Word: strips
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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During all the years of solemnity, one strip provided an antidote of sophisticated wit, and all the modern humor strips are in its debt. George Herriman's Krazy Kat, which ran from 1910 until its creator's death in 1944, rarely strayed from the established routine: Krazy, a thwarted idealist like Charlie Brown, loves the mouse Ignatz, but Ignatz is so incensed at this unnatural love from a cat that he hurls a brick at her; whereupon he is carted off to jail by the guardian of law and order, Offissa Pupp. Herriman injected so much poetry into...
...comics are still regarded by their U.S. creators as largely a pleasant, well-paying business, in which salaries of successful cartoonists run to six figures. Handling this $100 million-a-year business are a dozen powerful syndicates and some 240 smaller ones-many of which handle only a single strip. The syndicates sign up the artist, sell his strip to the newspapers, and then try to convince the papers to keep running it in what Milt Caniff calls a "murderous business...
...their services, the syndicates demand a high price: 50% of the strip's sales and usually a copyright, so that if the creator quits or dies, another cartoonist can be hired to carry on the work. On top of that, the syndicates exercise a censorship that is breathtaking. When Dale Messick included a Negro girl among a group of teenagers in Brenda Starr, the syndicate rubbed her out for fear of offending Southern readers. When Milt Caniff used the Air Force slang word abort (to cancel) in Steve Canyon, the syndicate figured it came too close to abortion...
...Some of the more spirited cartoonists buck, kick and squirm," says a syndicate editor, and Charles Schulz bucks as much as any. He complained about his second strip when United Feature sketched in a black eye Patty gave Charlie. Recently, United objected to the Peanuts sequence in which Linus' blanket attacks the other Peanuts. "That's monster stuff," complained United Feature's President Laurence Rutman, who prevailed on Schulz to abandon eight strips. "It's not the real you." In retaliation, Schulz bought a baby blanket, drew a monster on it saying "Boo!" and sent...
Schulz fights for his strip with vehemence because he puts so much of himself into Peanuts' world. So vivid have his strip characters become to him that he talks of them as if they were members of the household. (They are as real to readers, who have sent blankets to Linus, valentines to Charlie, and a variety of clothes to Snoopy.) The psychiatry Schulz includes in Peanuts comes from his own intuition; he seldom reads any weighty tomes. "I try to remember that basically cartooning is drawing funny pictures. So I just draw some kind of wild action...