22 Panels Comic Strip Book Club - Charles Schulz

Bob Sikoryak, Sean Harklerode, and Tad discuss Charles Schulz and the Peanuts gang.

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Transcript

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Tad Eggleston: Go.

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Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to the Comic Strip Book Club on on 22 panels. We've got a a lean group this time, because

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Tad Eggleston: I mean, we have people who are working for a living, and they actually have work to do. And that means that they don't have time to come talk comics, and we love them for that. So, you know. Go buy stuff from Karl Krumholz and Jonathan Bayless when you see it. Obviously Bob Skoriak, too, but Bob was able to join us anyway, even with the work that he has to do. So buy more of his stuff. And, Sean, the next time you're in a play we'll send people there, or is there anything I should send them to now?

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Sean Harklerode: I'm in the in the very enviable position of not being able to answer the question.

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Tad Eggleston: Cool, so I mean.

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Sean Harklerode: I have something that I cannot talk about right now.

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Sean Harklerode: All right. Fantastic.

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R. Sikoryak: 4 1st steps.

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R. Sikoryak: Or Superman. Maybe I'm.

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Tad Eggleston: You know. Has anybody ever seen Sean and Clark Kent in the same room together?

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Sean Harklerode: Well.

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R. Sikoryak: Yeah. Man.

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Tad Eggleston: So so we we're we're we're I don't think we'll be able to recreate the great lost episode.

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Tad Eggleston: We had a rousing conversation about Charles Schultz in October of

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Tad Eggleston: 2023, and that was also while we were recording our Santos sisters

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Tad Eggleston: audio adaptation. So I was sending Tyler lots of recordings all at once, and somehow it got lost in the shuffle and deleted from everybody's computers before we realized that it hadn't been posted.

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Tad Eggleston: So now we're gonna talk talk, Charles Schultz and Charlie Brown again, and hopefully, it's even better because we've had a whole year and a half to think about

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Tad Eggleston: Charles Schultz and Charlie Brown, and I'm just going to kick off with a

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Tad Eggleston: I think all of us kind of have a

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Tad Eggleston: like how we 1st got into peanuts

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Tad Eggleston: type story like where, where? Where we were.

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Tad Eggleston: where we encountered it first.st What made us start paying attention to it more? Whatever I'll let you guys fight over who goes first? st

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R. Sikoryak: Sean. You can go first.st

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Sean Harklerode: Well, I I would say my very 1st introduction to Charlie Brown, my mother drew

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Sean Harklerode: the Charlie Brown, the peanuts characters on curtains, where my brother.

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Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow!

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Sean Harklerode: Bedroom when I was a kid. So I just remember having all the characters on this.

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Sean Harklerode: The curtains

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Sean Harklerode: she used a thing called liquid embroidery, which you know was color fast and didn't fade with with washings. Then, of course, you know the the TV Specials.

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Sean Harklerode: you know, I can still hear that the Cbs special presentation music and the peppermint patty commercials.

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Sean Harklerode: so yeah, though, that was my 1st and then I had a little Charlie Brown encyclopedia in 1st grade.

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Sean Harklerode: and then just checking, like the little compilations out

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Sean Harklerode: when I was in elementary school from the school library.

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Sean Harklerode: And you know it's it's 1 of those things like a lifelong companion, you know. I don't.

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah.

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Sean Harklerode: Remember a time without.

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Tad Eggleston: Without Charlie Brown.

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Sean Harklerode: Charlie, brown.

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Sean Harklerode: Yeah.

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R. Sikoryak: Sean, I love that. Your 1st memory of them is someone's drawings of the characters because they're so iconic. And I mean that it's so personal that it's your mom that just seems very, very sweet, but also just that the characters are so iconic and ubiquitous, and would appear not even in their original form but that you'd like absorb them through the culture is really interesting, and actually says a lot about the strip, because,

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R. Sikoryak: you know there's so many products, merchandise, spin-offs of the comic.

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R. Sikoryak: And sometimes people don't like that about peanuts, because it became so ubiquitous. But, on the other hand.

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R. Sikoryak: Schultz was always

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R. Sikoryak: willing to let the characters kind of go off in the world, but at the same time the strip, the strip itself was always completely personal and completely his own. And

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R. Sikoryak: I'm going to say that the 1st time I saw the strip was in the newspapers we had a great newspaper growing up. I was born in 1964, and my brothers were reading comics. They're both older than me. So I'm going to say I saw it in the newspaper before I saw it on television. But who can say?

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R. Sikoryak: My brother had also painted Christmas decorations with the peanuts characters which were outside my house every year. This was probably around 1970, I'm going to guess.

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R. Sikoryak: But but, like you, Sean, I would say I saw them in different media. But but I was really lucky enough to read it in the paper day by day from I mean when I was very young, maybe 69. I'm not even sure, but I feel like I saw it there, or maybe the books which were also super prolific by 64. I think they were already reprinting the strips.

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R. Sikoryak: you know. Every year a new collection would come out, I'm guessing. And you know the strip had started in 1950, so I already had a backlog longer than my life strips to read.

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R. Sikoryak: so it's it's funny to ask 1st experiences because it is something that is so

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R. Sikoryak: so permeated the culture in so many ways.

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Tad Eggleston: Well, and I think my early experiences are similar. I can't completely pinpoint where I became

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Tad Eggleston: a Charlie Brown kid. I feel like my earliest memory is watching bon voyage, Charlie Brown at my

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Tad Eggleston: Grandma Gretna's house, if only because I feel like as I got into the comics for a while I just I kept expecting to see the French storyline. And it's like, Well, why aren't we?

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Tad Eggleston: Which didn't make me enjoy it less? It was just like part. You know I have.

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Tad Eggleston: I have autism. I'm very autistic and and like, so I'm always making those connections so so like, if I've seen it here. I'm looking for it there, or I'm trying to figure out where

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Tad Eggleston: so I think it started with Bonvoy as Charlie Brown, and just loving those characters, and and the way it went, and then I became certainly, you know, the Charlie Brown was the top

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Tad Eggleston: top cartoon in the the Daily and Sunday Tribune

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Tad Eggleston: for as long it might still be, because I think they're still printing the reprints, but it like.

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Tad Eggleston: if you picked up the comics page. It was the 1st thing you saw.

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Tad Eggleston: you know peanuts had that top spot for my entire life.

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Tad Eggleston: And like. As soon as as soon as I noticed that Charlie Brown was a baseball player, too. That certainly made me

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Tad Eggleston: love him that much more particularly because he he

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Tad Eggleston: doesn't need to win to want to keep going out and playing.

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Tad Eggleston: and that was totally me. As a kid I was never the

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Tad Eggleston: very rarely the best player on the field, and even if I, even if I had an argument for it, it was like, in a 1 dimensional way, I was the best pitcher on the field, but I couldn't hit, or I couldn't. You know what I mean?

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Tad Eggleston: You know, and I do.

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Tad Eggleston: I mean, I know I did art before this, because I mean

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Tad Eggleston: you do art in school. But the earliest art project that I remember doing was in 5th grade was the 1st time we did one of those grid drawings where we had to bring in a cartoon.

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Tad Eggleston: and we split it into 9, and then we split our paper into 9 so we could blow up the cartoon, and I used Charlie Brown on the mound.

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Tad Eggleston: I think my mom still has that somewhere. The drawing I did of Charlie Brown on the mound.

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Tad Eggleston: I think mid wind up even. I don't remember. But but you know. So it's just like, like you guys, it's just been ubiquitous in my life, you know.

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Tad Eggleston: I can't remember not having Charlie Brown. I probably sometimes have gone years without reading any Charlie Brown, and then like.

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Tad Eggleston: come across one Charlie Brown book and fallen down the rabbit hole

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Tad Eggleston: and spent a week reading nothing but Charlie Brown, and you know

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Tad Eggleston: Getting ready for this episode. I was jumping between like 7 different

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Tad Eggleston: collections. I love that. He's so ubiquitous. He gets collected different ways. You know you've got. You've got the the old. You've got the fantagraphics, black and white collections in in chronological order. You've got themed collections you've got.

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Tad Eggleston: You've got the Sunday collections. You've you've got themed collections where

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Tad Eggleston: the the panels are are laid out differently, where? Where they're in square boxes rather than 4 across, you know.

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Tad Eggleston: because the story the stories themselves are just universal.

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Tad Eggleston: You know I love all the different things that that

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Tad Eggleston: Snoopy has been and done through the years.

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Tad Eggleston: you know. I mean, every time I go back and revisit any part of Charlie Brown is when I realize, and we just talked about this with with Kirby this morning.

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Tad Eggleston: He's like the DNA of, like almost all comics we know now.

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Tad Eggleston: you know somebody. They were either influenced by Schultz or influenced by somebody who was influenced by Schultz, you know. As I was reading a collection that had, like the many faces of Snoopy, and I'm like, Oh, my God! This is Spaceman Spiff and Hobbes.

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Tad Eggleston: No, I'd never directly drawn the line between Charlie Brown and Calvin and Hobbes, but that now I'm totally seeing.

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R. Sikoryak: Yeah, I never thought of the spiff.

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Tad Eggleston: Hi.

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R. Sikoryak: Connection, either.

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Tad Eggleston: Right. But but you had those make-believe sequences in Charlie Brown, too. They just were more likely to be snoopy. But that but that makes it even a stronger connection to Calvin and Hobbes, because he's now turned Snoop, you know, when Snoopy went from being just a regular dog to

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Tad Eggleston: being so much more it just the the possibilities of the comic strip just exploded, and it really became

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Tad Eggleston: a strip that started out as like

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Tad Eggleston: an observation of kids. And often the way kids

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Tad Eggleston: I mean, one of the things I love about it is that it doesn't make them always happy.

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Tad Eggleston: It doesn't make them unaware. They have a range of feelings. They're not always nice to each other, but they are often

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Tad Eggleston: naive.

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Tad Eggleston: But as it goes on it, it also captures.

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Tad Eggleston: They're just full of imagination.

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Tad Eggleston: You, you know, it starts becoming more like

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Tad Eggleston: is somebody who's not just. And you know, I think you see a little bit of this if you look at

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Tad Eggleston: Schultz's biography as

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Tad Eggleston: against the books, it's like he went from observing children to observing and talking to children, and therefore was able to not just

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Tad Eggleston: show what he was seeing, but but like, Oh, well, yeah. But but my dog does this, and

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Tad Eggleston: and Bob, you're frozen on my screen. Does that mean that you're also.

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R. Sikoryak: I hope you can still hear me.

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R. Sikoryak: Yes, I can. Okay, yeah.

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R. Sikoryak: Well, since you hadn't said anything in a little bit, I was hoping that you weren't trying to add things, and I wasn't hearing you. No.

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R. Sikoryak: no, that was fine. I was. I'm yeah no, I'm I'm here. I'm here.

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R. Sikoryak: but this is an audio podcast so we don't have to worry.

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Tad Eggleston: Right.

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Sean Harklerode: Right, right.

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Tad Eggleston: Exactly.

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R. Sikoryak: So you you did bring up a lot of interesting notions, though I'm not exactly sure

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R. Sikoryak: I don't remember now. I did read the I did read the Michaelis biography. I don't remember

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R. Sikoryak: how how it spoke about the evolution of Snoopy but

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R. Sikoryak: but the strip has had so many iterations over the years and

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R. Sikoryak: it always. It always treated children as adults in a certain way, but

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R. Sikoryak: but obviously went through so many permutations. It's hard to hard to unpack all of them.

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I just came across, and I don't know when it's from, because it's it's in. It's in the collection

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Tad Eggleston: peanuts. Kids. Lucy speaks. Speak out, which isn't as Lucy centered as I expected, but at the end of a sequence

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Tad Eggleston: that that Snoopy has been the Red Baron, but also talking to this French girl when she passes

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Tad Eggleston: French girl is in class with

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Tad Eggleston: why am I forgetting Charlie's sister's name right now?

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R. Sikoryak: Sally.

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so she's sitting behind Sally, and she says, every day when I walk to school I meet this strange creature. He wears goggles and a white scarf.

