I love this strip! I saw it when I was a little kid in an early Peanuts compilation and it's stuck in the back of my mind ever since. The "For the Kiddies" in funky script at the top drives the joke home.
Check out all the names: Mangle, Slaughter, Throttle, Jab, Terror, Choke, Crush, Run (something), Mob, War (twice), Thrill, Smash, Murder Comix, Killer, Hate, Ouch!, Hit!, Mur-something (maybe Murder again), Terror, Gouge, Stab!, Kick Komics, something I can't make out, Kill Komics, Murder Comics, Smash, and Blast Comics.
In addition to some rarely-seen cultural commentary from Charles Schulz in the form of those titles, we get Charlie Brown professing to being discouraged here. And the Druggist is basically an unseen character here.
Drug stores used to be an important center for the community. How far they've fallen since those days. I have never seen an operational soda fountain in a drug store in my life.
EDIT: Fixed comic.
Looks like you linked to yesterday's comic?
ReplyDeleteMy mother owns a number of the original books, so a lot of the early strips are familiar to me, but until you posted this one, I thought I'd never seen an old Sunday strip before, but clearly I have because, like you, this one stuck in my head.
ReplyDeleteIn an old issue of Peter Bagge's comic Hate! - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_(comic) - they published the second panel of this strip. I always thought they'd rewritten Charlie's speech bubble - "surely he never said 'gory'?" - but apparently not. So thanks for a wonderful blog and for setting the record straight!
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that while Schulz references "gory" comics, he doesn't seem all that critical of them. Charlie Brown seems pretty well-adjusted for reading all those violent comics. He may have a somewhat cavalier attitude toward merchandise, but that's hardly symptomatic of a killer-in-training.
ReplyDeleteWith all of those sound effetc like names, it sounds like Batman! Roger Ramjet!! Pow!
ReplyDeleteBTW Glad to see this celebvration of the IMO forgotten formative years of Peanuts..!
Pokey