Publication Date: November 1, 2005 | Series: Peanuts
QUIET ON THE STRIP!
Hoping to have a lot of fun and laughs with the Peanuts gang? Say no more! In this newly compiled collection, Charlie Brown and company prove that actions speak louder than words–especially since these strips contain not a word of dialogue! The hilarious adventures of Charlie Brown fumbling and stumbling around the baseball field, Lucy bossing everyone around with a glare, and Snoopy and Woodstock up to their usual high jinks–proves that in the world of Peanuts, sometimes silence is golden!
Charles M. Schulz was born November 25, 1922 in Minneapolis. His destiny was foreshadowed when an uncle gave him, at the age of two days, the nickname Sparky (after the racehorse Spark Plug in the newspaper strip Barney Google).
In his senior year in high school, his mother noticed an ad in a local newspaper for a correspondence school, Federal Schools (later called Art Instruction Schools). Schulz passed the talent test, completed the course and began trying, unsuccessfully, to sell gag cartoons to magazines. (His first published drawing was of his dog, Spike, and appeared in a 1937 Ripley's Believe It Or Not! installment.) Between 1948 and 1950, he succeeded in selling 17 cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post--as well as, to the local St. Paul Pioneer Press, a weekly comic feature called Li'l Folks. It was run in the women's section and paid $10 a week. After writing and drawing the feature for two years, Schulz asked for a better location in the paper or for daily exposure, as well as a raise. When he was turned down on all three counts, he quit.
He started submitting strips to the newspaper syndicates. In the spring of 1950, he received a letter from the United Feature Syndicate, announcing their interest in his submission, Li'l Folks. Schulz boarded a train in June for New York City; more interested in doing a strip than a panel, he also brought along the first installments of what would become Peanuts--and that was what sold. (The title, which Schulz loathed to his dying day, was imposed by the syndicate). The first Peanuts daily appeared October 2, 1950; the first Sunday, January 6, 1952.
Diagnosed with cancer, Schulz retired from Peanuts at the end of 1999. He died on February 13, 2000, the day before Valentine's Day--and the day before his last strip was published--having completed 17,897 daily and Sunday strips, each and every one fully written, drawn, and lettered entirely by his own hand--an unmatched achievement in comics.
This review is from: It Goes Without Saying: Peanuts at Its Silent Best (Hardcover)
Ballantine Books have published several Peanuts books over the past 5 years or so. Several have chronicled strips published in a given year (1995 through 1999) while their most recent efforts have focused on themes (Halloween-related strips, baseball-related strips with another book based on camp-related strips coming out next year). This book deals with strips that have no dialogue in them, which was a format used by Schulz throughout the strip's nearly 50 year run.
It is amazing how Schulz could make a point or garner a small chuckle just through the actions of his characters without nary a word spoken. This is primarily done with his strips with the animal characters (Snoopy, Woodstock and Spike), but it actually to me is more effective with his human characters. I will say one thing. The book can be read through pretty quick with all that reading!
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