Peanuts: Did the little boy who sits in front of you at school cry again today?

Life has never been easy.

Peanuts: Promotion! Don't kid yourself ... Everything these days is promotion!

Lucy's cynicism makes her a girl after my own heart.

Peanuts and Get Fuzzy: I would like to say I enjoyed this first day at school...

Today's Peanuts includes some very nice character work and an impressive, intricate set-up leading up to a short, emphatic and very funny punchline.

Today's Get Fuzzy, meanwhile, includes the phrase "cow-based art."

Peanuts: What do you do with all the pictures of your hero when he gets sent down to the minors?

Peanuts is good. That is all.

Peanuts: This is all paid for by the city.

Years later, anti-library bias would become key in identifying the always unsigned work Sally Brown did as a cartoonist at Mort Walker Studios Inc.

Peanuts: How can we lose when we're so sincere?

This is old and overlinked, but it's baseball season now and it's always good to be reminded of brilliant things, so go (re)read this statistical analysis of Charlie Brown's baseball team. Despite their sincerity, they are not very good.

Peanuts: And I've got Linus down for Right Field.

It's the tower-building that really makes this comic.

But considering his range, shouldn't Linus be playing center field?

Peanuts: So I've decided to be a very rich and famous person who doesn't really care about money.

This has always been my goal, as well. And most everyone else's, I think.

Peanuts: I can't stand it!

This is just brutal. Brutal.

And I mean that in the best way possible.

Peanuts: Rats! Nobody ever gives me any valentines!

With the exception of Christmas, I'm not sure there's any holiday that cut to the core of what Peanuts is about quite like Valentine's Day.

Peanuts: She gave me a dollar to make up for it, but I'm gonna look awfully silly sucking my thumb and holding a dollar.

The brilliance of Peanuts is that it doesn't condescend, and it doesn't treat its characters as though they were stupid.

Linus is not the butt of this joke. Money is.

Peanuts: See? What did I tell you?

Happy New Year.

Peanuts: I hate playing "teddy bear"!

Today's rerun is probably the creepiest Peanuts comic I've ever seen.

Peanuts: You didn't mention jump ropes...

Sometimes it's just nice to be reminded that Peanuts really does deserve every nice thing anybody ever said about it.

Peanuts: I'm not the going-to-school type!

This Peanuts includes a very Family Circus-like malapropism in the third panel when Sally proclaims that she can’t be expected to remember “all that stuff about…the electrical college.” The important thing about it, though, is that it’s not the whole point of the comic, as it would be in a Family Circus cartoon, but rather a slightly humorous sub-joke based on character and context. The actual punchline—that Sally is worried about all of this even though she’s only going to kindergarten—is in the fourth panel.

Or maybe I’m just trying to justify chuckling at something in a Peanuts comic that I would have viciously mocked in a Keane cartoon.

Candorville, Prickly City and Frazz: Naaaawwww...too dog-ish.

This Candorville is funny, while this Prickly City is not so funny. But the reason I'm highlighting them is that they're both homages to Peanuts. Now, Peanuts is easily one of the best comic strips ever and completely deserves all the homages it receives. But I sometimes wish cartoonists would a pay a bit more attention to other classic comics. I can't even remember ever seeing a Pogo homage, and the last time I saw a Krazy Kat homage was in a Calvin and Hobbes strip.

Speaking of which, Calvin and Hobbes is the other strip that seems to get a lot of love. Frazz, for example, is basically one big Calvin and Hobbes homage.


*Candorville from 8-21-09. Prickly City from 8-22-09.

Peanuts Minus Snoopy: Do you have any regrets, Charlie Brown?

Friend of the blog, or at least the Twitter feed, Alex brings word of Peanuts Minus Snoopy, which I guess was sort of inevitable in the wake of Garfield Minus Garfield. The genius of Garfield Minus Garfield, of course, is that it changes the focus of a terrible comic and in so doing makes it a pretty great comic.

