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 Friday, August 28, 2009
 

A Life in Black and White

 
SnoopyThis title is a play on a series on my high school Media teacher's blog called "A Life in Four Colors," which is about his lifetime fascination with comic books. My fascination with comics unfortunately fizzled in my mid-teens, but when I was interested I primarily focused black-and-white newspaper strips. Recently as I was browsing the archives of TIME.com I ran across some stories on Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, and it reminded me how passionately I once loved cartoons.

I first became interested in comic books and drawing on trips to Chattanooga to visit my grandparents. They lived next door to a Majik Market convenience store, and since there wasn't much for a three or four-year-old to do around their house, dad bought me a few 35-cent comic books. My grandmother had some Mead writing tablets and pens and pencils, and I was contented for hours trying to draw pictures like the ones I saw in the comic books. Later on in school other kids thought I was a standout at this sort of thing.

"When I do something right, no one remembers. When I do something wrong, no one ever forgets." -- Charlie Brown

It was on a trip to Callaway Gardens around third or fourth grade, though, that I happened to pick up a paperback-sized tome of Peanuts cartoons at the hotel gift shop. I absorbed the whole thing in an afternoon and became a Charles Schulz fanatic on the spot.

Soon we couldn't go to K-Mart or the mall without me begging my parents for a couple of dollars to buy another Peanuts book. Then one day I discovered paradise: a store called Good Grief! had opened at Cumberland Mall, selling nothing but Peanuts-oriented merchandise. They had larger Peanuts anthologies ("Peanuts Parade") that I collected as my allowance would allow. There was also a huge hardback Schulz biography that was probably $50, but my Mom nixed that and I got a smaller bio, Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Me that I poured over as though it was the Ten Commandments. I practically memorized it. At Good Grief! I would annoy the clerk, a girl named Gina, with my Charles Schulz obsession because to my fifth-grade mind she was one degree of separation away from Him and in the comics business herself. Actually she was a teen girl with a job at the mall whom I was probably driving crazy.

"No problem is so big or so complicated that it cannot be run away from." -- Linus

I invented my own comic strip called Mop & Handle, which was about a rich kid, his dog and his butler. My parents said if I came up with 56 of them, enough to fill a year of Sundays, I could copyright it. I did, and I did. This was published at least once in the elementary school newspaper, and I would see where other kids traced it and tried to pass it off as their own work. PLAGIARISTS!

Opus the PenguinAs well as Schulz I dabbled in Garfield and B.C. Then comics took a quantum leap forward when Bloom County hit the scene. It wasn't as dry and mental as Doonesbury and it was more hip to current events than Peanuts. David Lee Roth and Mick Jagger popped up in Bloom County, for instance. The adventures of Milo Bloom, Binkley and Opus the Penguin thrilled my maturing 13-year-old mind.

"I saw a snake having marital relations with a garden hose this morning." -- Bloom County

The Village Voice's Jules Feiffer also caught my fancy, and in my 20's I tried to catch a speech by him at a local synagogue but missed it because I couldn't find the friggin' place. The last comics crush I had was Matt Groening, who at the time was known for his Life in Hell comic from the L.A. Weekly, and of course later for The Simpsons.

My fascination with Charles Schulz and cartooning blossomed alongside a fascination with Waylon Jennings and music, and by 17 music officially won out. I never went back to cartooning, but now I see there are boxed sets of Peanuts comics on Amazon, and...good grief, I may have $100 more passion for good ol' Charlie Brown!
 
 

Posted by Art | 8:30 AM EST | 1 comments |

1 Comments:

Blogger robcasting said...

I was able to find the entire Bloom County collection of books on Ebay for $15. A few of them them were in decent shape and were 1st prints too. Unfortunately, the Billy and Boingers one did not still have the record inside it(bummer). While in Iraq I reread all of the Bloom County's and was taken back to a simpler time for me.
I was quite upset when Burke Berthead decided to kill off Opus as a protest to the Bush Administration(no I am not making that up). I chronicled the whole thing over on my robcasting blog.
Anyway, these days I still like to follow Funky Winkerbean.
You gotta love the comic strips man!

7:47 AM, August 31, 2009  

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