Thursday, March 05, 2015

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.

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