Tag Archives: Peanuts

The Great Newspaper Comics Challenge Part 6

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It’s that time again. Time to check out the funny pages. Because newspaper comics aren’t all about Mutt and Jeff!

Classic Peanuts: Linus and Snoopy are searching all over the yard for … Snoopy’s contact lenses? Who knew? And how do they get him to sit still for that puff-of-air-in-your-eye test at the optometrist?

Baby Blues: The baby crawls around the house, burbling “mama” and “choo-choo.” He passes Dad, who’s just hit his finger with a hammer and is making those comic strip #@!$& curse words. The baby then crawls up to mom and repeats the word. Mom faints. As a parent, I can tell you this is pretty accurate.

Speed Bump: A doctor tells Pinocchio he needs more fiber in his diet. So wait, Pinocchio eats wood? I mean, I know people eat meat and all, but isn’t Pinocchio eating the material he was carved from — but no longer is — strange? Maybe it’s me.

Beetle Bailey: Sarge gets mad because Beetle is sleeping late and goofing off. Welcome to 1963.

The Family Circus: Mom wakes up Jeffy and tells him, “Time to start another busy day. Clock’s ticking away!” Then Jeffy — get this — pictures a clock with him doing stuff on it! My face hurts from this satisfied smile.

 

The Great Newspaper Comics Challenge Part 5

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It’s Sunday and that means (at least lately it does) a look at what’s in the comics pages. ‘Cause there’s still something good even though “Calvin and Hobbes” and “The Far Side” are long gone. Right?

“Classic Peanuts” jumps into March Madness with the kids playing basketball. Unfortunately, the hoop is on Snoopy’s dog house and baskets wake him up. Not one of Charlie Schulz’ best.

“Garfield” sits by with a cup of coffee while Jon cleans out his wallet, then advises his person, “Time for a man purse, pack rat.” Is this thing on?

“Wizard of Id” has the wizard walking past various ogres and giant spiders and rats, unperturbed, only to squeek when he seeks his wife with her hair in rollers and green stuff on her face. Hello? Hello? (Cricket noise.)

“Speed Bump” is a play on old “Frankenstein” movies with the mad doctor and Igor choosing a brain for the monster. The jars are labeled “Normal Brain,” “Abnormal Brain” and “Brain With Song Stuck In It.” “No, Igor! That would just be cruel,” the doctor says. Pretty good.

“Blondie” tries out a new hairstyle and Dagwood reacts with shock. Frankly, so did I. Doesn’t this look like Donald Trump’s hairdo?

Freaky.

“Dennis the Menace” discovers, about 15 years late, that truism about how kids are better with computers than adults. Next they’re going to show Dennis signing up for an AOL account.

Finally, “Ziggy” just confuses me. Ziggy’s bird is hanging upside down on his perch with comic strip “confusion” circles around his head. Ziggy asks his dog and cat, “Did you put butter on his perch again?”

Is butter why the bird is hanging upside down? Wouldn’t he just fall off, completely unable to hang on at all, if the perch were slippery? Why does he look like he’s taken a blow to the head?

Maybe Dennis the Menace could explain it to me.

The Great Newspaper Comics Challenge Part 4

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Here’s our latest look at what’s funny in the funny pages. There’s something fun in the post-“Calvin and Hobbes” era, right?

This week: The return of Ida Know and Not Me!

“Classic Peanuts.” Okay, spring is definitely here. The estate of the late, great Charles M. Schulz gives us the first (?) Charlie Brown vs. kite strip of the year.

But oy vey, this is a lame one. Good ol’ Charlie Brown talks to the tree that’s eaten his kite for, let’s see, six panels, ultimately giving up and acknowledging, “You can’t argue with a kite-eating tree.”

Moving on …

“Zits.” Okay, good stuff here. “Ridiculous stuff moms say” includes “Wear a coat” and “Does anybody want some kale?” As Homer Simpson would say, “It’s funny because it’s true.”

“Garfield.” Jon talks to Liz on the phone, fretting about what movie they’ll watch because he doesn’t want a weepy chick flick. He’s happy she’s picked a monster movie! But she’s chosen “When Godzilla Met Sally.” Ladies and gentlemen, my nominee for funniest newspaper strip of 1989.

