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...

The perfect disguise! There an awful lot of funny moments in Simon Hanselmann's Megahex, which collects and contextualizes the cartoonist's strips into one big, awesome, epic story, but that's the moment that I first remember laughing out loud while reading. I have a short review of the book in this week's issue of Las Vegas Weekly, if you would like to go read that review. I'd definitely read the book though, were I you...and it's your cup of tea, which it may not be, as there's an awful lot of content that I think can best be described as—oh, what's the term...?—fucked up. That's the term!

Over at Robot 6, I wrote a bit about the opening issues of DC's new weekly series, Earth 2: World's End, which, like Futures End, stars a bunch off-brand, alternate versions of the "real" DC superheroes.

(While there, check out Tom Bondurant's piece about Firestorm and Cyborg, which serves as a sort of introduction—or re-introduction, depending on your familiarity—in light of the two character's maybe appearing in live-action TV and film in the near-ish future. I was surprisingly not the least-bit-interested in Warner Bros DC supehero movie announcement earlier in the week, perhaps because it seems like I've been hearing about all of these movies more-or-less forever now. The only one that really surprised me was that they were planning a Cyborg movie, since he's a pretty boring character for a superhero: He's half-man, half-robot and, um, that's his whole deal. I can't think of a single Cyborg-specific villain. If you were going to give a Wolfman/Perez New Teen Titan-era character a solo movie, you should at least go for Beat Boy/Changeling—at least his powers are interesting looking, you know? Maybe the Justice League movie will make him into a more interesting character, but, at the moment, Cyborg is maybe the last DC superhero I would want to see star in a solo feature film).

Finally, I have a pair of reviews at School Library Journal's Good Comics For Kids blog. The first one is of a neat little line of board books in which DC's super-people teach the littlest of kids about shapes and shit such. The second Snoopy's Thanksgiving, another of Fantagraphics' little, seasonal gift book collections of Peanuts strips.

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).

Another thing I liked about Highschool of the Dead Vol. 2?

That's the volume where Bad-Ass Manga Snoopy shows up. Check it out:

In the third volume, the above dog gets the name Zeke, which makes it slightly more difficult for me to pretend that after Schulz's death, Snoopy decided to move to Japan and start a new career in manga.

More difficult, but not impossible.

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.

This expression of Snoopy's cracks me up:

Here's a rather poor scan of the strip that image is taken from, for context:That is apparently the face Snoopy makes when he's feeling sick from having had too much to eat and drink. That may explain why the face looked so strange to me, as it's certainly not one that shows up in many Peanuts strips, unlike the expressions he makes in the third and fourth panels.

The strip was scanned from the May 25 issue of the Ashtabula County Star Beacon.

One nice thing about newspaper comic strips

I've mentioned in passing before that I have a new roommate now—Yogi, a 12-year-old chocolate Labrador retriever (pictured below). She was my mother's dog and has lived with her the majority of those 12 years, but now poor old Yogo has developed dog arthritis and doesn't travel as well as she used to, so she's been living with me since this past spring. As it turns out, the lifestyle of an old, arthritic dog and that of a comics blogger are remarkably compatible!

A few days ago, I was going to make a pot of coffee for elevenses, and when I opened the cupboard where I keep my coffee I found a Sunday Peanuts taped to the inside of the cupboard door. My mother must have cut it out and taped it up as a surprise where she knew I'd find it the last time she was here.

The subject matter was Charlie Brown ruminating on how thankless the task of caring for a dog is...except for when it's not thankless.

Maybe not the greatest Peanuts strip, and the funnies page it was cut from (not exactly sure which paper, although I can narrow it down to three) had it laid out in an uneven column that hardly flatters it (see below), but it made me smile at the time, perhaps as much because it was a symbol that a family member was thinking of me and used it as part of a nice gesture.

And it reminded me of at least one thing about newspaper comics that is kind of special (Generally I only bring them up on the blog when it's to say something disparaging about how terrible they have become).

Is there any other medium of popular creative expression which lends itself to this sort of gesture? You might see a scene in a movie or a TV show or even a commercial or perhaps hear a song on the radio that reminds you of a friend or loved one, but you can't exactly take a pair of scissors to a TV or movie screen; you can reduce a song to a physical artifact to stick in an envelope or tape to a refrigerator door.

It's technically possible to cut a passage out of a book, of course, but books (like comics!) are expensive. The funnies are delivered to people's houses for such a little amount of money that they're practically free.

I don't want to open any web comics vs. paper comics debates, but I think this sort of funnies-as-interpersonal-currency is something the paper ones continue to do better than web comics. Sure, you can print out any comic you read on the web to put up on the office bulletin board, but it's a more engaged comics reader who will go looking at particular sites on the Internet to see strips (I know I'm the only person in my extended family and circle of friends who does so, for example).

Whatever their deficiencies, newspaper comic strips remain the most cut-out-and-taped-to-kitchen-cupboards type of comic...or popular art of any kind.

Well, newspaper comics or amateur, original art by little kids related to whoever owns the kitchen cupboards, I guess....


*********************

The particular strip discussed above:
(As always, clicking the images make them bigger, if you're having trouble appreciating Schulz's line work)

So I understand the Obamas are looking for a new dog...

Provided they don't have their hearts set on one that's both three-dimensional and, what's the word, real, then I might have a few suggestions...


