Post by westender on Oct 15, 2010 14:18:10 GMT -1
The Peanuts cartoon guy. A strip every day for most of his life. Retired and laid down his pen December 1999; died Feb 2000, as the last Peanuts strip rolled off the presses.
Embdy here into Peanuts?
The man really was a genius. This is a really nice, timely piece in todays' Herald:
www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/book-features/you-re-still-a-good-man-charlie-brown-1.1060859
"...We sometimes are so wrapped up in the money, the sources of its melancholy or the reach of the thing that we can forget it all comes down to a man sitting at his desk, writing and drawing four panels per day (three in later years and more at the weekend). Just four panels. Just four beats. Or sometimes two beats, pause and punchline (though even then it was often a subdued punchline). Or beat, pause, beat, beat. A rhythm constantly in flux. A tune played out in the familiar, oversized heads and small bodies of his characters, the coloratura a minimalist scribble of grass, the odd tree, a fence, Schroeder’s piano, Snoopy’s doghouse. A world reduced to a scratchy pencil line.
...
...Schulz wasn’t an artist because he suffered,” Franzen wrote in his introduction to an earlier volume of The Complete Peanuts. “He suffered because he was an artist. To keep choosing art over the comforts of a normal life – to grind out a strip every day for 50 years; to pay the steep psychic price for this – is the opposite of damaged. It’s the sort of choice that only a tower of strength and sanity can make."
Charles Schultz, and Jim Henson. In terms of 20th century universal cultural icons, I can't think of anyone more important than either of them. Their best work will never age - and will never be bettered.
I liked Linus.
Embdy here into Peanuts?
The man really was a genius. This is a really nice, timely piece in todays' Herald:
www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/book-features/you-re-still-a-good-man-charlie-brown-1.1060859
"...We sometimes are so wrapped up in the money, the sources of its melancholy or the reach of the thing that we can forget it all comes down to a man sitting at his desk, writing and drawing four panels per day (three in later years and more at the weekend). Just four panels. Just four beats. Or sometimes two beats, pause and punchline (though even then it was often a subdued punchline). Or beat, pause, beat, beat. A rhythm constantly in flux. A tune played out in the familiar, oversized heads and small bodies of his characters, the coloratura a minimalist scribble of grass, the odd tree, a fence, Schroeder’s piano, Snoopy’s doghouse. A world reduced to a scratchy pencil line.
...
...Schulz wasn’t an artist because he suffered,” Franzen wrote in his introduction to an earlier volume of The Complete Peanuts. “He suffered because he was an artist. To keep choosing art over the comforts of a normal life – to grind out a strip every day for 50 years; to pay the steep psychic price for this – is the opposite of damaged. It’s the sort of choice that only a tower of strength and sanity can make."
Charles Schultz, and Jim Henson. In terms of 20th century universal cultural icons, I can't think of anyone more important than either of them. Their best work will never age - and will never be bettered.
I liked Linus.
