Schulz's Youth [Paperback]

Charles M Schulz (Author, Artist), Jerry Scott (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Between 1956 and 1965, as Peanuts was becoming an international phenomenon, Schulz also drew a much less famous comic strip. Young Pillars was a biweekly single-panel cartoon for the Church of God's teen magazine Youth, mostly about church-related themes: youth fellowship picnics, Sunday school homework, heavy stacks of Bible commentaries. Several hundred of them are collected here, along with a few other church-connected single-panel cartoons Schulz drew in the '60s and some notes explaining jokes whose sense has been lost to time. With its cast of more-or-less devout teenagers, Young Pillars generally lacks the biting wit and underlying darkness of Peanuts, although Schulz still gets off some zingers. ("Don't bother me," says the strip's most regular character, a gangly fellow who could be a 16-year-old Shermy. "I'm looking for a verse of Scripture to back up one of my preconceived notions!") It's far from Schulz's best work, but it fleshes out the theological concerns that were rarely far from the core of Peanuts. It's also fascinating to see his inimitable wobbly line and deadpan sense of humor in a different context, and his gift for capturing facial expressions with a few lines in drawings of characters older than the wise children that were his specialty. (May)
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Product Description

From the mid-1950s through the late 1960s, while Charlie Brown and Snoopy were turning into international superstars, Peanuts creator Charles Schulz was also creating a series of single-panel cartoons about teens. Featuring a foreword by "Zits" and "Baby Blues" writer Jerry Scott, this volume collects hundreds of these teenager cartoons. While some of this material has seen print in earlier collections (the last one published in the 1980s), for this book the Warner Press archives have been scoured, unearthing cartoons that have never been collected, including ones unseen since they first saw print over 45 years ago.

Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: About Comics; illustrated edition edition (June 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0975395890
• ISBN-13: 978-0975395899
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #196,781 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Schulz' take on godly teens, December 9, 2007

By	Christopher Barat (Owings Mills, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Schulz's Youth (Paperback)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful 'Religious' Humor, April 10, 2008

By	Donald R. Fraser "In Oneness" (Napa Valley, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Schulz's Youth (Paperback)

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.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is like going back in time, March 28, 2008

By	Laura N. Wallace "musicalsrgreat" (Duncanville, TX USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Schulz's Youth (Paperback)

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.