Saturday, July 24, 2010

January 22, 1953: Schroeder signs the fence

Peanuts

These days, the ubiquity of computers has give us the cut-and-paste comic strip. That is why we still have (although we really don't need it) B.C., although Johnny Hart died years ago now, the syndicate has a database of all the characters in a variety of poses, and can now just throw together a strip in a paint program. It's just another way that newspaper comics have come to suck as of late.

Peanuts, although its streamlined, iconic look might make one think it to be one of the few strips that could be conceivably improved by such a process, to my knowledge never used it. Thus, when you see a complex bit of art in multiple panels, such as Charlie Brown's signature here, you can be pretty sure Charles Schulz drew it the same way multiple times. It is fun to play spot the differences in those cases: the 'r' in Charlie is a little wider in the second panel and extents further below the 'l', the 'e' at the end has a slightly larger loop, the 'o' is crossed by the board seam at the right place, but the second dip of the 'w' in Brown is smaller....

1 comment:

  1. My, how graffiti has changed over the years...

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