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Tad Eggleston: That's my brother's dog. He's weird, your brother or his dog both, and I'm like that's

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Tad Eggleston: I just want that. That's the the one of many peanuts, coke

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Tad Eggleston: comics just like clip out and go. This is what peanuts is.

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Sean Harklerode: Right.

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Tad Eggleston: Cool.

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Sean Harklerode: You had. I wanted to kind of circle back a couple of things.

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Sean Harklerode: 1st of all, when you mentioned watching bon voyage, Charlie Brown. It reminded me how excited I was

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Sean Harklerode: that I got to go see

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Sean Harklerode: Snoopy come home at the theaters. I think I was 4 or 5,

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Sean Harklerode: and I was so excited that I was going to see Snoopy at a movie. It was so exciting, but

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Sean Harklerode: the ubiquity that we all talked about earlier.

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Sean Harklerode: I think, as a teenager. I loved Bloom County.

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Sean Harklerode: and of course Burke Brethod was always making fun of Snoopy being the corporate spokesman and everything, and I think I

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Sean Harklerode: you know you start not really appreciating what peanuts was.

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Sean Harklerode: You know you you don't appreciate it for how special it it really was.

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Sean Harklerode: And when I got to college.

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Sean Harklerode: I remember my friend Galen Black was listening to the soundtrack to the the Christmas Special.

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Sean Harklerode: and I was like, Oh, wow! You know I that's probably something I've watched every year, for, you know, all my life, and it came on during exams that year.

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Sean Harklerode: and I made a plan. I was tutoring some folks, and I was like, whatever we do.

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Sean Harklerode: We're watching Charlie Brown Christmas, and from that moment I've watched it every year since

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Sean Harklerode: I usually wind up watching it with my family on Christmas Eve, but I think that was the beginning of my

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Sean Harklerode: my coming back to it.

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Sean Harklerode: and recognizing that there was something special and universal about these characters.

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Sean Harklerode: And you know you can't. I focused mainly on reading the seventies for this, this iteration of the podcast

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Sean Harklerode: and I think that may have been the peak.

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Sean Harklerode: Right?

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Sean Harklerode: I would say 1973 feels

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Sean Harklerode: I don't know what was going on with Charles Schultz in that time.

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Sean Harklerode: but there was a lot going on creatively. And

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Sean Harklerode: you know Charlie Brown went through a lot that year.

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R. Sikoryak: Yeah, well, a lot. And a lot of the

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R. Sikoryak: a lot of the strip is very related to what was going on in his life. And that's 1 thing that the biography that David Mckellis I apologies if I'm mispronouncing his name. But the David Mckellis biography called Schultz and peanuts really sort of talks about every part of his life, and how it relates to the comic.

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R. Sikoryak: maybe maybe to excess, but I don't know, but certainly certainly you can see you can see echoes. I can't remember when he married Jeannie Schultz. Well, the the future Jeannie Schultz that was sometime in the seventies. There was a lot of upheaval in his life in the in the seventies. A lot of changes.

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R. Sikoryak: And you talk about the universality of the characters. But the. It's also

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R. Sikoryak: amazingly personal. I mean, that's the thing about it. It's this very ubiquitous.

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R. Sikoryak: These characters are so ubiquitous in in in

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R. Sikoryak: And when I was a kid they would be in. They would be in, not even as a kid. When I was an adult they would be in life insurance ads they would the Christmas specials, the movies, the the T-shirts, all the merchandise.

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R. Sikoryak: But yet the comic is is so personal to him, so specific to what he's going through expresses all of his anxieties and joys, and

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R. Sikoryak: and the gamut of his experiences in that strip. But but we do think of those like iconic shapes and those iconic characters kind of outside of it. So it's it's really interesting. And it's funny you mentioned like, Burke Brethod, kind of like going off about him being so commercial because there was definitely a there was definitely a

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R. Sikoryak: a reaction to that kind of merchandising. And of course Calvin and Hobbes is always held up, as the is the example of the of the of the of the cartoonist who did it right, and I and I totally respect that approach.

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R. Sikoryak: But also I think Watterson would be the 1st to say that it would. His strip wouldn't exist without without the comic strip peanuts, you know.

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R. Sikoryak: And that's it's like I. Oh, go ahead.

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Tad Eggleston: No, no! Go ahead and finish.

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R. Sikoryak: No, just that. It was really hard for us to see it at this point. How how influential it was.

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Sean Harklerode: And Watterson certainly gave it to brethod, for all of Brethod's merchandising, as well.

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R. Sikoryak: Well.

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Tad Eggleston: The reason that I smiled when you brought that up is one of the things that I was flipping through, for this is is a book called The Complete Peanuts Family Album.

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Tad Eggleston: for which Burke Brethod wrote the Foreword and and pointed out specifically, that when he had

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Tad Eggleston: a broken spine. After after his plane crash he got a

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Tad Eggleston: package in the mail in the hospital

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Tad Eggleston: that included a very rare peanuts. Original strip signed to Berkeley with friendship and every best wish sparky.

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Tad Eggleston: and he said, with friendship, I'd never met him.

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Tad Eggleston: Character counts, indeed, in Sparky's character

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Tad Eggleston: case, his characters and all their flaws and passions and idiosyncrasies, gave a collective voice to his own character of deep and undisguised humanity.

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Tad Eggleston: I wish I'd known him better when I had the chance.

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Tad Eggleston: This volume may be the next best thing.

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Tad Eggleston: But yeah, so, and then it has a a

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Tad Eggleston: outland comic of of the cat eating the dog, and

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Tad Eggleston: that's selling life insurance and Charlie Brown from.

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R. Sikoryak: Can you remind me what book that is? I don't know that one.

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Tad Eggleston: It's called the Complete Peanuts Family Album.

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R. Sikoryak: Okay.

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Tad Eggleston: It is by.

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Tad Eggleston: It's the ultimate Guide to Charles M. Schultz, classic Characters by Andrew Farrago.

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Tad Eggleston: forward by Berkeley Brethid, and prefaced by Bob Peterson.

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R. Sikoryak: Okay. I know, Andrew, that's great.

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I will admit that I own it almost entirely, because it was. It was really cheap digitally one day on on that site that we don't talk about.

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R. Sikoryak: You know I but it's cool.

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Tad Eggleston: Enough that I kind of want a like full size one at some point, and.

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R. Sikoryak: I had to get rid of some of my peanuts books. I just had too many, because there's redundancies. After hundreds of volumes that have come out. I'm like, well, I guess I don't need. I don't need the copies I grew up with. I have the fantagraphics ones which are complete.

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R. Sikoryak: So either the format.

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but you can't put them in your back pocket.

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R. Sikoryak: No, you can't! You can't!

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Tad Eggleston: I mean that

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Tad Eggleston: we don't have enough books anymore that you can carry around in your back pocket. It's half the reason I've gone digital.

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Tad Eggleston: I can still carry digital books in my pocket.

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Sean Harklerode: As someone who hangs on to jackets for far too long. I had to finally get a new winter jacket.

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Sean Harklerode: and one thing I was really looking for was something that had a pocket big enough.

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Tad Eggleston: That I could comfortably put a pocketbook in. You know the signet pocketbooks.

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Tad Eggleston: Yep.

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Sean Harklerode: Just have pulp! Sized.

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Tad Eggleston: That's that's a requirement for me. In winter coats. I actually prefer to have a minimum of

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Tad Eggleston: 2 inside pockets and 4 outside pockets, and at least one of the inside pockets has to be big enough for

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Tad Eggleston: the the pocket size paperback.

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R. Sikoryak: What?

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R. Sikoryak: Even when I was a kid, there were.

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R. Sikoryak: There were the paperback.

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R. Sikoryak: there were paperback paperback editions. They were the slightly larger trade paperbacks. Yeah. And there were

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R. Sikoryak: 7 by 10 inch volumes. Give or take that I was buying in the seventies. I mean, I was buying all of his books in in every format. And

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R. Sikoryak: I mean, it's amazing. I'm often looking for old collections of comics. And there was a time in the seventies where everything was being printed in paperback. But then there are many artists whose work never got reprinted, and Schultz has been reprinted

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R. Sikoryak: so many.

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Tad Eggleston: Umpteen 1,000 times. Yeah.

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R. Sikoryak: And and I want to change the topic slightly. But it's sort of related to this. I realized yesterday I was talking to someone. Charles Schultz died 25 years ago this week.

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah.

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R. Sikoryak: And I remember how how much that hit me at the time.

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R. Sikoryak: and and and Ted, that you say that he is still the top strip in the newspapers.

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Tad Eggleston: Believe so.

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R. Sikoryak: Yeah, I.

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Tad Eggleston: I haven't picked up a physical tribune in a while, so I can't guarantee it. But the last time I had a Sunday Tribune he was the top half like everything above the fold in the Sunday funnies.

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R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, maybe that's just something about their audience. I wonder how Schultz would feel about that. On one hand, he was so competitive he would probably be very happy to still be at the top. But, on the other hand, I could also see him saying, Hey, let somebody else in there, right? I don't know. I don't know him well enough to know which of those would be him, but I could believe either one.

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R. Sikoryak: He was very supportive. I mean, I love that. He sent breath of that that strip, you know, people who the cartoonists who knew him like Kathy guys, white and

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R. Sikoryak: Oh, I'm blanking out on the name, but.

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Sean Harklerode: Stone, from.

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R. Sikoryak: Very good. Yes, Lynn Johnson. Yes, exactly. They speak very highly of of him as being like someone they could talk to and get advice from

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R. Sikoryak: Well, so great.

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R. Sikoryak: generous man, even as super competitive, I mean, as as with all of the neuroses of the characters.

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R. Sikoryak: Schultz wanted to be a winner, and he was. I mean, that kind of ambition that he had for himself really comes through. I say that in a I mean that as a as a, as a great, but like aggressively so.

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Tad Eggleston: He was like. He was like competitive in the best possible way, though he didn't want you to be worse. He didn't want to undermine you.

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Tad Eggleston: He just wanted to be the best.

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R. Sikoryak: Yeah.

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Tad Eggleston: You know it wasn't a go out and break their kneecaps so I can win. It was a.

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R. Sikoryak: Right.

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Tad Eggleston: I'll just hit more home. It was the Ted Williams. You're gonna create the shift for me, all right. I know how to bait the shift, hit it over the fence.

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Sean Harklerode: You know, early on he talked about.

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Sean Harklerode: you know, being jealous of of Mort Walker's success right? Because Mort had earlier success than he did.

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Sean Harklerode: But you know I mean

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Sean Harklerode: nothing absolutely against Mort Walker. But Schultz has has reached another level.

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Sean Harklerode: Than that.

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R. Sikoryak: Absolutely, absolutely.

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Tad Eggleston: In terms of the niceness. I

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Tad Eggleston: I haven't read all of it, but there's a fanagraphics put out a a book of interviews with him.

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Tad Eggleston: That that starts out with with one that he did with Gary Groff.

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Tad Eggleston: and he talks about. I think it was John Bailey was the.

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Tad Eggleston: I think the editor at Collier's at the time, who didn't actually wind up buying any of his

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Tad Eggleston: cartoons, but he said I sent him one batch of roughs once, and he tore out little scraps and corners of paper and attached them to each one, telling me what was wrong with them, and why he didn't buy it, which took time.

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Tad Eggleston: He must have felt it was important. I never met the man, but that was good, so I wonder how much

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Tad Eggleston: that influenced him

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Tad Eggleston: in terms of how he would treat people going forward, that this person that he never met, who never actually bought any stuff from him.

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Tad Eggleston: It sounds like he might have done it to other people, or for other people, too, because he said

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Tad Eggleston: he talked to Mort Walker and others.

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Tad Eggleston: but the way it's worded. It's it's it's not clear. If he talked to Mort Walker and Mort hadn't gotten that that

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Tad Eggleston: response from from John Bailey, or or if there were other good cartoonists who had gotten a similar

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Tad Eggleston: response from from Bailey.

