Customer Reviews

Schulzs Youth

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This volume reprints Charles Schulz' "Young Pillars" panels for the Worldwide Church of God youth magazine. Perhaps to distance himself just a bit from his concurrent work on PEANUTS, Schulz typically signed these works with a lowercase cursive "cms." Schulz' gags here, many of which involve (no surprise) Biblical and church-related references, are very much in the spirit of his PEANUTS gags, calculated to produce smiles and chuckles rather than guffaws. Schulz does make efforts to generate running gags involving such topics as bowling dates, rattletrap jalopies, and teens awkwardly trying to teach Sunday School lessons to seated children who look very much like well-dressed members of the PEANUTS gang, but he's usually content to make a gag with a single point and get off the stage. The earliest panels are comparatively realistic-looking, as if Schulz (just as in his syndicated panel IT'S ONLY A GAME) were consciously trying to make them so, but the familiar Schulz abstraction soon takes over. By the end of the run, the characters resemble nothing so much as contemporary PEANUTS participants stretched on a rack. In one unusual stylistic quirk, the faces of certain female characters -- especially good-looking ones -- are drawn so that there is a gap between the tip of the nose and the mouth. The closest thing the feature has to a recurring character is a skinny male skyscraper with a face like Charlie Brown's and a shock of hair resembling that of a ruffled rooster, but he doesn't ever develop a distinct personality. The message was clearly "the thing" in this enterprise, a sharp departure from the character dynamics that fueled PEANUTS. The book also includes Schulz' illustrations from another WCOG publication, "Two-by-Fours", which feature neatly-coiffed preschool kids carrying off mildly amusing religious-themed gags. Obviously essential for a Schulz completist, but whether this collection will interest anyone else is very much an open question.

This book by Sparky Schulz is simply a DELIGHT

It is a wonderful example of Sparky's creativity -- before and beyond his creation of the successful Peanuts Cartoon Strip.

There's something endearing in those drawings, and even the not religiously oriented appreciates such puns as "I take very seriously my religion, I argue with it all day!" and how not find all too true that "The more you mature, the more childish the rest of the world appears to be"?
A gem for Schulz aficionados, and not only for them!

This book is amazing and is so much fun. Every page is like looking in a window back in time at the youth of the past. The simple and happy nature. The common expectations. It is adorable and while enjoying, the reader can also learn a few lessons without even trying. This is a treasure for anyone who has or does work with youth in any way. It is also enjoyed by teens who can see themselves, their friends, and sometimes their grandparents in each cartoon.
Great buy and a treasure to share.

back in the mid '70's someone at church gave me a slim volume entitled "Whats buggin' old Pharoah?".. Later I gladly accepted "Teenager is not a disease." (even tho I was still preT)...Although I tended towards MAD mags then these still worked.. CShultz doing his minimalism thing into one panel comics is very cool and communicates his love of God, church and kids wonderfully...And this volume apparently collects ALL of his efforts in this project, title whatever..Kind of hard to impress todays kids that are used to big splashy grafix novels buts its nice to at least try... highly recommended