoopy, Charlie Brown and their human friends traveling to Tokyo.

I have a short review of the book at Good Comics For Kids, if you'd like to go read it; otherwise, stay here for a few more long seconds and drink in Snoopy's salute to Japan's favorite dog and his cowardly retreat from The King of The Monsters....

I can't decide which I like better.

The above panel, taken completely  out-of-context...

...or in context, in which Snoopy goes into his dog house in order to find an outfit that shows off his mean side before confronting the cat next door.

I like the gag both ways an awful lot, though.

The sequence is from Boom's original graphic novel Peanuts: The Beagle Has Landed, Charlie Brown!, by Andy Beall, Bob Scott and Vicki Scott and Paige Braddock.

There's something a little...off about large swathes of it, as is often the case with Boom's post-Schulz Peanuts works. The apparent early '60s setting, for one, even though there is later a reference to Snoopy's 1980s Flashbeagle persona. And then there's the focus on Charlie Brown and friends as little kids pursuing little kids pursuits, instead of as adults in children's bodies, whose child-like pursuits can be read as symbolic. I don't know, it just seems weird to me to see Charlie Brown playing spacemen and martians with the neighborhood kids...like something they would have done in the early 1950s strips, but here they are drawn closer to their late '60s, early '70s looks.

But then every once in a while you'll get a great image and sequence like the one above, which makes the slightly-off feeling sequences worth reading through to get to.

Meanwhile...

Posting has been a bit lighter than I would normally like here on EDILW, but I've got a decent excuse—I've been writing a bunch of stuff for publication elsewhere over the past week or so.

First up, I reviewed Scott McCloud's excellent graphic novel The Sculptor for Las Vegas Weekly. You've likely been seeing reviews of it and interviews with McCloud pretty much every where, and with good reason. The Sculptor is the book of 2015...or at least the first two months of 2015. You can read that review here.

I also (kinda) reviewed Peter Bagge and company's Sweatshop for Robot 6. That was a brief, likely semi-forgotten six-issue "ongoing" monthly that DC Comics put out in 2003. I discuss this in the piece itself a bit, but in Bagge's afterword he explains that the book grew out of editor Joey Cavalieri's apparent repeated attempts to get "alternative" cartoonists working for DC Comics. Cavalieri edited the Bagge-written, Gilbert Hernandez-drawn Yeah! as well as the Bizarro Comics anthology. That last one I thought of particular interest since one of the many unbelievable artists who helped Bagge out on Sweatshop was Stephen DeStefano, who drew the framing story for Bizarro Comics. I loved that story; I think DeStefano drew not only my favorite Mr. Mxyzptlk in that story, but also the definitive Bizarro. Whenever I think of Bizarro, it's DeStefano's design I see in my head (And that story? Totally in continuity; Big Barda, Steel and other members of the Morrison/Porter JLA team totally show up at the climax).

Anyway, you can read me talking about Sweatshop here.

Finally, I have a pair of reviews that were posted at Good Comics For Kids this week, one of Beware The Batman (the trade paperback collecting the DC Comic based on the TV show based on DC comics) and another of Peanuts #25, Boom's ongoing effort to produce original Peanuts material for the comic book market. You can read those pieces here and here, respectively.

Meanwhile...

Today at Good Comics For Kids, I have a review of Fantagraphics' latest Peanuts gift book, A Valentine For Charlie Brown.

And, at Robot 6 I have reviews of Michael DeForge's First Year Healthy, Akira Toriyama's Jaco The Galactic Patrolman and Takuma Morishige's My Neighbor Seki.

Happy New Comics Day!

Did you guys get the latest issues of Throttle, Jab and Gouge...? What did you think of the new story arc they just started in Murder Comics? Did it seem a little derivative of the earlier issues of Murder Komix to you at all...?

...

Okay, I don't have a post for tonight, so please just admire this great single panel from an early Schulz Peanuts Sunday strip. It and about two years worth of great comic strips can be found in Fantagraphics' Complete Peanuts 1950-1952, now available in paperback.