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Tad Eggleston: but I mean a the fact that he's saying it in this interview in 1997 means that it must have stuck with him.

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Tad Eggleston: And B. You know, when we think about sending Burke Brethitt a signed original, never having met him.

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R. Sikoryak: Yeah.

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Tad Eggleston: The guy that had made fun of him in cartoons, but is, but is lying in the, you know, laid up in the hospital, and say, Here.

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Tad Eggleston: my friend, in friendship, and you know

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Tad Eggleston: and like I didn't get the opportunity to reread it this year. But before the last time I read that that, and I know that neither of you got into it before the last one. But have either of you gotten the opportunity to read funny things. The comic strip biography of Charles Stroats.

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Sean Harklerode: No.

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Tad Eggleston: Since the last time.

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R. Sikoryak: No, I didn't. I I'm sorry to say I forgot to.

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Tad Eggleston: No, that's completely.

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R. Sikoryak: I did see. I did see a I did see a preview of it, though. Yes, so I'm I'm aware of it.

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah. And and at least I'm pretty certain. Let me look at the author. Yeah.

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Tad Eggleston: yeah, they never met Charles Schultz. I feel like I read somewhere that they're like barely old enough to have read any peanuts

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Tad Eggleston: when it was new.

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Tad Eggleston: You know it's a couple of Italian artists, Luca Debusse and and Francesco Mertuzzi that that just did a fantastic job

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Tad Eggleston: of going through all of the biographical and whatnot

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Tad Eggleston: available, and then turned the story of Schultz into a series of very peanuts-esque cartoons.

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Tad Eggleston: But yeah, the what I remember is this is this overwhelming kindness that he had.

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Tad Eggleston: kindness. And and like again, yeah, you're right amazingly competitive. He wanted to be the best, but but also.

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Tad Eggleston: I mean, I guess the thing that like struck me

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Tad Eggleston: the most in some ways, because I grew up in

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Tad Eggleston: what is sometimes called the Bible belt of the Midwest. I grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, the home of the Billy Graham Center, where you know you can.

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Tad Eggleston: You can not make the High school baseball team at a public school because you go to the wrong church.

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Tad Eggleston: so the fact that that Schultz was very devout and very active in his church.

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Tad Eggleston: but didn't even expect his kids to go with him. It was. It was a personal choice of his, and and he didn't want it to be anything but a personal choice of theirs

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Tad Eggleston: right there tells me just so much about his character.

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Tad Eggleston: Because it was. I have my goals, my morals, my ethics, and sure there are some things that I might wind up judging some people for and others. But there's a whole lot of things that this is what I believe. It's not what you have to believe. It's not what you have to do. You can be of great value to the world and to me, and whatever.

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Tad Eggleston: even if you don't behave the way I do.

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Tad Eggleston: even if you don't think the way I do. And I think that also shows through in peanuts and all of the different

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Tad Eggleston: characters and scenarios, and

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Tad Eggleston: you know he's always looking for, you know. I mean, it's 1 of the reasons I like to read peanuts randomly sometimes, you know, rather than reading, just stretch. I like to to just hit the random button on. Go comics, because

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Tad Eggleston: sometimes you'll get weird sequences. We're like, oh, these all feel alike, even though they're 20 years apart, and sometimes you'll go from the Red Baron to

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Tad Eggleston: Snoopy before he was super animate to.

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Tad Eggleston: That's how I randomly discovered Charles Schultz in 1987, doing a gun control

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Tad Eggleston: week of cartoons, you know. He he set it up all week. It was the Friday. It was either the Friday or the Saturday cartoon, where? Where Snoopy's essentially able to buy an Ak. 47. Because you don't need any sort of license for that at all. After not being able to get a driver's license and not being able to get a fishing license.

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R. Sikoryak: yeah.

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Sean Harklerode: Yep.

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Tad Eggleston: You know

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Sean Harklerode: I see describe I don't know how long, how many, 10 years, however long ago it's been

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Sean Harklerode: Archamax. I get a daily strip from peanuts in my email box, and they do a pretty

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Sean Harklerode: great job of curating them, you know, coming from the different eras. But they they will follow a complete storyline.

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Tad Eggleston: Right, Archamax.

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R. Sikoryak: The the way that the way that he would treat serious topics like religion

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R. Sikoryak: is really interesting because he wouldn't. He wouldn't proselytize, but he would like quote Scripture.

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Tad Eggleston: Yep.

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R. Sikoryak: Great degrees, and the Christmas special is also shocking to me to watch, to just sort of see it stop dead, so that he can tell you about the birth of the birth of the Savior in the middle of it, which I mean is pretty proselytizing, but in terms of the strip itself.

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R. Sikoryak: It's often used as a as a springboard to a punchline that doesn't dismiss religion. But sometimes it just says the characters don't understand religion, which is, you know, more, it's more. It's more personality based than proselytizing. It never turned into what BC. Became in its later years, where it was like very

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R. Sikoryak: pro Christianity.

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Sean Harklerode: Right.

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R. Sikoryak: and it was never. It was never like that. And

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R. Sikoryak: It seems like Schultz was

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R. Sikoryak: smart enough to not go that route where it just became. He always took the character seriously. It was always about the characters first, st and and I have to look at that. Ak, 47 strip again. But even that is kind of about how Snoopy can get away with anything right and

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Tad Eggleston: Well, and I mean it's.

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R. Sikoryak: Sorry.

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Tad Eggleston: I think there is a statement there.

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R. Sikoryak: Of course, of course, but of course. But.

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Tad Eggleston: It was, it was meant to be. Look and think about this more than you.

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Tad Eggleston: and for that matter, if you'd chosen to, you could have read it, as

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Tad Eggleston: it should be easier to get a driver's license easier to go fishing if we can have a gun

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Tad Eggleston: right?

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Tad Eggleston: And the reason I bring that up is is probably the most controversial cartoon he ever did

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Tad Eggleston: was the one where Sally is is all concerned.

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Tad Eggleston: because she prayed in school today, and she, she tells, you know, can't tell anybody.

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Tad Eggleston: but he doesn't say which side he's on. There.

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R. Sikoryak: And he.

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Tad Eggleston: He got people upset on both sides. How could you stand up for school prayer? How could you not stand up for school?

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Sean Harklerode: Yeah.

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Tad Eggleston: And he's like that was essentially exactly what I wanted to do.

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, you know, because he's like, it is a complicated issue. And I think most people don't think of I mean, I think I saw him read or talk about it somewhere, but but it felt like essentially what it came out to was.

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Tad Eggleston: they're not stopping you from praying on your own in school and no, I don't want the school leading you in prayer

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Tad Eggleston: it's not necessarily appropriate. But but nobody who is making the argument at all seems to be thinking that deeply about it.

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Sean Harklerode: I mean, someone once said. You know, so long as there are math tests there will always be prayer in school.

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R. Sikoryak: Right.

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Tad Eggleston: Right, you know. But again, you know, it was this perfect setup where where it was all you know.

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Tad Eggleston: Don't tell anybody, don't tell anybody. And then just that last panel. And again it didn't put.

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Tad Eggleston: you know, when I read it the 1st time I I didn't know that that

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Tad Eggleston: he had such a connection to

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Tad Eggleston: his church and his faith, so I honestly didn't know how I read it other than I thought it was funny.

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Tad Eggleston: And it wasn't until like

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Tad Eggleston: much later than I'm like, oh, yeah, it's in.

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Tad Eggleston: He's looking at the absurdity of an argument that's made way bigger than it.

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R. Sikoryak: Right. Right. I I wonder as we're talking about this, how much of this is?

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R. Sikoryak: I don't mean this to sound

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R. Sikoryak: like it's the. I don't want this to come across the wrong way, but I'm wondering how much of it is calculated to not offend.

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R. Sikoryak: He often would talk about being a salesman for the newspapers. It's like what I. My job is to sell newspapers. So I create a comic strip

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R. Sikoryak: that, you know, is accessible, that people like that will make people buy the newspaper, and when people would complain to him about the merchandising, he would say, but what I do is, I sell things like, I'm a salesman for a living. So to sort of like skirt around these issues in the comics, talking about gun control, or talking about prayer or talking about religion. I wonder if some of it is calculated? And again, I don't mean calculated in a pejorative way.

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R. Sikoryak: but calculated to talk about these things in a way that is accessible to people but not.

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R. Sikoryak: doesn't put people off.

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R. Sikoryak: The key is always thinking of his audience, and at the same time, the strip is

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R. Sikoryak: so so so specific to his

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R. Sikoryak: point of view and his personality and his neuroses that it's this really interesting balance. And maybe that's what makes it so special. It's like you can draw those characters, and you can love the way Snoopy looks, even if you've never

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R. Sikoryak: seen him do anything or you can fall in love with the characters because they seem fully human.

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R. Sikoryak: well works. It works at those both levels in an amazing way.

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Tad Eggleston: It's completely funny that you say that. And and I think you actually wind up hitting it straight on, at least, according to the Schultz Museum. I just pulled up a press release from

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Tad Eggleston: 2014 for humor and controversy in Peanuts social Commentary, the new exhibition at the Schultz Museum. It says, healthcare gun control. The environment and racial equality were all topics broached by Charles M. Schultz and the 50 years he created peanuts, comic strips.

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Tad Eggleston: his beloved peanuts, characters, raised issues of the day. Lucy embraced feminist philosophies. Linus panicked when he mistook snow for nuclear fallout, and Sally whispered about praying in school. Schultz also introduced Franklin, a black peanuts character into a predominantly white cast. On July 31, st 1968, just months after Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis Schultz Museum

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Tad Eggleston: does that? Schultz gently communicated the issues of the changing world around him through the unique pathos of his characters and quick wit, and by remaining universally Centrist. He gave readers the opportunity to interpret his comic strips according to their own personal dictates. Exceptions were rare and marked. A moment of passionate appeal for causes. He deemed

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Tad Eggleston: personally significant such as environmental concerns and civil rights advancement for women in sports

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R. Sikoryak: Yeah.

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.

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R. Sikoryak: Yeah, the set he is. Centrist is the perfect word. And I again, it's kind of amazing when I think about like

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R. Sikoryak: how how he's able to walk that line and not be land. It's not.

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R. Sikoryak: It's not a bland Centrist version at all.

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Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, I think I think it also goes back to what I had said earlier about

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Tad Eggleston: it feels like he's he's 1st an observer.

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Tad Eggleston: You, you know. I mean, I'm certain that he came to

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Tad Eggleston: many, many conclusions in his own life, and and various feelings, and and whatever. But it seems like

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Tad Eggleston: first, st it was deep observation and and more thinking than beliefs.

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Tad Eggleston: You know he doesn't strike me as the type of guy that was necessarily completely unwilling to change his mind based on

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Tad Eggleston: new information.

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Tad Eggleston: Does that make sense?

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you know.

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R. Sikoryak: Yeah.

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Tad Eggleston: I'm in

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Tad Eggleston: you, you froze again. So so for for me, looking at you, Bob, I just see you with a half smirk on your face, and I'm like, is he going? No, no, no.

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R. Sikoryak: No, no, I'm very much in agreement. It reminded me that it reminded me that at a certain in an interview, I think with Gary Groth. He refers to himself as a secular humanist, which I thought was a wild

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R. Sikoryak: phrase to come from him, because I do feel like he was very much a Christian, but I'm assuming this is a nineties interview. I can't remember where I read it, but it was very striking to me at the time, because it just felt like he somehow had opened up. And maybe that was a centrist view

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R. Sikoryak: of America in the nineties. It's possible that he was moving with the culture in a way that was very like, you know. Yeah, I'll say centrist rather than middle of the road. But it was a little startling for me to hear that.

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Tad Eggleston: What I would say in response to that is like

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Tad Eggleston: from the ways that I've embraced Christianity in my life, and I have. But I don't really associate with churches for the most part, occasionally with pastors. I'm related to one

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Tad Eggleston: It's because of the actual teachings of Christ, and the idea that a forgiving God is very comforting.

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Tad Eggleston: And I think if you're actually following the teachings of Christ, not using Christianity as your cudgel, as it so often is now.