“Dilbert.” The pointy-haired boss spouts techno-gibberish like “Do we have enough room in the cloud to Skype?” and Dilbert explains that he “slips in and out of understanding basic technology.”

Dilbert reassures him, “We have plenty of space because we upgraded to a cumulonimbus cloud.” Good stuff.

“Foxtrot.” One of the kids gets ideas for “John Carter” sequels once they run out of Mars stories, including “John Carter of Tattooine.” Extra geeky!

“Blondie.” Dagwood and Blondie continue their master class on household budgeting and economics. Dagwood buys Blondie an expensive necklace at the jewelry store.

“Did you see anything new at the golf shop today?” Blondie asks. “You won’t believe the amazing golf bags they just got in,” Dagwood replies. ‘Cause it’s okay to spend as much money as you can when everybody shares the loot.

“Curtis.” Curtis gets good grades so his dad takes him to buy a reward, “something called an iPad,” Dad says. They return later, sans iPad, at odds over spending money. Counting this and the “Blondie” strip, I think this week’s theme is household spending.

Finally — and I am so excited about this, “Family Circus.” Mom has the kids — have they always had four? — lined up for interrogation.

There’s a broken dish in her hand and a disappointed look on her face.

“I think I know the answer but I’ll ask you anyway,” Mom says. “Which of you broke my good plate?”

Wait, the Keenes have only one good plate? Times must be tough in the newspaper comic strip industry. But I digress.

Joining the line-up of kids being grilled: The see-thru forms of Ida Know, Not Me and Nobody.

Nobody in particular is unfamiliar to me and has me a little worried. He’s got a moustache, for Pete’s sake. How old is this imaginary blame-taker? What’s he doing hanging around with a bunch of school-agers?

 

 

The Great Newspaper Comics Challenge Part 3

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I’m way overdue for a look at the funny pages in this, an irregularly recurring look at newspaper comics.

The premise: The glory days of the newspaper comic ended with “Calvin and Hobbes” and “The Far Side,” but there’s still some good stuff out there. And if not good stuff, at least familiar. And you know the old saying: Familiarity breeds content. That was the old saying, wasn’t it?

In today’s Sunday strips:

“Garfield” talks about the weather. Seriously, this strip sums up my feelings about the transition from winter to spring. Standing outside, Garfield experiences sun, snow, rain, hail and wind. “I’m done with March,” he tells Jon.

Weather is the theme of the day. In “Classic Peanuts,” Linus grumbles about having to walk to school in the rain, worrying that he’ll catch  a cold. When he finally sneezes, he takes it as a sign to head for home. One more weather strip in my Sunday paper and I’ll take it as a sign the cartoonists collaborated like they do for those fabulous annual Arbor Day tributes.

“Pickles” actually has a pretty good joke that cat owners can relate to. Two people dispute the possibility that cats really care about people, noting that a neighbor with gourmet cat food could lure the cat away. “Muffin would never do that to me,” the lady says. “Would you Muffy?” The cat thinks — because cats don’t talk — “I’m doing it now. I actually belong to the lady down the street.” No weather.

In “The Wizard of Id,” campaign leaflets are tossed from a balloon and rain down on people below. Does that count as weather?

“Dilbert” features a robot with attitude that calls for a robot apocalypse. Does the end of the world count as weather? I’m sure the Weather Channel would claim it.

In “Hi and Lois,” one of the kids is sick and hopes he misses school. Hmmm. Counting “Peanuts,” maybe the real trend for today is childhood illness.

Meanwhile, Dagwood considers taking a nap at work.

In “Dennis the Menace,” Dennis and Joey try to hit Margaret with a snowball. I think that counts as weather.

In “The Family Circus,” Dad takes a nap and one of the kids gives him a teddy bear. Awwww …. and dammit. Now I think naps are the trend of the day.

“Non Sequitur” has the little goth kid complaining that it’s snowing when it should be spring. I think that settles the matter:

Weather: 6 (right? right?)

Kids too sick to go to school: 2

Grown men taking naps: 2.

 

iPhoneography: Christmas ornaments

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When I was growing up, the ornaments on the Christmas tree were almost always glass balls. Red and blue and gold and purple, with little wire hooks at the top that made it almost impossible for my clumsy fingers to hang on the branches of the tree, ornaments of that type are still what I think of when I imagine the decorations on the tree.

