To Be (or Not to Be) Continued
by T. Hodler
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Well, one of my initial impetuses for the way [Wilson] was told was that I was reading the collected Peanuts editions […] And to read them in sequence, it felt like a new way to tell a story, in a way. I mean, that wasn’t Charles Schulz’s goal was for you to read them all at once, that you’re supposed to read them every day. But to read them in sequence, it really felt like it was replicating the way that you remember the passage of time in memory. It – you know, you remember just these sort of high moments, emotional highs and lows or certain resonating moments of a given year.
—Dan Clowes, interviewed for NPR’s Talk of the Nation
I wonder if Clowes is right that Charles Schulz did not intend for his strips to be read all at once. When Schulz first began Peanuts, of course, the idea that the entire strip would eventually be collected in its entirety would have been beyond imagining, but at a certain point in his career, it must have become obvious that the vast bulk of his strips would, in fact, be collected into books. That must have influenced the way he created them on some level, right? Even if he was primarily concerned with the strips as standalone, daily reads (and he presumably was), it could not have escaped his notice that they would eventually be read together, and that after their initial publication, that would be more or less the only way they would be read. One of my co-bloggers (or our readers) might know more definitively what Schulz thought of all this, if he ever said anything about it publicly.
That potential savior might also have the answer to a question this raises: When exactly did the strip cartoonists who might be affected by this fact first begin to realize it? And how, if at all, did it affect the way they conceived of their art? Clearly by the time of later cartoonists such as Bill Watterson and Garry Trudeau, eventual collection in books had become more or less a given for the most successful cartoonists. Walt Kelly of course famously reworked Pogo for his book collections, and I am sure there must be more examples of continuity rearranging that more knowledgeable readers can name. I wonder when exactly the likelihood of this dual publication (at least for the most popular artists) became clear, if ever. (This also brings to mind the loosely similar change in mindset affecting cartoonists like Clowes and the Hernandez Bros., as graphic novels take the place of the serialized comic book their work was once designed to fill.)
Someone like E.C. Segar couldn’t have predicted that the complete Popeye strips would eventually be available for purchase and shelving, but it’s amazing just how well Thimble Theatre works read as a piece. Perhaps because of its vaudeville nature, the repeated setups and gags (necessary to keep readers up-to-date even if they’d missed previous strips) actually often lead to increased hilarity and enjoyment. (I am writing this without access to the books, or I would provide an example or two. Perhaps I will have time to add one here later.)
Another strip whose continuity-preserving repetitions often provoke my laughter is Stan Lee and Larry Lieber’s Spider-Man. But that somehow seems less of a testimony to craftsmanship.
Labels: Charles Schulz, comic strips, continuity, Daniel Clowes, E.C. Segar, Larry Lieber, serialization, Stan Lee, Walt Kelly
I think there’s a lot of value in Clowes’s idea that the experience of reading daily strips in collected form replicates memory.
In my opinion this is particularly apparent in James Kochalka’s American Elf. When read in collected form (with four strips on each page), each four-panel strip becomes, in effect, a single panel in a larger narrative, unfolding at a constant rate over time. As Clowes says, this creates a completely different reading experience to what you get from taking the strips daily. It’s fascinating to see gradual shifts in tone and style emerge from such a staccato format.
I wrote briefly about this idea in relation to Kochalka in my undergraduate dissertation, but I think there’s a lot more to be extracted from it. I particularly think that it presents a fascinating way of re-reading Wilson. Imagine if Clowes had presented each page weekly, then collected them years later!
Many people interested in comic strips have been reading collections of them for a very long time.
It was fairly common for comic strip readers to clip and save strips; often pasting them into notebooks. This practice has been mentioned by quite a number of cartoonists. I’m almost certain Schulz has described doing this himself as a kid.
In addition there were strip collections going back to the early 1900’s. In the 1930’s the earliest comic books were strip collections.
A book collection of Krazy Kat was published by Holt in 1946, and it’s likely Schulz read Krazy Kat in the Holt book.
Kim Thompson mentioned a few months ago that he felt perhaps the best way to read daily strips would be if they were slightly edited to remove repetitive elements.
Personally I don’t like the idea at all.