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Tad Eggleston: you have to be a secular humanist. I don't think it's I don't think it's impossible to be a secular humanist and a non-secular Christian.

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Tad Eggleston: you know, it's defining the 2 parts of your life. But but to be

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Tad Eggleston: to be Christian and not be humanist to me is one of the most baffling things I see. I see it all the time. People who say they're Christian and clearly aren't humanist.

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Tad Eggleston: But so I mean that that makes perfect sense to me that he would call himself a secular humanist, because that's essentially saying.

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Tad Eggleston: I think, being kind and loving all I mean, Jake.

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Tad Eggleston: I don't want to bring politics into it too much. But here we go.

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Tad Eggleston: Perhaps the the the like basic.

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Tad Eggleston: just like throwaway thing that happened this week that like irked me the most was our vice President said that he believed in the Christian tenet of you take care of your family, and then you take care of your community, and then you take care of your country, and if you've got energy left over. You take care of the rest of the world.

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Tad Eggleston: and I'm like that's not a Christian belief.

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Tad Eggleston: Jesus said, love your neighbor as yourself. And then He despite, defined your neighbor as everybody.

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R. Sikoryak: But the question here is, What does Jd. Vance think of rerun.

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Sean Harklerode: I don't know.

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R. Sikoryak: We run vent health.

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Tad Eggleston: Right.

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R. Sikoryak: For those for those of you listening at home. Rerun. Van Pelt is Lucy and Linus's brother.

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Tad Eggleston: Rather, who I had completely forgotten until I was reading the the

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R. Sikoryak: The book that I just, yeah, that's a guide. Yeah.

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Tad Eggleston: The family album.

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R. Sikoryak: I was thinking, I've been before we go. One thing I do want to get to with peanuts is, I was thinking about this because of something Sean said about 1973 being like the peak year for for him and peanuts. And I do remember some really great

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R. Sikoryak: episodes from that, from that era, from the early seventies era. But the thing about peanuts is because he never stopped drawing it.

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R. Sikoryak: It. The strip changes radically from decade to decade, and I certainly was reading it in the sixties and seventies. I was in college in the eighties, and was not keeping up with it.

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R. Sikoryak: but I kind of came back to it in the nineties, and the strip was very different at that point, and you know, people characters showed up in the seventies, and later well, Franklin, of course, in in 68 was a big shift

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R. Sikoryak: peppermint, Patty.

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R. Sikoryak: I think it's probably around the same time as that. I think she came into her own, her own in the seventies, and rerun also a seventies character. But by the nineties a lot of the strips were kind of about rerun, and it really felt like it really felt like Schultz was reconnecting with very little kids. A rerun is probably a couple years younger than Linus and Lucy in terms of the the character, age, not the

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R. Sikoryak: strip, the actual, our reality, but the stripped reality and rerun, was going to was going to kindergarten and getting in fights with his teacher because he was drawing underground comics, as he put it, in school, and he sort of was becoming an artist, and I felt like Schultz had kind of found a new character to sort of put all of his own like early struggles on and

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R. Sikoryak: I don't remember how we got here from from Jd. Vance, but but just to say that, like the strip, the strip kind of reinvented itself multiple times and

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R. Sikoryak: and I guess I would tell like 1st time readers, to start with the sixties. I think for me, I'm a little older, maybe, and that's why that's the maybe that's the era that appeals to me a little bit more than the seventies, although I think the drawing is wonderful. In the seventies. I think his line work has gotten really loose and expressive in by that era, but in terms of what era to tell people to read.

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R. Sikoryak: It's a little difficult, because it's so different. And you could, I mean, people have made the case for the fifties, being the best era and for the seventies. But I think the later work is also interesting, too, because it it's kind of reinventing itself again. And he keeps drawing it himself.

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R. Sikoryak: you know. And it's it's just I just the achievement of that of 50 years. Of that I. There are not many strips that have lasted that long. And and where the Creator has really stuck with it from day one.

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R. Sikoryak: So I just think that's thanks.

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Tad Eggleston: I'm actually a I'm flipping through the groth interview.

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Tad Eggleston: and there's there's a part where he talks about. You have a terrific strip. I think the early sixties where Lucy wrote on the sidewalk. Charlie Brown is a blockhead, and Charlie Brown asked her, why'd you write that? And she said, because I honestly, truly believe it, and I had to be completely honest. And in that last panel he said, something like, you know, I kind of admire her integrity, and I thought that was an interesting commentary on offense. And Odyssey and Schultz's response is, I wouldn't do that anymore.

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Tad Eggleston: Which wouldn't you do? I wouldn't even draw that cartoon.

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Tad Eggleston: because it's too cruel. Yeah, I've gotten older. My strip is much more mild than it used to be.

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Tad Eggleston: It is. I couldn't help but notice that the strips of the fifties and sixties are much more barbed, more acerbic than they are now, he said. One of the advertising agencies just sent in a rough idea for an animated commercial and last panel. Lucy is saying good grief, Charlie Brown and I thought, Oh, boy, I haven't used good grief, Charlie Brown, in 30 years. So this person is just drawing on something I did years ago, which is why nobody else is ever going to be able to draw the strip.

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Tad Eggleston: The best they could do is come up, if they're lucky to where I am now, but they'll never be able to take it into new areas because they're not me. So I think this strip is much more mild. Even the insults that Marcy and Pepper Patty go through are all done in good humor. They're serious. They really. They get really mad at each other. But nobody ever hits anybody in my strip

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Tad Eggleston: and I think it's interesting that, like

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Tad Eggleston: he was aware that he went through that that progression that that like fifties and sixties mean.

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Tad Eggleston: And I've noticed that, you know, there's some means I have trouble reading the fifties and sixties strips. Sometimes.

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Sean Harklerode: And Charlie Brown can be a jerk.

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Charlie Brown can be a jerk. They can all be jerks, and I'm sitting there going. I mean, part of what I'm going is. Oh, so this is what was normal for kids then, and that's the trauma our parents had and passed on to us.

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Tad Eggleston: and why they want us to just like

422
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Tad Eggleston: buck up and not feel anything when people are being horrible to us.

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R. Sikoryak: Well, Schultz does this interesting thing where you mentioned earlier that in 1997 he remembered something that an editor had told him years ago.

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Tad Eggleston: Right.

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R. Sikoryak: It seemed that he carried all of the slights and disappointments of his childhood into his adulthood.

426
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R. Sikoryak: And all of those are completely present in the strip. Yeah. But then he's also excuse me.

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R. Sikoryak: He's also fully reflecting his current life, and he didn't.

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Tad Eggleston: No, I.

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R. Sikoryak: He did get remarried in the seventies, and I think the strip takes a turn, and he's older. He's more mellow. He is clearly top of the heap.

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Tad Eggleston: Well.

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R. Sikoryak: Struggles were in the fifties. Aren't, aren't don't exist for him in the same way.

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no. When I take the strip and mix it with

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Tad Eggleston: interviews that he's given things that he's written about his own work. And then what?

434
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Tad Eggleston: How things have changed in psychology since then. I think if he was a kid today he'd be more likely to get a neurodivergent

435
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Tad Eggleston: diagnosis. He'd be more likely to have people understand that he thought a little bit differently, that different things stood out to him, that, and and hopefully that would have led him to have

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Tad Eggleston: not as hard of a childhood in terms of figuring out how to how to get through things, and not as many periods where he was

437
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Tad Eggleston: completely

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Tad Eggleston: walled off, or walled himself off from the world. It seems like in some ways, the way he was able to find his happiness, and therefore have the mildness come into his cartoon. Is, he finally became affluent enough to

439
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Tad Eggleston: not only wall himself off with a good gatekeeper in his new wife, so that he wasn't

440
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Tad Eggleston: alone. But he didn't have to deal with unrefereed, untested.

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Tad Eggleston: you know. Wasn't. Wasn't the stranger that might say something mean or take something that he said the wrong way because he didn't say it right, because, you see that a lot of that, too, Charlie Brown has trouble with language. He'll be trying to say one thing, and people will be taking it

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Tad Eggleston: another.

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Tad Eggleston: you know. So I wonder how much of it was he was able to to create that place where he had. He had his own roller skating rink. He had his studio, he had his house.

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Tad Eggleston: you know. He was far enough away from anything that he wasn't going to have to deal with any traveling salesman. He didn't have to go into town for anything.

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Tad Eggleston: you know.

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R. Sikoryak: I should say ice rink.

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Tad Eggleston: Oh, was it an ice rink? Okay.

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R. Sikoryak: Big big hockey fan, aggressive.

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R. Sikoryak: That's right.

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R. Sikoryak: Aggressive sport.

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Tad Eggleston: Baseball fan, too. I mean, he was a Minnesota kid.

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Tad Eggleston: Minneapolis through and through, I mean that that shows up, even after he's moved to California.

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Tad Eggleston: which apparently didn't work with his 1st wife. I think it was actually Arizona or New Mexico that they moved to, and it didn't work out for him, but I think again it had more to do with.

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Tad Eggleston: When he moved to California he was able to essentially start his own estate.

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Tad Eggleston: You know, he was able to make his own place, whereas I think, the previous move he was moving into a neighborhood. So all of the things

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Tad Eggleston: that

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Tad Eggleston: all of the routines and places and and people knowing him and whatnot from his dad's barbershop to the what correspondence

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Tad Eggleston: Art Correspondence College that he worked at. He didn't have those when he moved. He had this, this completely foreign environment with people that he didn't know

459
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Tad Eggleston: with a wife that he didn't completely connect with.

460
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Tad Eggleston: who expected him to be things that he wasn't and it didn't work, you know

461
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Tad Eggleston: which I mean that that's again. That's the beauty of peanuts. Another one of the beauties of peanuts, so many beauties of peanuts

462
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Tad Eggleston: is that like you get to see these kids who don't always easily gel with each other.

463
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Tad Eggleston: but particularly as the the cartoon matured, were more likely to

464
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Tad Eggleston: accept that and work around it rather than having that be.

465
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Tad Eggleston: Oh, you're not like me. We are enemies, you know.

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Tad Eggleston: I mean in some way.

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Tad Eggleston: Go ahead.

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R. Sikoryak: I was just gonna say, and yet people still think good grief

469
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R. Sikoryak: right. Certain certain aspects of the strip

470
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R. Sikoryak: stay with us, even if it's not present in the strip anymore.

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but I mean good. Good grief doesn't have to be that extreme. It was often when he used it, which is probably while.

472
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Tad Eggleston: but but it became part of the vernacular is something that that you know I mean. My wife will give me an oh, good grief when I know it's completely in love. It's just

473
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Tad Eggleston: I love you. I know you're like this. I can't handle it right. Now go to your room.

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R. Sikoryak: Just saying that we bring. We bring aspects of the characters that.

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Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.

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R. Sikoryak: Or to the strips, even if they're not present. Yeah, right? As much as Lucy. Lucy becomes very

477
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R. Sikoryak: protective of rerun in the later strips, which I find really interesting because she was never that way with Linus. And maybe that's the middle. The middle child syndrome.

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Tad Eggleston: All right.

479
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R. Sikoryak: But the dynamic of Lucy with rerun is much more, much more.

480
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R. Sikoryak: loving if they don't get. I don't think they get each other, but I think that they they have a better relationship. But

481
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R. Sikoryak: but I love what Schultz said about no one could take over the strip because they wouldn't take it the next step, and he was thinking of the next. Well, he wasn't only thinking of the next step. He was living the next step.

482
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R. Sikoryak: right? And all.

483
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R. Sikoryak: all of the I mean, I like a lot of the I like a lot of the iterations that have been made in in in TV and such since

484
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R. Sikoryak: he died. But they're they're all

485
00:57:19.410 --> 00:57:33.049
R. Sikoryak: they're all formed out of pre-existing pieces. They're not. They're not. They're not making anything new, and they don't, they don't. They want to be reverent, which I understand. But also it's not in the spirit of the strip in a certain way.

486
00:57:33.350 --> 00:57:34.280
R. Sikoryak: Do that to me.