Some of them were probably the popular Shiny Brite ornaments pictured above, or imitations.

Ornaments — originally German-made glass baubles popularized by big American retailers like Woolworth and Macy’s — were so traditional for so long that it was inevitable that pop culture would eventually work its way into the product.

That point came in 1973, when Hallmark introduced its Keepsake ornaments collection. Those first few ornaments were snowmen and angels and Santa and look pretty primitive compared to the elaborate ornaments of today.

But the world of Christmas ornaments had changed. Before long, we could decorate our trees with Peanuts figures or Barbie or Mickey Mouse.

This year, the retailer is offering scenes from “Star Trek,” comic books like The Avengers and the Fisher Price Play Family Village.

Of course, for the latest iPhoneography Christmas entry, I thought I’d pass along some of the more offbeat pop culture offerings.

There aren’t many more instantly recognizable pop culture figures than jumpsuit-era Elvis Presley. Although this guy looks a little underfed, he’d be a good companion to a “Blue Christmas” theme.

How about Kiss frontman Gene Simmons? Nothing like an extra long tongue to say happy holidays.

And no, I’m not sure why he’s upside down in his box. Maybe that makes him more collectible.

Now this is more like it. “Yellow Submarine”-era Beatles ornaments. If this ornament could talk … it wouldn’t be in the actual Beatles voices.

And you can’t spell Christmas ornament without Grinch. Well, you can’t really spell it with G, R, I, N, C and H. But you know what I mean.

I mentioned Peanuts earlier but couldn’t resist coming back to this item, which isn’t really an ornament but is instead the Charlie Brown version of a nativity scene. Curiously, it’s not really labeled as such. Maybe they thought such a direct reference would offend someone. That would have to be someone who hadn’t seen the Peanuts Christmas special, of course.

More next time.

 

 

The Great Newspaper Comics Challenge Part 2

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For a moment there, I thought I had slipped through some kind of time portal into the distant past.

Here in front of me, in an Indianapolis community newspaper called the Eastside Voice, was the old “Flash Gordon” newspaper comic strip.

I hadn’t seen “Flash Gordon” in years. No newspapers that I knew of carried it. Yet here it was, in this little neighborhood newspaper.

Upon doing a little research on the Interwebs, I figured out why I hadn’t heard of the strip lately. “Flash Gordon” hasn’t been an actively-published newspaper comic strip since 2003, when artist Jim Keefe — following in the footsteps of classic “Flash Gordon” auteur Alex Raymond — stopped drawing it. Papers like the Eastside Voice run reprints of Keefe’s strips, which ran for several years.

So no danger that I’ve been missing new adventures of Flash, Dale and Ming the Merciless all these years.

So if “Flash Gordon” is still stuck on Mongo, what is in the comics lately?

A few weeks ago I acknowledged that I haven’t been reading newspaper comic strips regularly since the passing of “Calvin and Hobbes” and “The Far Side” and vowed to remedy that.

Well … I haven’t been reading the funny pages daily. But I thought I’d check out the Sunday edition today.

In “Peanuts” — a rerun, of course, since the passing of Charles Schulz a few years ago — takes a page from Calvin’s book by having Linus make a realistic snowman figure of Lucy. But instead of destroying it, Linus says he’ll get back at Lucy’s latest bullying by standing and watching the Lucy effigy “slowly melt away.” Yikes.

In “Garfield,” Jon insults Garfield’s bulge. Check. Garfield says talk about his waistline is making him hungry. Hmmm. Check, I guess.

In “Zits,” the teenage son in the household complains about having to take out the trash. Weirdly, however, the artists show the guy’s naked butt in the shower. Do we normally see naked butts in comics? Not since the great “Sgt. Snorkel Goes Streaking” incident of 1975, I would bet.

“Dilbert” looks at smartphone rage. It leads to a silly gag but it’s a good idea.

Jeff and Bil Keane’s “Family Circus” is a good execution of a simple idea. One of the kids — Billy? Jeffy? Honestly I can’t tell them apart — is seen giving a recitation of excuses about how he didn’t make his little brother cry.

More to come next time. Hopefully.