The better comic strip artists were far to skilled to just throw away a panel in recapping the previous days events. I’d think a throw away panel would almost never occur in a well done strip. In the best strips even when the previous days events are recapped they are seen from another angle; perhaps a character who witnessed the events recounted in the previous strip might describe them to another character not present at the time.
Harold Gray often used the device of having a group of gossips repeat a story giving the story a different slant. This recapped events, but also allowed Gray to “comment” on the negative effects of gossip.
Annie might also recount some event to Sandy, or someone she trusts, but these monologues recast events, previously seen as action, in Annie’s own words, and add her commentary. I enjoy Annie’s speeches and wouldn’t enjoy seeing them cut out to speed the plot along.
There were strip continuities designed to be readable with or without the Sunday page. The Sunday page is repetitive in many instances because it was designed to be read and understood without reading the dailies.
The case of Walt Kelly and Pogo is a very different matter.
I have all or nearly all the Pogo books which will be well worth keeping to compare to the forthcoming newspaper strip reprints. As was mentioned Kelly reworked these himself, and seeing the changes he made will be a fascinating study.
I really have no idea how extensive the chages he made are. I would assume Kelly added as well as subtracted material, retouched and redrew panels, maybe whole sequences?
It was fairly common for comic strip readers to clip and save strips; often pasting them into notebooks. This practice has been mentioned by quite a number of cartoonists. I’m almost certain Schulz has described doing this himself as a kid.
This is true, and an interesting point. Of course, knowing that your strips will be pasted into a book by devotees is a bit different in not only degree, but kind, from having them published and sold in bookstores, so I’m not sure it would have affected many cartoonists’ approaches, but who knows? Stranger things have happened.
A book collection of Krazy Kat was published by Holt in 1946, and it’s likely Schulz read Krazy Kat in the Holt book.
Right! But am I wrong in thinking that was a very unusual publication at the time? When did comic strips first start getting published in book form on a regular basis? Someone knows. The answer is surely buried somewhere in my library, and I will look for it this weekend.
Kim Thompson mentioned a few months ago that he felt perhaps the best way to read daily strips would be if they were slightly edited to remove repetitive elements.
Personally I don’t like the idea at all.
I don’t like the idea much myself, either, but Thompson still might be right! But I’m with you, if only for historical reasons.
The better comic strip artists were far to skilled to just throw away a panel in recapping the previous days events. I’d think a throw away panel would almost never occur in a well done strip.
I am not sure I agree with this, however. This is a matter of opinion, of course, but everyone from Chester Gould to Milton Caniff to Harold Gray have been unable to solve this particular problem with grace every single time. At least to my mind. I don’t think this is really a flaw so much as a feature that inevitably arose from the daily format, but there’s no question that sometimes when I read a complete collection of older strips, there are often a fair number of recap panels that are, strictly speaking, redundant in an artistic sense.
Schulz must have had collections in mind for some time. There are decades of collections of his books…and I think he actually started writing longer and more elaborate stories as he went on.
I was just looking at Popeye and thinking about how well the repetitions worked….
The thing about Schulz, and what delayed The Complete Peanuts for so long, is that while his strips started to get collected into paperbacks just a few years into his run, he held out a number of what he considered to be his lesser strips from such collections. That was especially true of one-off gags or strips that had specific cultural references he didn’t want to include later on.
While the paperbacks and collections did a fine job of collecting the longer storylines (and there were plenty of week or even multiweek storylines just a few years into his run), they failed to capture just what Tim is getting at here: Peanuts as a sort of measure of time for one man’s life. While Schulz’ aim above all else was to be funny and give a solid gag for the reader, the surrounding mood and emotional content of each strip seemed to rise and fall from day-to-day and year-to-year. That’s especially true of the 60s strips an Charlie Brown himself; it’s the pathos of those strips that had such a profound effect on guys like Chris Ware.
It was only toward the very end of his life that Gary Groth was able to talk him into doing a complete, chronological run of his strips. Schulz honestly thought no one would want such a thing, especially with regard to his earliest strips. It really is acting as a kind of memoir in the way that Clowes suggests.
I don’t dispute any of that, but I don’t think it really conflicts with what I am saying, either. The fact is that the bulk of his strips were collected in books, Schulz knew that many of them would be read in sequence (even if not in their absolute entirety), and I can’t believe that that did not in some sense affect the way he approached them (if only at the back of his mind). It’s impossible to prove, of course, and maybe not that interesting…
Otherwise, I basically agree with what you and Clowes are saying, so this isn’t a major conflict, I don’t think.