487
00:57:34.280 --> 00:57:39.740
Tad Eggleston: You know, I think that in some ways

488
00:57:39.990 --> 00:57:48.769
Tad Eggleston: what you have when you read peanuts chronologically, is almost like

489
00:57:50.000 --> 00:58:00.069
Tad Eggleston: a a mental health journal from Schultz. Whatever whatever he was working through at the time was what was gonna I mean? I actually thought it was funny, like

490
00:58:00.320 --> 00:58:08.820
Tad Eggleston: I looked up my birthday, like my actual birthday, March 25, th 1980, and.

491
00:58:10.370 --> 00:58:31.019
Tad Eggleston: you know, given given my my history of depression, bipolar disorder and whatnot. It was, it was so fitting that sometimes, when you're depressed, all you want to do is nothing. All you want to do is lean your head on your arm and stare into space. Sometimes this can go on for hours. If you're unusually depressed, you may have to change arms.

492
00:58:34.290 --> 00:58:36.919
Tad Eggleston: but then the very next day is a snoopy cartoon.

493
00:58:37.640 --> 00:58:46.269
Tad Eggleston: Maybe I should have been more ambitious. I could have gone more places, done more things. Instead, I chose to remain home and be what I am. Just your basic beagle. So like there's that.

494
00:58:47.640 --> 00:59:00.970
Tad Eggleston: But then the next day goes back to the depression. I figured it out. Charlie Brown, if you stay depressed for 2 more days you'll make it into the Book of World Records. Wow! That's great. You just blew it.

495
00:59:03.680 --> 00:59:13.640
Tad Eggleston: that's good, you know. So I mean that that, you know, and and and

496
00:59:14.880 --> 00:59:19.659
Tad Eggleston: I can't say what Schultz was going through, but but that that feels like to me.

497
00:59:19.790 --> 00:59:31.817
Tad Eggleston: It feels like my my up and down mood swings my mania, or bipolar, or my mania, and depressive and whatnot

498
00:59:32.870 --> 00:59:40.473
Tad Eggleston: and my my ability to go. Shiny thing, you know.

499
00:59:41.840 --> 00:59:48.180
Tad Eggleston: but but that's also where I was going. I think the collections tend to be.

500
00:59:49.020 --> 00:59:55.100
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I almost would love to look into who edits the collections of

501
00:59:56.350 --> 01:00:07.090
Tad Eggleston: cartoons that aren't in, because sometimes they'll even use things that that are from the same chronological period, but not have them in the same order that they'd been originally

502
01:00:07.370 --> 01:00:18.420
Tad Eggleston: so I almost wonder if the collections represent the editors going through their own psychosis via peanuts.

503
01:00:18.920 --> 01:00:19.470
Sean Harklerode: Right.

504
01:00:19.680 --> 01:00:25.549
Tad Eggleston: You know, it's it's like there's a peanuts cartoon for everything and and anybody could. I mean.

505
01:00:25.860 --> 01:00:33.160
Tad Eggleston: if you had the time, energy, and or memory to know where to find it. You could like use peanuts as your daily.

506
01:00:33.740 --> 01:00:35.890
Tad Eggleston: This is how my day was. Journal.

507
01:00:36.920 --> 01:00:37.530
Tad Eggleston: Well, I do.

508
01:00:37.530 --> 01:00:38.120
Tad Eggleston: You know.

509
01:00:38.120 --> 01:00:50.060
R. Sikoryak: I do love that the Fanta Graphics books have indexes in the back, because that's very useful in terms of finding wait. When were they playing hockey, or whatever. I don't remember how, if they go into like, you know, manic depression episode, or

510
01:00:50.330 --> 01:00:53.339
R. Sikoryak: I don't think they. I don't think they go that far, but they do they.

511
01:00:53.340 --> 01:00:54.469
Tad Eggleston: I'm on other things. You have

512
01:00:54.470 --> 01:00:58.079
Tad Eggleston: to make some serious judgments on that sort of thing. Right? Yeah.

513
01:00:58.310 --> 01:01:00.429
R. Sikoryak: Yeah, if it's not in the dialogue, it's not gonna be.

514
01:01:00.430 --> 01:01:03.160
Tad Eggleston: There would be somebody who would get upset about it.

515
01:01:03.160 --> 01:01:06.194
R. Sikoryak: Yeah, no, I understand. I understand.

516
01:01:06.700 --> 01:01:19.872
Tad Eggleston: I actually, I came that that, you know again, autistic brain tangent. Just because I I thought to myself, Oh, you could probably do. The the psychiatrist is in as as a as a

517
01:01:22.560 --> 01:01:33.469
Tad Eggleston: index line, but but the one I read recently, and I'll have to go dig it up, possibly for the show notes was, There's a there's a Lucy psychiatrist is in

518
01:01:34.160 --> 01:01:40.520
Tad Eggleston: 5 5 cents, and she's frustrated because she doesn't have any customers.

519
01:01:40.660 --> 01:01:44.370
Tad Eggleston: and then the last panel is

520
01:01:45.870 --> 01:01:50.740
Tad Eggleston: dog hugs and snoopy. At a smaller booth, one cent.

521
01:01:51.950 --> 01:01:53.510
R. Sikoryak: Oh, that's nice! I don't remember that one.

522
01:01:57.770 --> 01:02:00.979
Tad Eggleston: Which again you know it just

523
01:02:03.380 --> 01:02:09.600
Tad Eggleston: I mean, this is where I'm so happy to in between having done the

524
01:02:10.090 --> 01:02:14.870
Tad Eggleston: our our great lost Schultz episode. And now I also read

525
01:02:15.230 --> 01:02:31.199
Tad Eggleston: how to read Nancy, and and therefore have started looking at cartoons in a much more granular way, like the psychiatrist is in versus dog hugs. You know. You've got all of the psychiatric stuff that those give you already. You've got

526
01:02:31.440 --> 01:02:41.409
Tad Eggleston: hints of capitalism, and on top of all of that you've got the. You know what your psychiatrist is great and incredibly necessary, but sometimes

527
01:02:42.330 --> 01:02:44.950
Tad Eggleston: hugging a dog is just as good, and it's cheaper.

528
01:02:46.260 --> 01:02:48.190
R. Sikoryak: Happiness is a warm puppy. I've been thinking.

529
01:02:48.190 --> 01:02:49.549
Tad Eggleston: Exactly right.

530
01:02:53.450 --> 01:02:55.649
Tad Eggleston: Which which is a great great book.

531
01:02:58.736 --> 01:03:05.220
Tad Eggleston: That was, I think, the 1st of the themed, if you like. That

532
01:03:05.810 --> 01:03:10.120
Tad Eggleston: was the 1st of the themed collections to put out.

533
01:03:10.260 --> 01:03:12.160
R. Sikoryak: Right in the sixties. He started.

534
01:03:12.160 --> 01:03:12.610
Tad Eggleston: Right.

535
01:03:12.610 --> 01:03:22.650
R. Sikoryak: I don't. I don't remember. I don't know if they're redrawn or they're repurposed panels from the comics made into into aphorisms. So the book.

536
01:03:22.650 --> 01:03:23.160
Tad Eggleston: Right.

537
01:03:23.160 --> 01:03:30.369
R. Sikoryak: A drawing with with an aphorism. Happiness is a warm puppy. All I need is friends. There was a whole series of these books. They were sort

538
01:03:30.910 --> 01:03:31.760
R. Sikoryak: books.

539
01:03:31.900 --> 01:03:32.380
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.

540
01:03:32.380 --> 01:03:36.529
R. Sikoryak: He was amazing. He was an amazing marketer. I mean, right? Yeah, he was.

541
01:03:36.530 --> 01:03:43.990
R. Sikoryak: It's not really my, it's not really my my point of entry for peanuts, but I gotta hand it to him for being able to do everything.

542
01:03:43.990 --> 01:03:52.450
Tad Eggleston: Well, and and I think that goes back to you know, at least in everything that I've seen and read. What he wasn't good at was

543
01:03:54.550 --> 01:04:00.690
Tad Eggleston: socializing, so so Peanuts was most of his world.

544
01:04:01.070 --> 01:04:04.990
Tad Eggleston: He had other parts of his world, and it's not that he didn't do other things, but like

545
01:04:05.270 --> 01:04:06.949
Tad Eggleston: when he was done drawing.

546
01:04:07.240 --> 01:04:09.010
Tad Eggleston: It's like, Okay, what do I do next?

547
01:04:10.040 --> 01:04:30.080
Tad Eggleston: And a lot of what he was interested in was, Oh, well, I could do this. Let's work on that, or people would come to him with ideas, and he turned down a lot of them. But if if they struck him oh, no, that's a cool idea. But he also wanted to be his like, even with the cartoons he wound up very involved in.

548
01:04:30.120 --> 01:04:40.249
Tad Eggleston: We didn't draw all of the panels, but he was very involved in character, design, and helping figure out like what they looked like from different angles. You know he talked about that being.

549
01:04:40.250 --> 01:04:41.479
R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

550
01:04:41.480 --> 01:04:47.740
Tad Eggleston: One of the most difficult things is like he's like I'd never had to think about what Snoopy would look at look like from this angle.

551
01:04:47.740 --> 01:04:48.430
Sean Harklerode: Right.

552
01:04:49.300 --> 01:04:54.060
Tad Eggleston: I'd never drawn that. Yeah, but when I saw it it didn't look right.

553
01:04:54.060 --> 01:04:54.640
R. Sikoryak: Yeah.

554
01:04:58.490 --> 01:04:59.020
Tad Eggleston: Interesting.

555
01:04:59.020 --> 01:05:04.839
R. Sikoryak: He's credited as the he's credited as the writer on all those specials. I can't believe that he wouldn't be very hands on.

556
01:05:05.100 --> 01:05:11.270
Tad Eggleston: He wasn't, I mean, from what I've heard he was incredibly hands on. He wasn't the full on animator of every single

557
01:05:11.610 --> 01:05:12.450
Tad Eggleston: so.

558
01:05:12.450 --> 01:05:14.060
R. Sikoryak: No, no, not at all, not at all.

559
01:05:14.060 --> 01:05:17.769
Tad Eggleston: But but he was incredibly hands on. Yeah.

560
01:05:17.770 --> 01:05:18.325
R. Sikoryak: Yeah.

561
01:05:19.220 --> 01:05:22.790
Tad Eggleston: I think he even picked out Vince Giraldi, but I don't.

562
01:05:22.790 --> 01:05:29.619
R. Sikoryak: That sounds that sounds right. I feel like someone told me that anecdote. I don't quite remember how it goes, but yes, I.

563
01:05:29.620 --> 01:05:58.079
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I've read so much, you know I'm my memory is so spotty, and I'm not good at taking notes. I should get better at it. I've read so much about Charles Schultz here and there through the years, and even more over the last year a. As I got well last 2 years a as I got ready for the last episode, which meant a lot to me, and and so I was equally bummed when I'm like, God damn it all that work! And it's the only 22 panels episode that's gone.

564
01:05:58.580 --> 01:05:59.350
Sean Harklerode: Wow!

565
01:06:02.890 --> 01:06:08.150
Tad Eggleston: But I don't always remember exactly where I heard what I read, what or

566
01:06:09.160 --> 01:06:11.940
Tad Eggleston: what I imagined, because it feels right.

567
01:06:12.250 --> 01:06:14.579
Tad Eggleston: because memory's a weird thing that way.

568
01:06:16.390 --> 01:06:20.310
Sean Harklerode: I, you know I think you you talk about how

569
01:06:20.840 --> 01:06:26.400
Sean Harklerode: Schultz's psychology is tied up in the script and in the strip, and and it

570
01:06:27.040 --> 01:06:31.500
Sean Harklerode: blows through his life, as Rob pointed out earlier.

571
01:06:31.610 --> 01:06:34.799
Sean Harklerode: You know he died 25 years ago this week.

572
01:06:36.390 --> 01:06:39.069
Sean Harklerode: And he died the morning the last.

573
01:06:39.700 --> 01:06:40.210
Tad Eggleston: Right.

