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Posts from Heddels for 10/30/2023
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By Oli Stevenson on Oct 30, 2023 12:01 am
There are a lot of answers you’ll get to the question “What’s the longest story ever told?” The Bible. Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps. But the real answer is a simple four-panel comic written by one man, Charles M. Schulz, between the years 1950 and 2000. It’s a story about a group of misfit children and a beagle with an active imagination: Peanuts.
Heddels is all about things that last and Peanuts has been going strong for over 70 years, has outlived its creator, and isn’t going to see an end anytime soon. Schulz’s extensive merchandising, the comic’s countercultural influence and its characters becoming part of the visual lexicon of the Vietnam War—all of which we will explore later—also mean that Peanuts has played a huge role in vintage clothing and heritage reproductions from its start in 1950 until now.
In this two-part series, we’ll be investigating the effect that Peanuts has had on both mainstream culture and counterculture over the past 73 years. To kick things off, we’re going to take it back to the very start and explore what the cartoon is all about and determine why it’s so popular after all this time.
Sparky and Spike
Charles M. Schulz was born on November 26 1922 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Comics became a part of his life very early on, his uncle nicknaming him Sparky after the horse Spark Plug from Billy Debeck’s Barney Google who had been introduced six months before Schulz was born. All Schulz wanted to do as a kid was “draw funny pictures” so he picked up the pencils early on, often drawing their family dog Spike. Spike, unlike his future namesake, did not live in the Mojave Desert but did eat pins, tacks, screws, and razor blades. We learned this from Schulz’s first-ever published cartoon: a drawing of Spike from a national Ripley’s Believe It or Not newspaper feature from 1937. Schulz was just 15 years old. A few years later, as a Senior in high school, Schulz enrolled in a correspondence cartoon course at the Federal School of Applied Cartooning.
Spike by Sparky via Ripley’s
Though, like everything else, the early ‘40s took a knock on Schulz’s career as a cartoonist. In 1943, he lost his beloved mother to cancer and, shortly after, he was drafted. Schulz spent the following two years training at Camp Campbell in Kentucky before being posted in Europe. The future cartoonist was then a squad leader of the 50 caliber machine gun team in the 20th Armored Division of the US Army. Though, Schulz never actually saw combat. He never fired his weapon and the one German he came face-to-face with quickly surrendered. Nevertheless, the events of the previous two years, the death of his mother and being drafted into the army, had a profound effect on the young Schulz.
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