Krypto The Superdog

Breed: Kryptonian

Current owner: Superman

Positives: Has all of Superman's many powers, only scaled to dog proportions, making him an ideal guard dog, watch dog, bloodhound and, should the need arise, attack dog.

Negatives: Would be difficult for human owners or handlers to take him for flies into outer space for exercise, or throw trees for him to fetch; could render the president's secret service detail superfluous, costing hundreds of them their jobs



Ace, The Bat-Hound

Breed: German shepherd

Current owner: Batman (estranged)

Positives: Batman would likely be willing to give Ace up, given how the Dark Knight tends to be ashamed of his occasional canine sidekick and is constantly trying to distance himself; an experienced tracker, Ace could help find people when the president can't (Look out, bin Laden!)

Negatives: Previous owner was kind of insane, so Ace might have a difficult time adjusting to living with a normal family that never wears capes or assaults anyone; background check could compromise Ace's secret identity, and thus that of Batman



Rex, The Wonder Dog

Breed: German Shepherd

Current owner: A national treasure, Rex is owned by us all

Posiitves: A superb polymath and jack-of-all-trades, Rex's skill set and resume are unparalleled by any dog in history (and, come to think of it, few humans); in addition to being an excellent guard dog, he could easily fill in as a nanny for the girls, a secret service agent, White House chief of staff, Secretary of State, Vice President, or whatever Obama needs, really

Negatives: It might not do to have the First Dog showing up the president of the United States, and the fact that Rex would likely crush the back of al Qaeda, capture bin Laden, turn the economy around, solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and invent a new source of cheap green energy within his first 100 days pretty much guarantees he'll be making Obama seem incompetent in comparison.



G'Nort Esplanade G'neesmacher

Breed: G'Newtian

Current owners: The Guardians of the Galaxy

Positives: As a biped that can speak English and has opposable thumbs, G'Nort needs little in the way of care, and could be more useful than most first pets tend to be(he could feed himself, reach things on high shelves for the girls, etc.); his magic wishing ring is sometimes referred to as the "most powerful weapon in the universe" and can create any form of energy and matter in any amount, so long as he has the necessary willpower and imagination

Negatives: Past unsavory personal connections include Guy Gardner, The Scarlet Skier and Justice League Antarctica; allegiance to an immortal race of remote, controlling aliens may present the appearance of a conflict of interest; less intelligent than most species of earth dogs; a little of him goes a long way



Lockjaw

Breed: Attilanian giant bulldog

Current owner: The Inhuman Royal Family, or possibly Ben "The Thing" Grimm

Positives: An exceptionally good dog for watching after the daugthers of the powerful; has experience working with ruling families; in addition to his great strength, his ability to teleport would be a useful form of transportation for the president; would be the first First Pet with a tuning fork in its head

Negatives: His great size may be problematic, potentially causing damage to the White House; the United States and the Inhumans have had several recent conflicts, and it may be impolitic to invite one of them to live in the White House; drools



Scooby-Doo

Breed: Great Dane

Current owner: Some beatnik

Positives: Master of disguise (for a dog); will do absolutely anything for a scooby snack; can talk (albeit with a speech impediment); friends with ghost-breakers Mystery Inc., who could prove useful in solving the mystery of the White House ghosts

Negatives: Extremely cowardly and somewhat paranoid (Get ready to hear “Sp-Sp-Spirit?!” every time you mention “The spirit of bipartisanship," Mr. President-Elect); needs held a lot; enormous appetite could put an unusual strain on the White House's pet food budget



Dynomutt, Dog Wonder

Breed: Android

Current owner: The Blue Falcon/Radley Crown

Positives: As his dog hair is synthetic, he's hypoallergenic; miraculous system of transistors allows him to telescope his limbs to great lengths and pull a gadget for almost any emergency out of his chest; worked for the first black mayor in a Saturday morning cartoon; former All-Star Laff-a-Lympic athlete; his partner Blue Falcon says he’s “as strong as a train…fearless, scare-less” and “a go-go dog person” (that’s a compliment, right?)

Negatives: An inveterate bumbler; kind of an idiot (for a talking android dog); has an extremely annoying laugh; has amassed a long list of goofy but potentially dangerous villains like Madame Apeface, Queen Hornet, The Red Vulture, The Glob, Fishface, Lowbrow, The Blimp and so on; according to his partner Blue Flacon he has “a so-so brain” and is “a little too careless”



Goofy

Breed: Human canine hybrid

Current owner: The Walt Disney corporation

Positives: Has opposable thumbs and walks bipedally, so he can manipulate most basic tools; can dress, feed and walk himself; can speak (although mostly just says “Gorsh!” and “A-hyuck hyuck”)

Negatives: Severely mentally retarded (or possibly brain-damaged); unsavory associations include a gigantic rodent and a duck with severe anger management issues



Snoopy

Breed: Beagle

Current owner: A depressed, round-headed grade school student

Positives: Good with kids; extremely affectionate toward little girls; quite a dancer; his Easter Beagle schtick would be a hit at White House lawn Easter egg rolls and hunts

Negatives: Prone to hallucination and elaborate delusions, has trouble separating his imagination from reality; ties to MetLife may present conflict of interest when the new president tackles health insurance reform