574
01:06:40.210 --> 01:06:41.260
Sean Harklerode: Was published.

575
01:06:41.510 --> 01:06:43.690
R. Sikoryak: You know his life really.

576
01:06:43.890 --> 01:06:46.429
Sean Harklerode: Became entwined with this strip.

577
01:06:47.000 --> 01:06:47.600
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.

578
01:06:48.230 --> 01:06:50.549
Sean Harklerode: Did it until he couldn't do it anymore.

579
01:06:50.780 --> 01:06:53.479
Sean Harklerode: And and then he died.

580
01:06:56.556 --> 01:07:01.380
Tad Eggleston: That don't ask me why. That reminds me. But

581
01:07:01.810 --> 01:07:07.020
Tad Eggleston: we talked extensively about one of your favorite runs last time around Mr. Sack.

582
01:07:07.540 --> 01:07:10.630
Tad Eggleston: 1st you got to show off your toy to Bob.

583
01:07:11.410 --> 01:07:17.510
Tad Eggleston: because he found he found a Mr. Sack action figure. That's great. That's great.

584
01:07:17.510 --> 01:07:19.289
R. Sikoryak: Was that 1973.

585
01:07:19.290 --> 01:07:20.649
Sean Harklerode: It was 1973.

586
01:07:20.650 --> 01:07:25.670
R. Sikoryak: Yeah. So that's when you said it. I was thinking of that series, because that's a that's a great series.

587
01:07:25.670 --> 01:07:31.439
Sean Harklerode: Right. So go ahead. I I will say there are a couple other storylines. The the

588
01:07:31.800 --> 01:07:36.120
Sean Harklerode: the testimonial dinner is the beginning of 73.

589
01:07:38.260 --> 01:07:41.929
Sean Harklerode: And then and then this. But go ahead for Mr. Sack.

590
01:07:42.600 --> 01:07:44.500
Tad Eggleston: Well, no, I was saying you should.

591
01:07:44.690 --> 01:07:55.859
Tad Eggleston: What do you love about Mr. Sack? You have a much stronger relationship than I have. I read it before the last time, because you have a strong relationship, and I loved it. But I haven't reread it.

592
01:07:55.860 --> 01:07:56.400
Sean Harklerode: Right.

593
01:07:56.510 --> 01:08:07.990
Sean Harklerode: Well, I love it. 1st of all, 2 days before the Mr. Sacks storyline starts, we've talked about Schultz remembering the encouragement he got

594
01:08:08.928 --> 01:08:14.310
Sean Harklerode: well, we all know Snoopy is a an aspiring author.

595
01:08:14.700 --> 01:08:17.470
Sean Harklerode: So this strip is Snoopy

596
01:08:17.720 --> 01:08:33.809
Sean Harklerode: reading a letter. Dear Contributor, we are returning your stupid story. You are a terrible writer. Why do you bother us? We wouldn't buy one of your stories if you paid us. Leave us alone, drop dead, get lost!

597
01:08:34.630 --> 01:08:37.479
Sean Harklerode: Snoopy lies down on top of the doghouse.

598
01:08:37.810 --> 01:08:40.029
Sean Harklerode: Probably a form rejection slip.

599
01:08:40.180 --> 01:08:40.960
Tad Eggleston: Right?

600
01:08:41.979 --> 01:08:43.539
Tad Eggleston: What? What's the date on that one.

601
01:08:44.290 --> 01:08:48.380
Sean Harklerode: That would be June 8, th 1973.

602
01:08:48.720 --> 01:08:49.520
Tad Eggleston: Okay.

603
01:08:49.942 --> 01:08:51.379
Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's right, is it?

604
01:08:52.049 --> 01:08:56.169
Tad Eggleston: The sack doesn't show up until a little bit later. We've got the baseball first.st

605
01:08:56.557 --> 01:08:57.719
Sean Harklerode: 11th June, 11.th

606
01:08:57.720 --> 01:08:58.410
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.

607
01:08:58.410 --> 01:09:06.389
Sean Harklerode: Charlie Brown wakes up in the middle of the night, or he wakes up 1st thing in the morning and looks out the window, and the sun is a baseball.

608
01:09:06.600 --> 01:09:07.180
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.

609
01:09:07.649 --> 01:09:12.629
Sean Harklerode: And then the next day the moon is a baseball or so, and then

610
01:09:12.749 --> 01:09:20.659
Sean Harklerode: Sally makes him an ice cream cone, and it has the baseball ribbon on it.

611
01:09:20.939 --> 01:09:28.529
Sean Harklerode: So then he's talking to Linus, and he has an itch on the back of his head, and he turns around, and there it's the baseball stitching.

612
01:09:28.829 --> 01:09:31.299
Sean Harklerode: and Linus tells him he has to go to the doctor.

613
01:09:31.529 --> 01:09:37.259
Sean Harklerode: so the doctor tells him that he needs to go to camp

614
01:09:37.779 --> 01:09:40.129
Sean Harklerode: needs to get baseball off his mind.

615
01:09:40.359 --> 01:09:44.279
Sean Harklerode: So Charlie Brown has put a sack on his head.

616
01:09:44.769 --> 01:09:50.269
Sean Harklerode: and the doctor asks, why is he wearing a sack? He's like cause some kid just tried to autograph my head.

617
01:09:53.620 --> 01:10:04.580
Sean Harklerode: So Charlie Brown goes to summer camp with a sack on his head, and he's elected camp President.

618
01:10:05.490 --> 01:10:07.779
Sean Harklerode: People come to him for advice.

619
01:10:08.250 --> 01:10:13.165
Sean Harklerode: He's breaking up, fights. Everyone loves him and

620
01:10:15.140 --> 01:10:19.729
Sean Harklerode: He! He's just. He's living his best life. It's Charlie Brown

621
01:10:19.890 --> 01:10:27.180
Sean Harklerode: living his best life. He writes a letter home to his parents, you know, and

622
01:10:28.780 --> 01:10:37.490
Sean Harklerode: just. It's a really great vindication, you know, and he quotes Scripture, you know a prophet is never is, is not without honor

623
01:10:37.840 --> 01:10:40.179
Sean Harklerode: save in his own country.

624
01:10:40.705 --> 01:10:41.230
R. Sikoryak: Right.

625
01:10:41.230 --> 01:10:51.800
Sean Harklerode: So he's not appreciated, you know, wherever peanuts takes place. But here he can be, Mr. Sack and I just I just think that's awesome.

626
01:10:52.596 --> 01:10:57.729
Sean Harklerode: Unfortunately, the rash goes away, takes the sack off his head.

627
01:10:57.900 --> 01:11:02.030
Sean Harklerode: and his roommate is like we elected that guy President.

628
01:11:02.570 --> 01:11:03.110
Tad Eggleston: Okay.

629
01:11:04.080 --> 01:11:06.209
Sean Harklerode: And so then he goes out

630
01:11:06.380 --> 01:11:09.770
Sean Harklerode: to greet the son, and he was like, Okay, if

631
01:11:12.860 --> 01:11:25.209
Sean Harklerode: if wait, I do have to go back, there's 1, if if it's still the sun, I mean if it's still a baseball, I messed up. But if it's the sun I I've cured this.

632
01:11:25.790 --> 01:11:32.040
Sean Harklerode: and when the sun rises it's Alfred E. Newman with what me worry over it.

633
01:11:33.980 --> 01:11:34.680
Sean Harklerode: And that's the.

634
01:11:34.680 --> 01:11:35.140
Tad Eggleston: Right.

635
01:11:35.140 --> 01:11:41.110
Sean Harklerode: Right, and I know he asked Gaines, and everyone for permission.

636
01:11:41.510 --> 01:11:46.890
Sean Harklerode: and Gaines was like, we've made so much fun of him over the years? How could we say no.

637
01:11:48.410 --> 01:11:52.529
Tad Eggleston: That was July 5, th 73 was the what may worry right?

638
01:11:52.530 --> 01:11:57.979
Sean Harklerode: But so he went. I forgot. He went to Lucy for help

639
01:11:58.520 --> 01:12:09.219
Sean Harklerode: about this. In the middle of this yesterday morning I woke up very early. I couldn't sleep. My bedroom faces east, and so I could see the sun coming up, only it wasn't the sun. It was a huge baseball.

640
01:12:09.370 --> 01:12:17.709
Sean Harklerode: I think I must be cracking up. I think I'm finally losing my mind. And on top of it all I feel terribly alone.

641
01:12:18.710 --> 01:12:22.449
Sean Harklerode: Lucy. Okay, now tell me more about this huge baseball.

642
01:12:24.970 --> 01:12:31.010
Sean Harklerode: I mean that that sums it up right there. He's bearing his soul.

643
01:12:31.010 --> 01:12:31.430
R. Sikoryak: Yeah.

644
01:12:31.430 --> 01:12:32.570
Sean Harklerode: And no one's listening.

645
01:12:33.390 --> 01:12:34.200
R. Sikoryak: Yeah.

646
01:12:35.820 --> 01:12:37.249
Sean Harklerode: Yeah. And that's

647
01:12:37.940 --> 01:12:49.479
Sean Harklerode: you know, I really that reading the whole year. You know that coming soon after that testimonial dinner that, you know. Everyone

648
01:12:49.590 --> 01:12:54.390
Sean Harklerode: you know says we don't want to say nice things about Charlie Brown. We'd be hypocrites.

649
01:12:54.916 --> 01:12:55.970
R. Sikoryak: And and.

650
01:12:55.970 --> 01:13:05.429
Sean Harklerode: Brown sitting at the dinner, and but Woodstock is sitting next to him, which I found interesting when I was reading it last week. So Woodstock is still with him.

651
01:13:06.040 --> 01:13:09.000
Sean Harklerode: but everyone else has abandoned it.

652
01:13:09.600 --> 01:13:13.810
Tad Eggleston: Woodstock is one of the unsung heroes of

653
01:13:15.510 --> 01:13:19.779
Tad Eggleston: peanuts. I love Woodstock, and what what do they call the 4?

654
01:13:20.810 --> 01:13:24.209
Tad Eggleston: The the 4 Mini Woodstocks that go around with them sometimes.

655
01:13:24.210 --> 01:13:25.280
R. Sikoryak: Oh, right!

656
01:13:25.750 --> 01:13:30.320
R. Sikoryak: I know who you mean when they were like they're all like they're off at camp, and they go on and.

657
01:13:30.320 --> 01:13:30.710
Tad Eggleston: Right.

658
01:13:30.710 --> 01:13:34.040
R. Sikoryak: Snoopy. I don't remember the name. I'm.

659
01:13:34.040 --> 01:13:34.690
Tad Eggleston: Right.

660
01:13:34.690 --> 01:13:36.970
R. Sikoryak: Should know this.

661
01:13:37.430 --> 01:13:39.440
Tad Eggleston: Well like, I said, unsung heroes.

662
01:13:39.440 --> 01:13:40.010
R. Sikoryak: Yeah.

663
01:13:40.520 --> 01:13:41.249
Tad Eggleston: I mean here.

664
01:13:41.250 --> 01:13:44.559
Sean Harklerode: Charlie Brown and Pat peppermint Patty, you know.

665
01:13:44.560 --> 01:13:45.240
Tad Eggleston: Right.

666
01:13:45.240 --> 01:13:46.220
Sean Harklerode: You know right.

667
01:13:46.220 --> 01:13:56.289
Tad Eggleston: I was about to say. We've been talking for an hour and a half. We haven't really brought up peppermint, Patty or Marcy. We've only kind of brought up Linus. We we haven't talked

668
01:13:56.680 --> 01:14:10.000
Tad Eggleston: about most of Snoopy, you know. We haven't talked about the Red Baron. We haven't talked about Spike. We haven't talked about. I mean, there's so much I mean, we could. We could almost.

669
01:14:10.130 --> 01:14:15.639
Tad Eggleston: I mean, if we wanted to. You could so easily do like a year by year.

670
01:14:17.350 --> 01:14:25.730
Tad Eggleston: peanuts Book club, and and have new material every time. You know it's it's it's yeah.

