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Charles Schulz’s Teen Comics

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The Comicrazys blog has posted some scans from the out-of-print Charles Schulz book What Was Bugging Ol’ Pharaoh?

In Schulz’s Peanuts, the adults were always offstage, so it was easy to assume he never drew adults, teenagers, or anyone over the age of ten. So these cartoons are interesting artefacts from a man who spent 50 years drawing small children. What also sets some of these apart is their overt religious themes.

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Schulz was a devout Christian, but in 50 years of Peanuts, he managed to keep references to God out of his strip. There were a few exceptions, such as the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, of course, and this famous example from 1963:

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And while these cartoons feature mostly teenagers, we’re even treated to an actual adult now and then. So we can easily imagine how Charlie Brown might look when he grows up.

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Most, if not all, of these teenager cartoons have been reprinted recently in a paperback book called Schulz’s Youth. But as books go, it feels like an ugly slapped-together afterthought. Those beautiful captions set in Futura that so perfectly place the cartoons in the late 50s/early 60s are replaced with oversized captions purposelessly set in font based on Schulz’s handwriting from the latter half of his career. And there’s something about that old, yellowed paper that brings a cartoon to life that today’s ultra-smooth bleached-white paper fails to do.

Here’s another of Schulz’s book of teen cartoons, this one from my collection, called Young Pillars:

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  • http://fatherbrownatleisure.blogspot.com/ John Salmon

    Actually, Christian references were common in “Peanuts”-from the mouth of Linus in particular.

  • kelseigh

    Speaking of Linus, the girl in that Young Pillars cover looks disturbingly like him (and seems to have a similar attitude). Perhaps he was headed for a lifetime of cross-dressing?

  • http://teaboxscent.blogspot.com Cris C.

    Wow, I love those, they nevere made it to Italy though: we had peanuts but I never saw his teenage comics! Thanks for sharing!

  • Bart

    I remember reading “Young Pillars” in the early 1970's. Being so conditioned to see “Peanuts” I never quite got what he was up to in this other book. I remember being fascinated by the idea of how his Peanuts characters might appear as adults.

  • Scooby

    Mr. Salmon, you should just be amazed that something not ripping into Christian values was actually posted on here.

  • http://threemeninatub.blogspot.com/ Ted Dawson

    Later in life, Schulz stated that he was a secular humanist.

  • http://www.findingelim.com dave nelson

    Sheesh, Ted. Thanks for popping my bubble. Oh well, Schulz's characters were so endearing, I always appreciated the way they exposed people to religion in a pretty non-threatening way. I wonder how he looked back on these toward the end of his life. GREAT post, BTW.

  • Sean C

    I once saw a old paperback of these comics, in a Christian Book Store my mother dragged me to often, I was 10 or 12 and didn't find any of the jokes amusing, and had no money, so I put it back but was fascinated by what a teenage charlie brown might look like. I still am curious about this other Schulz comic that is out there. Thanks for the post.

  • Tim

    “Polishing up one of the ol' church pillars”? Eh? That sounds pretty risqué …

  • http://comicrazys.com ComiCrazys

    WOW! Thanks for the mention here. I have been a fan of Drawn from practically it's beginning. Great job, everyone!

    I must apologize to anyone finding this post missing from ComiCrazys. I received an email from the current publisher of Schulz's Youth, notifying me that I had way to many images posted and that… well, read for yourself:

    “As the current publisher of the Warner Press Schulz material, my agreement with Warner Press makes it incumbent upon me to tell you to take down the images that you currently have up. 24 pages from a 64 page book passes beyond any reasonable interpretation of “fair use”.

    HOWEVER, our agreement with them also allows us to authorize limited quantities of the panels for promotional use. What I would be glad to do is to take, say, four of those two-page spreads, put the appropriate rights notice on them, and those you can have up. The only other requirement would be a single line of text noting that those panels and more are currently available in Schulz's Youth, published by About Comics — that will allow us to count this as “promotional use”. (The posting of the cover as you did was certainly generous and fine, but not necessary.)

    So let me know which spreads you would like to keep, and I'll get to adding the rights text!”

    I had posted a link to the current edition of Schulz's Youth on Amazon, figuring that would be enough. It wasn't. I could have gone along with the publisher's request, but I really think only 4 spreads is just way to little a sampling of these rarely seen strips. So i declined.

  • http://www.holycoast.com Rick Moore

    I've got both those books. Got them when I was a kid in the 60's and part of a youth group in my church. There's a lot of funny stuff in those collections.

  • Damian

    Absolutely. Linus played the prophet often. What Was Bugging Ol’ Pharaoh? and The Gospel According to Peanuts were free time reading when I was in 6th Grade.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1787149452 Lilium Illuminata

    interesting! and i thought we were neglected by C. Schulz!

  • Eric Paulsen

    Who knew that one of my childhood favorites was about one hop, skip, and jump away from being Jack Chick?

  • http://wistfuldreaming.com Wistful Dreaming

    Wow, I only knew Charles Schulz for his Peanuts cartoons…

  • http://twitter.com/nsfmc Marcos Ojeda

    this is sort of a lame comment, but the captions are printed in Spartan, not Futura. Spartan is a charming american Futura knockoff (with a charm all its own!!), you can tell because its M is not as pointy :(

    neat comics, though!

  • http://twitter.com/kissja74 Janos Kiss

    good grief! :-)

  • Philip Shade

    I think Schulz is pretty far from being Jack Chick.

    Not religious myself, it's still always bothered me the way people treat beloved icons from their youth – say the Narnia chronicles – when they realize they're religious.

  • Jim Jameson

    I bought one in the late 60s called Teenagers of the World Unite! Where the Peanuts gang are all teens and protesters to boot!

  • DewiMorgan

    That's an unusually pleasant takedown demand.
    They genuinely have no choice but to make them, as I understand it: as with a lawn, if they don't defend their property, there's an argument that it then becomes public domain. But as with a lawn, simply crying “get off my lawn!” is sufficient: muscle tactics are not required.

  • Nobody

    its wak