Meanwhile...

I have two reviews up at School Library Journal's Good Comics For Kids blog this week. One is of Fantagraphics' new(-ish) softcover presentation of Charles Schulz's The Complete Peanuts Vol. 1: 1950-1952. I will never get used to how goddam cute Snoopy was at the dawn of that strip. The other is of the latest in Bongo Comics' generally pretty excellent One-Shot Wonders series, Kang & Kodos. I'm not much of a Simpsons fan anymore, but you can't really go wrong with Bongo's Treehouse of Horror annuals and One-Shot Wonders books, depending on which character is featured and how much you like that character, of course.

And over at Robot 6, I reviewed all of the Futures End one-shots I got this week, which was only five of them (they published 10 of the 42 they announced this week). That still seemed like a whole lot, but hey, how about that Grayson special, huh? That was some good stuff.

Meanwhile...

Hey kids! Comics!

Last week was the debut of the print version of DC's new Sensation Comics, their digital-first Wonder Woman book, in the style of Adventures of Superman. If you were at all worried that it might make a genuine effort of courting new readers from beyond DC's existing fanbase, worry not; the first two-thirds of the issue are written by Gail Simone, drawn by Ethan Van Sciver and deals with Wonder Woman fighting Batman's villains. Also, there's little chance of it filling the void of Wonder Woman comics appropriate for children, as it does include the above page.

But she doesn't really kill all of Batman's enemies! She's just imagining doing so. That was maybe the second-weirdest part of the Simone-written story, which I reviewed at some length for Robot 6 today. The weirdest part is page 18, drawn by someone else entirely. Given what came immediately before and immediately after, I wonder if page 18 reflected a last-minute editorial change to the story, that Van Sciver either didn't want to draw or didn't have time to draw.

On page 16, Wonder Woman's Amazon reinforcements show up. On page 17, we see Poison Ivy's vines take some of them out, and the Penguin pushing a button, triggering an explosion. And then, on page 18, we see Wonder Woman telling her Amazon army that it is now a rescue mission, and shows them saving civilians from a burning building. I suspect in the original version, the bomb was meant to kill the Amazons, and someone said it was either too extreme, or that the Amazons are pretty much constantly being killed in every story they appear in, and they decided to change that.

Or I don't know, maybe EVS drew the book out of order, and ran out of time before drawing 18. Anyway, weird book. I've added it to my pull-list though; this first issue isn't very good, but I'm looking forward to those to come based on the announced creative teams.

Wait, maybe that's the third weirdest part. Her "Wondarangs" were pretty damn weird, too.

It's not like part of her costume is also a razor-sharp projectile that returns to her hand when thrown.

Also! I wrote about Fantagraphics' latest Peanuts gift book, Waiting For The Great Pumpkin, for Good Comics For Kids. It's Charles Schulz's Peanuts, so obviously it's good. What I found particularly interesting about it though was that it featured the strips in which Schulz introduced the Great Pumpkin concept; most of those strips are new to me, despite being so familiar with the concept from that Halloween animated special I used to watch annually as a child.

That one time in the early '50s when Snoopy worried he'd be put to death in the electric chair:

Here are two panels from the middle of an eight-panel Sunday strip collected in Fantagraphics' Complete Peanuts Vol. 1, newly available in paperback (I almost said they were out-of-context, but I think Patty's first dialogue bubble is all you need to understand Snoopy's dark, anxious but still darling fantasies). I really love these early strips, in large part because of how far removed, how alien they seem to the Peanuts that exist in my head. That early Snoopy is just so damn cute, it boggles my mind (Oddly, seeing him in prison garb breaking rocks and/or awaiting execution in a puppy-sized electric chair doesn't dim his cuteness any, but actually seems to accentuate it).

If only it still worked like this.

From Fantagraphics' The Complete Peanuts Vol. 1, now available in softcover.

Meanwhile...

I've got two reviews at places-that-aren't-here to link to tonight. First, I reviewed Batter Up, Charlie Brown! for Good Comics For Kids, and, second, I reviewed Katie Skelly's Operation Margarine for Robot 6.