671
01:14:25.910 --> 01:14:27.480
Tad Eggleston: there. There aren't.

672
01:14:28.280 --> 01:14:38.240
Tad Eggleston: There aren't many comics that I find that I could talk about as much as I talk about or can talk about peanuts. You know.

673
01:14:38.360 --> 01:14:42.209
Tad Eggleston: It's it's like peanuts, love and rockets. Saga.

674
01:14:48.370 --> 01:14:49.910
Tad Eggleston: Calvin and Hobbs.

675
01:14:51.000 --> 01:14:57.459
R. Sikoryak: It's it's 1 thing to say that he did this for 50 years. It's another thing to say. He did every day for 50 years.

676
01:14:57.460 --> 01:14:58.040
Sean Harklerode: Bye.

677
01:14:58.210 --> 01:14:58.660
R. Sikoryak: I.

678
01:14:58.660 --> 01:15:00.389
Tad Eggleston: And it was good.

679
01:15:00.390 --> 01:15:02.700
R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

680
01:15:03.264 --> 01:15:10.360
R. Sikoryak: I mean, I've made a lot of comics in my lifetime, but not every day, and not for public consumption.

681
01:15:10.790 --> 01:15:11.220
Tad Eggleston: Alright!

682
01:15:11.220 --> 01:15:11.650
Tad Eggleston: Well.

683
01:15:11.650 --> 01:15:16.030
R. Sikoryak: Idea that you mean the the kind of mindset you have to have to do that

684
01:15:16.140 --> 01:15:29.999
R. Sikoryak: is so specific. And he didn't leave anything out, as far as I can tell. I mean, it's all. Everything's referenced, even if it's obliquely, or through the character, through the children's eyes, or what have you feels very.

685
01:15:30.420 --> 01:15:31.809
R. Sikoryak: You really put it all in there.

686
01:15:32.780 --> 01:15:34.629
Tad Eggleston: You know, it's just.

687
01:15:35.720 --> 01:15:41.379
Tad Eggleston: It's so hard to think of anybody

688
01:15:41.850 --> 01:15:49.910
Tad Eggleston: doing that much work without like swinging and missing. And there's hardly a single strip that doesn't make you grin.

689
01:15:51.120 --> 01:16:00.459
R. Sikoryak: Well, he, one of my favorite quotes of his is, he introduces a cat that lives next door to Snoopy. Why, it's actually Frida Frida.

690
01:16:00.460 --> 01:16:03.160
Tad Eggleston: We ever actually see the cat, because we see it.

691
01:16:03.380 --> 01:16:04.310
R. Sikoryak: Oh, Frida.

692
01:16:04.310 --> 01:16:05.260
Tad Eggleston: That's a lot.

693
01:16:05.636 --> 01:16:13.540
R. Sikoryak: Sorry there's 2 cats. Frida has a cat named Baron FARO. N. Am I remembering that right?

694
01:16:13.700 --> 01:16:19.350
R. Sikoryak: She has a cat named. She has a cat, and Snoopy does not like the cat, and I think

695
01:16:20.170 --> 01:16:37.350
R. Sikoryak: I think Schultz realized he didn't like having that dog cat dynamic on, you know, in the panels. So later on another off screen cat was introduced. But I think it was about. I think it was about Frida's cat, he said. Sometimes you make a mistake in the strip, but there's always the next day

696
01:16:37.590 --> 01:16:38.070
R. Sikoryak: right?

697
01:16:38.070 --> 01:16:44.680
R. Sikoryak: It was either that strip or another one where he was like. I went down the wrong road with this, but you just do another one.

698
01:16:44.960 --> 01:16:47.443
Tad Eggleston: Which is something I feel like we heard from

699
01:16:50.750 --> 01:16:53.689
Tad Eggleston: Ernie Bush Miller, too, with with

700
01:16:53.990 --> 01:16:56.830
Tad Eggleston: how he approached. Nancy was like.

701
01:16:57.290 --> 01:17:01.399
Tad Eggleston: I do stuff, and if it worked we keep doing it and.

702
01:17:01.400 --> 01:17:01.719
R. Sikoryak: It is.

703
01:17:01.720 --> 01:17:05.050
Tad Eggleston: It didn't feel right. We we came up with a new gag.

704
01:17:05.600 --> 01:17:09.129
R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah. And every day is a reset. To a certain extent.

705
01:17:09.130 --> 01:17:09.860
Tad Eggleston: Right.

706
01:17:09.860 --> 01:17:12.070
R. Sikoryak: The order is usually restored.

707
01:17:12.250 --> 01:17:28.890
R. Sikoryak: I mean, you know, of course, accepting the sad sack. This I'm sorry the Mr. Sack Storyline, but even at the end of that. By the end of that we've restored order. It's not every day, but it's still like kind of. By the next month we were back to the, to the.

708
01:17:28.890 --> 01:17:29.400
Tad Eggleston: Right.

709
01:17:29.400 --> 01:17:30.500
R. Sikoryak: The usual dynamic.

710
01:17:30.500 --> 01:17:33.479
Tad Eggleston: Well, and I think that's actually one of.

711
01:17:33.860 --> 01:17:38.230
Tad Eggleston: And again, I didn't research it again. But I feel like I I was looking at it

712
01:17:39.420 --> 01:17:47.159
Tad Eggleston: before we did our last last, recording on this, that it is high on the list of longest continuing storylines

713
01:17:47.620 --> 01:17:51.309
Tad Eggleston: in peanuts. It was very rare for him to go

714
01:17:52.650 --> 01:17:55.380
Tad Eggleston: more than a week with the same.

715
01:17:56.150 --> 01:17:59.150
Tad Eggleston: you know. And this this one was was 3 weeks.

716
01:18:02.160 --> 01:18:04.070
Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah, no. So so that's

717
01:18:04.180 --> 01:18:09.440
Tad Eggleston: it's another, you know, he clearly was, was getting something out.

718
01:18:10.250 --> 01:18:16.439
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you know, at some point I may go deep diving to see if see if he ever talked about Mr. Sack, because I

719
01:18:16.570 --> 01:18:22.869
Tad Eggleston: you know again the beauty of the way he works from that centrist perspective.

720
01:18:23.150 --> 01:18:25.590
Tad Eggleston: And actually, it reminds me of a

721
01:18:27.230 --> 01:18:35.610
Tad Eggleston: in the imagine John Lennon documentary, which has got all sorts of of his on video footage.

722
01:18:35.760 --> 01:18:38.490
Tad Eggleston: There's a scene where somebody has

723
01:18:41.990 --> 01:18:46.260
Tad Eggleston: climbed the fence and got into his front door of his London estate.

724
01:18:48.680 --> 01:18:55.469
Tad Eggleston: And I forget what song it was. But he's like in this song, you know. What? What?

725
01:18:57.000 --> 01:18:59.449
Tad Eggleston: What does it mean? And John's just like.

726
01:19:00.050 --> 01:19:08.039
Tad Eggleston: what does it mean to you? He starts telling me he's like, I don't know if it meant that to me, but that's that. Seems like a good thing for it to mean to. You.

727
01:19:08.760 --> 01:19:12.060
Tad Eggleston: Come, have breakfast. We're making pancakes.

728
01:19:12.810 --> 01:19:21.294
Tad Eggleston: you know. And that's I. I know some artists don't like that they want they want. My message must come out.

729
01:19:21.940 --> 01:19:31.769
Tad Eggleston: But but to me some of the greatest art is, it almost certainly meant something very specific to Charles Schultz, but he did it in such a way

730
01:19:32.530 --> 01:19:40.730
Tad Eggleston: that it doesn't have to mean that to me, or you, or you, you know

731
01:19:41.050 --> 01:19:45.589
Tad Eggleston: hopefully, will take the same comfort in it that he took in it.

732
01:19:47.150 --> 01:19:49.420
Tad Eggleston: you know. But we don't have to.

733
01:19:49.590 --> 01:19:56.409
Tad Eggleston: We don't have to draw. I mean, we don't have the same experiences. Nobody has the same experiences.

734
01:19:57.180 --> 01:20:04.990
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, peanuts is peanuts, you know. It's it's so funny, because

735
01:20:06.110 --> 01:20:18.829
Tad Eggleston: when you talk about the Greats, and particularly the Greats that have so much. It's, you know. I can go 6 months without listening to the Beatles. I can go 6 months without listening to Louis Armstrong, you know.

736
01:20:19.410 --> 01:20:39.799
Tad Eggleston: occasionally go 6 months without reading a penis cartoon, and then I pick one up, and I'm like, Oh, my God! Why have I not played? Why have I not played an album or read this? You know, because it's just that it becomes so good that it like transcends the art form, and it's like your brain can't handle it being that good. So like

737
01:20:40.180 --> 01:20:43.059
Tad Eggleston: anytime where I don't have it in my hands.

738
01:20:43.890 --> 01:20:47.799
Tad Eggleston: it won't automatically make my list of of best comics.

739
01:20:47.920 --> 01:20:49.230
Tad Eggleston: It should.

740
01:20:50.050 --> 01:20:54.369
R. Sikoryak: But it doesn't, because it cause it like goes without saying.

741
01:20:55.510 --> 01:20:56.010
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.

742
01:20:56.010 --> 01:20:56.380
Sean Harklerode: Right.

743
01:20:57.180 --> 01:21:09.369
Tad Eggleston: You know, that's that's just how it feels to me is like like the the idea that it's among the best comics that just goes without saying so. Why would you even bother to put it on top of a list? Because everybody knows.

744
01:21:09.370 --> 01:21:14.660
R. Sikoryak: I mean it. It's it is the ubiquity I mean. That is the that is the issue with all of the merchandise.

745
01:21:14.660 --> 01:21:15.100
Tad Eggleston: You're right.

746
01:21:15.100 --> 01:21:17.420
R. Sikoryak: That is that it's so. It's so

747
01:21:17.880 --> 01:21:20.370
R. Sikoryak: present. You don't see it anymore.

748
01:21:20.700 --> 01:21:27.830
Tad Eggleston: Also, I mean peanuts and Star Wars before Disney.

749
01:21:28.400 --> 01:21:38.570
Tad Eggleston: are the 2 things that did merchandising in a way that almost always felt like they enhanced rather than

750
01:21:41.050 --> 01:21:44.210
Tad Eggleston: cheapened what they were doing.

751
01:21:47.290 --> 01:21:57.760
Tad Eggleston: I guess, when Star Wars made its huge push with the Prequel trilogy and was on all the Pepsi products and whatnot that might have been overboard, but but it didn't quite feel there yet.

752
01:21:58.120 --> 01:22:02.119
Tad Eggleston: but like the action figures of the character that was on screen for a second.

753
01:22:02.730 --> 01:22:09.969
Tad Eggleston: You know, peanuts having the lunchbox having the full, I mean, had the lunchbox. Yeah, all right, all of.

754
01:22:09.970 --> 01:22:13.540
Sean Harklerode: I have the Star Wars episode. One bomber jacket from Pepsi.

755
01:22:13.540 --> 01:22:20.529
Tad Eggleston: Yep, right. But but with the exception of probably the metlife.

756
01:22:22.390 --> 01:22:26.520
Tad Eggleston: But that was even done in such a way that most kids didn't really completely get it.

757
01:22:27.930 --> 01:22:35.180
Tad Eggleston: You know, almost every piece of peanuts merchandise out there felt like something that, like a character in peanuts. Would

758
01:22:35.400 --> 01:22:37.020
Tad Eggleston: a Ps lunchbox? Whoa

759
01:22:37.140 --> 01:22:46.420
Tad Eggleston: peanuts, kids needs lunch boxes, a stuffed, a stuffed, a peanut, stuffed animal. Well, you know, they're kids. They love stuffed animals, you know it. It felt

760
01:22:46.650 --> 01:22:52.410
Tad Eggleston: organic and still feels organic, except when I think about that. The

761
01:22:52.540 --> 01:23:03.730
Tad Eggleston: the met billboards with with Snoopy on them that were all over Chicagoland for a while and had me going. What's metlife? And why does Snoopy like it? When I was like 7?