In Garfield the focus is always on Garfield: Garfield likes lasagna; Garfield likes to crush spiders; Garfield likes to torture dogs; Garfield likes to mock his owner; Garfield thinks he's way funnier than he actually is; etc. Removing Garfield shifts the focus of the strip onto Jon Arbuckle, whose pathos had always been obscured by the wisecracking of his dumbass cat. And so the comic becomes something genuinely different and smarter and better.

Peanuts Minus Snoopy, on the other hand, takes a great strip and turns it into...something slightly less great.

Unlike Garfield, Snoopy isn't really the focus of his strip. Peanuts is an ensemble; Snoopy is an important player, but Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy and Sally are all just as important. And so removing Snoopy doesn't change the focus of the comic in the way that removing Garfield from his eponymous strip does. Peanuts is about the struggles of childhood. Peanuts Minus Snoopy is...about the struggles of childhood.

This isn't to say that Peanuts Minus Snoopy is a disaster or anything. Far from it. It's an interesting experiment. It puts a finer point on some of the non-Snoopy relationships. It provides some pretty decent surreal humor. But it isn't as good as the originals. More often than not, it just feels like a pretty good comic strip that's missing something.

Peanuts, Zits, Cathy and Pluggers: When will you have a baby? or The limits of relatability.

One of the things that makes Peanuts so great is how relatable it is. In today's reprint from 1962, for example, we can relate to Linus because, while we've probably never been blown over by a Beagle, we have all had our assumptions and expectations unexpectedly overturned.

But there's other stuff going on here, too. The characters are (obviously) very well-defined, and their interaction is realistic within the world of the strip. The drawing, meanwhile, is expressive and sufficiently illustrates the absurdity of the joke.

In Zits, the characters are somewhat less well-defined, being at times little more than broad archetypes. In this strip, Jeremy isn't really a specific character so much as a stand-in for every teenage male everywhere; the same goes for Connie, who is just a stand-in for every mother of a teenage male everywhere.

As such, the strip has a tendency to lean a bit too heavily on relatability, which is the case here. The drawings, however, are often very well done, which is also the case here. While the joke isn't really anything special, basically just amounting to "Kids sure do eat a lot, don't they?", the image of Jeremy detaching his jaw and swallowing an entire ham in the second panel is funny enough that the lazy premise gets a pass.

I'm not generally in the target audience for Cathy, but I can relate to this particular strip. And that's a good thing! But it's still not funny.

The problem is that merely being relatable isn't enough. The characters in Cathy, like the characters in Zits, tend toward the archetypal. (The other big working woman comic, Sally Forth, actually has far better characters, despite being written by a man.) Cathy Guisewite's drawing, meanwhile, just isn't expressive or absurd or, just in general, good enough to be funny on its own. And so there's a lot of times when all the strip has to recommend it is its relatability. Which very nearly makes it Pluggers for working women. And that's not a good thing to be.

Because as much as I thoroughly despise Pluggers' self-congratulatory blue-collar populist bullshit, that's not its biggest problem. Pluggers' biggest problem is that it's basically relatability porn, so much so that it's actually written by the readers. The characters are not even archetypes, but instead completely blank slates onto which the readers are to graft themselves. And the drawing rarely has anything to recommend it; the characters exist as animals, for example, but for no good reason.

Today's installment isn't a great example for making this point. The joke is actually decently constructed, and the dog-husband's mortified facial expression is almost sort of amusing. As such, it's probably the best Pluggers comic I've ever seen. And, yeah, that's probably the faintest praise ever.

Of course, a lot of people like Pluggers. And a lot of people like Cathy. Because those comics are simple, and people understand them. Readers don't have to think about them or read them carefully or really even look at the drawings. And that's the problem. Relatability is a good thing, but using it as a crutch isn't. Doing so cheapens the relationship between the readers and the comics, turns it into something lazy and cheap and superficial. That's where Pluggers started, and where Cathy is at now, and where Zits could end up if its not careful. Peanuts never did give into that impulse. And that's another one of the things that makes it so great.