They are both very good books, in very different ways; the former is a sort of novelty gift packaging of some Peanuts strips along a baseball theme, in a beautifully designed packages, while the latter is a bad girls on motorcycles genre exercise from EDILW favorite Katie Skelly. Guess which book the above image is from.

(Also at R6, Tom Bondurant discusses the history of Dick Grayson and Robin in light of a few announcements of upcoming books made this week; Grayson more than just about any other character suffered from the New 52 reboot and super-compressed timeline. He used to be the kid who was raised and trained by Batman, who lead a team of superheroes for years, who forged his own superhero identity and was generally one of the most well-liked and well-respected heroes in the DCU and perhaps the best leader of other heroes. Now he's just a circus kid who worked with Batman for maybe a year, changed his codename and then went back to the circus. Just about anything of interest about the character—being the adult result of a childhood spent as a kid sidekick, working with and knowing Superman better than any superhero other than Batman maybe,  his universe full of personal connections—is all gone now, so like a lot of New 52 rebooted characters, he's basically just a familiar codename. And I guess they're taking <i>that</i> away in the new series now too? I'm really curious to see how Geoff Johns and DC put Grayson's secret identity back in the genie bottle in Forever Evil #7, because everyone on earth should be able to figure out that if Nightwing is Grayson, then Batman must be Bruce Wayne).

On the comics content in Time's The 100 Most Influential People Who Never Lived

Despite the form it takes, this fleet, 120-page, 2013 hardcover is more a conversation than a book. Assembled and written by Kelly Knauer and Ellen Shapiro—with a dozen or so contributions from celebrities like Jodie Foster, Mary Tyler Moore, Gerard Butler and others—and produced and packaged by the folks at Time, the book is inspired by the magazine's annual list of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World."

Editor Knauer would probably readily admit that the list is meant as a conversation more so than a definitive statement, as part of the process of assembling it involved collecting opinions on Time.com, which lead to nominations and arguments for and against some listees. They did try to keep it from being an argument, though, at least a vehement one, by coming up with guidelines that forbade the inclusion of gods and divinities, and religious figures like Noah, Moses and Job that would place Time in the position of having to declare them real or fictional.

They also gave themselves the rule that the "people" had to actually be people, as in human beings, "which eliminated such beloved characters as Mickey Mouse, Snoopy, Yoda and Frodo Baggins," Knauer writes (Not sure why 2001's robot Hal 9000 gets an entry then, however).

One could, would and probably should find a lot to quibble with in here. Unlike the annual lists, which take a snapshot of who's doing the influencing now, and thus take a stab at zeitgesit-capturing while simultaneously coming with an expiration date, the broad title of this list means they're trying to whittle down the most influential fictional characters of all time, and thus inclusions of the most recent vintage will likely seem especially suspect. Like Hunger Games' Katniss, Mad Men's Don Draper, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo's Lisbeth Salander, or even The Big Lebowski's The Dude, for example (Wow, Big Lebowski is 15 years old already?).

I saw a page with a few superheroes while flipping through it, which is why I originally brought the book home from the library. I was curious to see how many superheroes, as well as which superheroes, the Time people thought were worthy of inclusion. After having read the book—heavily illustrated and broken into a series of articles about 500 words or so in length, it's a quick read—I realize most of the characters have appeared in comics of some form or another.

Many have been imported into comics from other media, be it literature (Dracula, Doctor Frankenstein, Tarzan), film (Darth Vader, Indiana Jones, James Bond), television (Homer Simpson, Buffy, Captain Kirk and Spock) or, in one instance, video games (Tomb Raider's Lara Croft is the only video game character in the book; is she really more influential than a certain mustachioed plumber, though?). Uncle Sam and Santa Claus are in here as well.

In fact, it would probably be easier to list the characters who I am fairly certain have never appeared in a comic book before than those who have, and hell, I could be wrong about some of those.