762
01:23:05.313 --> 01:23:11.989
Tad Eggleston: You guys were older. So maybe you you saw merchandise that didn't make as much sense to you, but but that was.

763
01:23:12.950 --> 01:23:18.597
R. Sikoryak: I think I accepted it all at the time. But in retrospect, I'm like, Yeah, there's a lot of it.

764
01:23:18.880 --> 01:23:23.170
Tad Eggleston: Is, there's a ton of I'm not, and there still is. I have, you know.

765
01:23:23.170 --> 01:23:26.310
Sean Harklerode: Stock hairbrush. Yeah, if if you.

766
01:23:26.310 --> 01:23:29.660
Tad Eggleston: Want a peanut something you can probably get it.

767
01:23:29.660 --> 01:23:30.020
Sean Harklerode: 70.

768
01:23:30.020 --> 01:23:30.959
R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah.

769
01:23:31.410 --> 01:23:35.060
Tad Eggleston: I mean I was. I was. I was flipping through chip kids book.

770
01:23:37.490 --> 01:23:38.580
R. Sikoryak: Chip, Kidd wrote.

771
01:23:38.580 --> 01:23:40.249
R. Sikoryak: He makes everything look beautiful.

772
01:23:41.510 --> 01:23:47.869
Tad Eggleston: Chip Kidd wrote the the Charles Schultz and the arts of peanuts, and and like

773
01:23:48.050 --> 01:24:01.979
Tad Eggleston: it's got aside from like sketches and whatnot. It occasionally has some of the the, and, like hallmark, put out a set of napkins, a pack of 36 napkins, with 36 different pictures on them.

774
01:24:02.350 --> 01:24:11.600
Tad Eggleston: So on one side, you know, peanuts, napkins, and on the other side, who bought Charles Schultz

775
01:24:12.280 --> 01:24:16.360
Tad Eggleston: would go, sure. But but we got to have a different image on everyone.

776
01:24:20.070 --> 01:24:20.570
Sean Harklerode: Wow!

777
01:24:20.960 --> 01:24:21.400
R. Sikoryak: I don't know.

778
01:24:22.380 --> 01:24:36.360
Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's just it's like, Oh, let's get your peanuts cartoon in in. I mean, what I'd really, really be curious to find out is whether it turned if you got the 36 napkins, whether they told one story.

779
01:24:37.734 --> 01:24:39.929
R. Sikoryak: I somehow doubt it, but I don't know.

780
01:24:39.930 --> 01:24:41.750
Tad Eggleston: I do, too, but.

781
01:24:41.750 --> 01:24:43.520
Sean Harklerode: Like the spider-man toilet paper.

782
01:24:47.675 --> 01:24:52.029
Sean Harklerode: I didn't even know that there was spider-man toilet paper.

783
01:24:53.070 --> 01:24:54.510
Sean Harklerode: Oh, yeah. Told the story.

784
01:24:55.000 --> 01:25:03.509
Tad Eggleston: Did it. That's kind of awesome. Okay? Maybe it wasn't the the chip kid book I misattributed where where the the napkins were.

785
01:25:03.680 --> 01:25:07.349
Tad Eggleston: So maybe they were. Were they in the the family album?

786
01:25:09.730 --> 01:25:12.579
Tad Eggleston: Yes, 36 different napkins.

787
01:25:12.950 --> 01:25:21.990
Tad Eggleston: There are 36 napkins, all different from peanuts. Gang was a hallmark creation in 1960.

788
01:25:22.840 --> 01:25:24.620
Tad Eggleston: Cocktail napkins.

789
01:25:24.620 --> 01:25:31.730
R. Sikoryak: There's a there's a there's a way in which Mickey Mouse became a symbol for the company rather than a character.

790
01:25:32.060 --> 01:25:35.929
R. Sikoryak: I don't think Mickey Mouse's character is as interesting as Snoopy's.

791
01:25:36.100 --> 01:25:42.080
R. Sikoryak: but there is, there is always the. There's always the problem of over representation, and.

792
01:25:42.080 --> 01:25:42.859
Tad Eggleston: Actually, I.

793
01:25:42.860 --> 01:25:43.680
R. Sikoryak: Ability and.

794
01:25:43.680 --> 01:25:45.119
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I think you just.

795
01:25:45.120 --> 01:25:48.320
R. Sikoryak: Nailed it, whatever it's on. Yeah.

796
01:25:48.320 --> 01:25:56.799
Tad Eggleston: You just nailed it, and in part because Mickey Mouse is not as interested as Charlie Brown because

797
01:25:57.280 --> 01:26:06.550
Tad Eggleston: because of that overrepresentation, it's easy to forget how great the source material is, because.

798
01:26:06.550 --> 01:26:07.570
R. Sikoryak: Concern, yeah. Yeah.

799
01:26:07.570 --> 01:26:10.979
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so much. Logos are just that they're logos.

800
01:26:11.490 --> 01:26:13.240
R. Sikoryak: And it's a great logo, I mean.

801
01:26:13.240 --> 01:26:13.680
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.

802
01:26:13.680 --> 01:26:15.368
R. Sikoryak: I think he's an amazing design.

803
01:26:15.650 --> 01:26:17.099
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so is Charlie Brown.

804
01:26:17.170 --> 01:26:20.659
R. Sikoryak: Yeah, I mean, they're all amazing designs. Yeah, yeah, you know.

805
01:26:21.225 --> 01:26:24.149
Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no. Snoopy is a phenomenal design.

806
01:26:24.400 --> 01:26:31.180
Tad Eggleston: and actually, in a lot of ways, the the most fun. And I'd love to find a graphic that just took Snoopy through the years.

807
01:26:32.600 --> 01:26:33.320
R. Sikoryak: Oh, I'm sure.

808
01:26:33.320 --> 01:26:33.670
Tad Eggleston: Knows.

809
01:26:33.670 --> 01:26:34.219
R. Sikoryak: Good ones.

810
01:26:34.220 --> 01:26:40.090
Tad Eggleston: Certain there is one. I just haven't gone specifically looking for it yet, because Snoop oh.

811
01:26:40.090 --> 01:26:48.619
Tad Eggleston: Snoopy Snoopy evolved so much, and then started evolving into characters, too. You know, you've got so many snoopies.

812
01:26:49.650 --> 01:26:50.340
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.

813
01:26:50.480 --> 01:26:52.829
R. Sikoryak: I know we're probably wrapping up soon. But

814
01:26:53.210 --> 01:27:01.539
R. Sikoryak: Schultz said about Snoopy at some point. He went back and looked at some of like the early 60 drawings. He was really elongated, really Long neck.

815
01:27:01.660 --> 01:27:15.970
R. Sikoryak: and I remember him saying something like, I don't know what I was doing. They I don't know why they didn't fire me like I don't know what I was doing to these characters. He's trying things out and just like letting it. It was very organic. Obviously he didn't have a plan, a 50 Year Plan, but just would.

816
01:27:15.970 --> 01:27:16.430
Tad Eggleston: Right.

817
01:27:16.430 --> 01:27:18.500
R. Sikoryak: Figure it out as he went, and.

818
01:27:19.010 --> 01:27:24.780
R. Sikoryak: I mean, actually, I'm so used to that elongated soupy. I don't mind it, but it is definitely not the classic version.

819
01:27:24.780 --> 01:27:25.220
Sean Harklerode: Right.

820
01:27:25.220 --> 01:27:26.200
R. Sikoryak: We're now.

821
01:27:26.350 --> 01:27:28.310
Tad Eggleston: Well, and he hasn't. He hasn't.

822
01:27:28.770 --> 01:27:33.130
Tad Eggleston: He hasn't become anthropomorphic yet.

823
01:27:33.690 --> 01:27:37.139
R. Sikoryak: No, no, I think he's dancing around, but not.

824
01:27:38.180 --> 01:27:44.910
Tad Eggleston: And even then then it's much more dog like, you know, you're not getting. You're not getting

825
01:27:45.230 --> 01:27:51.840
Tad Eggleston: Snoopy's thoughts yet, and and most of the time. I mean, I think you get

826
01:27:52.040 --> 01:27:54.810
Tad Eggleston: you get dancing before you start getting more from him.

827
01:27:55.040 --> 01:27:59.639
Tad Eggleston: But early early on he's just a dog.

828
01:28:00.030 --> 01:28:06.359
Tad Eggleston: an entertaining dog, because dogs are entertaining, but but just a dog, you know.

829
01:28:06.740 --> 01:28:11.920
Tad Eggleston: You see your own dog in Snoopy in the early comics.

830
01:28:13.021 --> 01:28:25.540
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I feel like we'll wind up revisiting Charles Schultz sometime, just because he's fun. If we ever do, we'll have to pick some specific aspect to go out after. But

831
01:28:25.920 --> 01:28:30.249
Tad Eggleston: you 2 are the only ones here, and we don't have anything on the calendar next, I'm thinking.

832
01:28:30.380 --> 01:28:36.189
Tad Eggleston: since it took so long to get to this one, and because I know our our other guys schedules

833
01:28:36.360 --> 01:28:45.610
Tad Eggleston: are kind of crammed that rather than trying to do march, which normally would be the next scheduled, we'll just push to June. But who do we want to look at

834
01:28:46.160 --> 01:28:47.549
Tad Eggleston: any ideas.

835
01:28:48.540 --> 01:28:53.000
R. Sikoryak: This is a good question. Hmm!

836
01:28:53.830 --> 01:29:01.449
R. Sikoryak: I'm working. I'll just say I'm working on my next book, which is an adaptation, not it's it's an illustrated version of the Declaration of Independence.

837
01:29:02.660 --> 01:29:05.489
R. Sikoryak: I I'm this ties to our subject. I don't want to take us.

838
01:29:05.490 --> 01:29:06.260
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.

839
01:29:06.430 --> 01:29:08.680
R. Sikoryak: My previous book was on the Constitution. Each.

840
01:29:08.680 --> 01:29:09.300
Tad Eggleston: Institution.

841
01:29:09.300 --> 01:29:13.099
R. Sikoryak: Each page of these books is in a different comic style.

842
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Tad Eggleston: I have your Zen of the Declaration of Independence.

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R. Sikoryak: Okay. So you've seen the beginning of it.

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Tad Eggleston: Fit. Yeah.

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R. Sikoryak: So. So my my point is that

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R. Sikoryak: I've drawn about 200 different artists over the course of these 2 books, and I'm trying to think of who who I drew that we haven't spoken about yet. Who would be appropriate.

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Tad Eggleston: Many let me think. Let me think!

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R. Sikoryak: But I almost have too many in my head right now.

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Tad Eggleston: Right.

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R. Sikoryak: So we'll I'll have to. I'll I'll ponder it, will. It'll be a surprise for the next episode, unless you have an idea, Sean. I don't know.

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah.

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Sean Harklerode: I don't really have ha! Have a great idea.

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Tad Eggleston: We can start throwing.

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Tad Eggleston: You're a text or email change.

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Sean Harklerode: Think of!

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Tad Eggleston: Yes.

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Tad Eggleston: Seeger's an issue. I want to do Watterson at some point. I want to do Berkeley breadth at some point. I want to do, Trudeau, at some point.

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Tad Eggleston: Those are the ones that I grew up loving, loving.

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Tad Eggleston: I think it would be nice to do

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Tad Eggleston: God, I'm drawing blanks now, too.

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R. Sikoryak: Sean. This was Barry Kelly by just to say, Schultz was very influenced by Seagar. So that's.

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah.

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R. Sikoryak: Think twice on that end, although doing a more modern artist, a living artist, even right.

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Tad Eggleston: Yeah living artist. I don't think we've done a living artist yet, so we might have to

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Tad Eggleston: to think on that. So we'll we'll toss it into the text chain, email, chain whatnot, and we'll figure it out soon. We got some time but for Sean Hoggle Road and Bob Sikoriak this has been

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Tad Eggleston: the 22 panels, comic book, Comic Strip Book Club, and a discussion of Charles Schultz and Peanuts, and we will see you after the next page.