Schulz in a latter (probably TCJ) interview talked about the paperback book collections.
He was bemoaning the fact they had faded from the scene.
Schulz saw the value of the cheap inexpensive format, and if I recall mentioned them as being perfect for an airplane passenger.
I’ve got stacks of the cheap 60’s-70’s paperbacks all over the place. My son who is 8 recently got into B.C. and blew through a dozen of them over the course of two days.
I think Schulz was correct that cheap little collections would still sell in high numbers to a casual readership unlikely to invest in an expensive hardcover.
BTW: the early Rinehart Schulz reprints from the 50’s are very nice books. The design is outstanding, the reproduction excellent, and the strips are reproduced at a larger size than in the Fantagraphics volumes.
I don’t think Schulz created the strip with books in mind. Sure, he liked having them (“Look at me, I’m an author!”), but he was a strip man (i.e., a newspaper man) at heart and it was all about that daily schedule. I think the daily nature of the strip dictated everything from his work schedule to his pacing, and think if he was truly creating with books in mind, I think you’d see more consistency in the lengths of continued storylines and probably even a bit more considered structuring to the stories. At least that’s my impression from what I know. I think this is supported by his initial ambivalence if not outright dismissive attitude towards the very idea of The Complete Peanuts. My impression is that when he finally consented to Gary Groth pursuing the idea, any interest he had was from a more historical/archival interest than because he thought the strip should ultimately be read that way. Then again, he *did* love books. So who knows. I’ll have to ask Jeannie or Monte Schulz.
Interesting. Thanks, Eric! You make a lot of solid points. Schulz really was a complicated guy, and I should probably have been more hesitant about reading his mind. But it still kind of baffles me to think that an artist as ambitious as he seemed to be would be complacent about how the strip would be read after his lifetime. But maybe I’ve been looking at it all wrong: he may have (probably correctly) figured that future readers of the strip would make allowances for its daily-newspaper origin, and simply wanted it to be the best possible daily strip that it could be. And why worry about something you can’t really control (at least without massively changing the way the strip was conceived)?
The strangest thing I noticed reading the collected first few years of Peanuts was how frequently a joke would be repeated, often only weeks or even days apart. I don’t just mean jokes with simlar themes or setups or punchlines, but the same-exact-joke. I’d have to dig out the volumes to provide specific dates, but I was shocked when it would occur… and I wondered how this got by the editor, if Schulz himself noticed (or did it deliberately?) and if the audience at the time noticed. I suppose this is to be expected with a daily strip grind, and especially during the early years when Schulz’s work was more gag based than the later philosophical or observational stuff. Obviously reading a sequential, complete collection amplifies that sort of repetition.
“T. Hodler says: And why worry about something you can’t really control (at least without massively changing the way the strip was conceived)?”
This brings to mind one of my biggest problems with Bill Watterson’s attitude towards his work. All his bitter complaining in his later years about how awful the constraints of the comic strip page were has always rubbed me the wrong way. He could have dropped the strip at any moment after the first couple years (and certainly later, after the enormous success with the reprint books) and moved to comic books, or children’s books, or whatever, and had all the formal and content freedom he wanted, but it’s like he had blinders on about the very medium and business he CHOSE to practice in, while remaining ignorant that any other similar, more adventageous medium existed. I’d go so far as to say he was a bit of a bullshit artist — would he have had anything to say or draw in a larger, freer format than what he was already doing? Or just more dumb stuff about Calvin fighting dinosaurs?
Similarly, Trudeau’s insistence that his strip be printed larger is typically obnoxious…
Not only did Schulz recycle gags from Peanuts (often re-used in a slightly different context but many years later), he recycled many more gags from his first strip, LI’L FOLKS. I think this speaks to three things. First, he may not have had an encylcopedic memory of his own gags over a fifty-year period. He may well have been recyclying by accident. (That would make particular sense if he thought of Peanuts as a somewhat disposable strip.) Second, he may have struggled with the daily deadline as a young cartoonist, and so might have chosen to cannibalize his own work from time to time. Third, moving to even the loosest of continued storylines may well have been a way of solving the problem of having to come up with a new gag out of the blue every day.