As for characters native to comics, there are five of them in the book. Three of them are superheroes, and they are probably the first three you thought of: Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.

The trio all appear in the section of the book entitled "Outliers" (and not, oddly, "Heroes and Villains"). Actress Lynda Carter pens the article on Wonder Woman, which isn't really a case for Wondy's inclusion so much as a mini-essay on the subject of "What Wonder Woman Means To Me," and the entry fills two pages, with most of one page devoted to a 1977 image of Carter in her television costume.

The Superman and Batman entries are both written by Knauer, and are shorter still, and pretty basic in their observations (I liked the cheesiness of the Superman entry's opening line: "'You don't tug on Superman's cape,' sang Jim Croce, and that's good advice. But Superman's cape tugs at you..."). Her Superman entry makes note of creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and that Superman launched not just "a thousand strips," but also "a lot of lawsuits, after the two sold the rights to their creation for a mere $130."

No creators of Batman are mentioned, and the only real person's name attached to the character is that of Tim Burton, in a sentence mentioning some of the most prominent Batman mass media adaptations: "Over the years, Batman has been portrayed on a '60s TV show as a Roy Lichetenstein canvas come to life; as the central figure of a rewarding run of imaginative Tim Burton fantasies; and, most recently, as a relentless, muscle-bound crusader in a freak-show series of action films loaded with violence." (Speaking of arguing, er, conversing, I think "comic book come to life" is a bit more accurate than "Lichtenstein canvas come to life," as the latter was a recontextualization of the former anyway, and I'm not sure just two movies constitutes a "run;" certainly "a pair of imaginative Tim Burton fantasies" works just as well, even if it loses the alliteration).

To illustrate these entries, Time uses a full-page image of the cover of 1939's Superman #1 and a small head shot of Michael Keaton as Batman from the first of the Burton films (Man, the fact that his eyes move but his head doesn't really makes for a super-creepy Batman).

As you guys will notice, these are all DC Comics characters, and among the only superheroes—in fact, I think they are the only superheroes—who have had comics in continuous publication since they were first launched back in the Golden Age (Captain America, The Flash, Green Lantern...those guys all had significant time off from the monthly grind, didn't they?). That may be why they are included and no other heroes are, although I suspect their presence in other, mass media (even if, for Wonder Woman, it was just that one TV show and some cartoon appearances with other DC superheroes), and their general cultural impact were the main reasons. ("Why Robinsons Crusoe and not Lemuel Gulliver? Why Batman and not Spider-Man? Our list reflects our preferences, and it's been a pleasure to put it together," Knauer states in the introduction).

As for the implied DC vs. Marvel thing, I think it likely comes down to the fact that the trio above are perceived as the most iconic of the super-heroes, with Superman being the template for a superhero, and all of the Marvel heroes, even those that pre-date Marvel itself by decades, are the awesome and compelling characters they are because of the way they reflect, tweak or comment on the basic idea of a superhero, as represented by Superman (and Batman and Wonder Woman). The true Marvel characters of the 1960s boom are superheroes with problems or, in other words, more fleshed-out, complex and realistic takes on the sorts of characters DC published before.

I think it is interesting—and I'm sure there are essays, hell, maybe even a book, to be written on the subject—that a handful of characters currently owned and controlled by the company called DC had such a huge cultural impact at such an early time, and for such a long time, and are just now starting to fade in relative prominence, while the Marvel characters are in such a meteoric ascendancy. Is there a reason— what is the reason?—that Superman, Batman and, to a lesser extent, Wonder Woman, were the superheroes of the 20th century, whereas Spider-Man, The X-Men, Captain America and the The Avengers characters are the superheroes of the 21st century? (There were two big-budget, all-star cast films about Thor and three about Iron Man before a Wonder Woman film ever got out of development. Think about that from a broad view; that's really, really weird).

There are only two other comics-born characters in the book/on the list: Charlie Brown and Lucy Van Pelt, who appear in the "Couples" chapter (along with the likes of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, Romeo and Juliet and the aforementioned Kirk and Spock).

