Comment by randycupertino

15 hours ago

There was a long read article that came out a few years ago called "How Snoopy Killed Peanuts:"

https://kotaku.com/how-snoopy-killed-peanuts-1724269473

about how Peanuts lost it's edge once the "cute" popular dog was introduced, whereas prior it used to be more subversive, philosophical/theoretical with darker material.

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randycupertino

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FiddlerClamp  2 hours ago

I think it was a one-two punch:

1. Snoopy becoming Flanderized, as in the "Happiness is a warm puppy" stuff from the 1960s.

2. Introduction of Woodstock the bird. That meant Snoopy and Woodstock went off and had their own adventures which didn't involve the human gang at all.

I also wonder whether Schulz participated in any recreational drugs in the 1960s. I don't meant to be disrespectful at all, but some of the stuff he drew was pretty wild.

There's a set of strips where Charlie Brown sees the moon as a baseball (and later, Alfred E. Neuman's head), another where Snoopy dreams of Charlie Brown flying him like a kite and him crashing to the ground in pieces, and a horror-movie-like series where Linus's blanket attacks Lucy. All very strange.

PakG1  13 hours ago

It's too bad that there are probably meant to be so many example comics in that article, judging from how it's written, and what's really there is just ads where the comics are probably supposed to be. Wonder what happened.