Time's television critic James Poniewozik writes their entry, and it's quite well-written (and includes a derivation of the word "fussbudget," so kudos for that, Poniewozik). He notes the most famous image of the pair together is that of the football kick that never connects, but thinks its a misleading one, as it presents them as enemies more than the friends who need each other that they actually are ("Truth is, Charlie Brown needs a sounding board, and Lucy needs a project"). In Poniewozik's mind, then, the most telling image of the pair is Charlie Brown sitting at Lucy's Psychiatric Help booth, which is, of course, the image used to illustrate the piece, magnified to fill about a third of the page, allowing for a nice look at Charles Schulz's wiggly line-work.

Meanwhile, at Good Comics For Kids...

I have a review of Charles Schulz's Charlie Brown's Stocking, if you would like to go read it.

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

I have a better-late-than-never review of the first issue of Boom/Kaboom's new Peanuts comic (actually, it's the second one, since they released a #0 issue, but I waited until the one numbered #1 came out to give it a look). You can read the piece here. The one bit of the book I forgot to mention was that it concludes with a strip in which Lucy Van Pelt teaches the reader how to draw Charlie Brown. I didn't follow the instructions exactly (I used pen, and didn't erase my guide line) and sort of rushed through it at the end, but above is my attempt at following her instructions. While the above kinda sucks, the instructions seemed spot on. With lots of practice, I think someone following them could end up doing a hell of a waving Charlie Brown.

Elsewhere on the Internet, I have "Six Thoughts on the Possibility of a Live-Action 'Green Arrow' TV series," generated by the news that the CW is apparently going to order a pilot of such a thing. I hope they go with the bearded version of GA, in which case I already know exactly who they could have play him.

MY GOD--!!!

On the cover of Boom Studios/Kaboom!'s first issue of Peanuts, Snoopy's head is revealed to be the exact same shape as an actual peanut! What does this mean?! It means something, right?

I feel like I just discovered the first clue in cracking some kind of Da Vinci code...

Today's the day

(From Fantagraphics' The Complete Peanuts 1953-1954)

I still have trouble getting used to how cute Snoopy used to be

November 7, 1953 Peanuts strip by Charles Schulz, scanned from Fantagraphics' The Complete Peanuts 1953-1954.

Reminder:

Lucy van Pelt is not to be trifled with.

Apparently you have to not hoard comics to really appreciate this comic strip.

This happened again this past weekend, and once again the comic strip in question was an installment of Peanuts, which is now officially the most often cut-out-by-my-mother-and-left-for-me-to-find comic strip in the paper.

You can click on the strip to make it bigger and thus more readable, if you missed it when it re-ran in your local paper a few weeks ago. The joke is, of course, that Charlie Brown supposedly has a comically unlikely amount of used comic books for sale, and despite the exaggerated for comedy's sake amount, Rerun or whoever the kid on the right is doesn't think it's quite enough comics.

Of course, when I read the strip, not only did I not laugh at the situation, I thought to myself, Jeez, that's not really that many comic books, is it? That can't be more than two longboxes...well, maybe three tops.

And then I realized that I had many times more used comic books than Charlie Brown has for sale in that panel and, were I to pile them all up like that for a sale, they would not only fill the top of the panel, but probably spill far beyond its borders.

And then I wept softly.

"Hey party people, it's Charlie B"

If you're not addicted to ABC's Dancing With The Stars like, um, some comics bloggers I could name, then you may not have seen this year's commercial for the annual airing of 1966's It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, featuring a rapping Charlie Brown.

You are lucky.

You can see and hear it by clicking here (for now anyway; note you'll probably have to see a short ad before the ad for special).

Here are the lyrics:

Hey party people, it's Charlie B
Bringing Halloween Thursday to ABC
Raking leaves
and rolling on a pumpkin
trick or treat
then the party gets thumpin'
Lucy's getting bossy
Snoopy's feeling saucy
and things are getting crazy with my Peanuts posse
But where is Linus? This party's posh
He's waiting in the field for a mythical squash

Word.