“Update” is Not a Calendar Joke but Sounds Like it Should Be


And in what is going to be my very last calendar update until the next one I would just like to say …

Triumph.

The Peanuts 2018 page-a-day calendar, sitting atop my boxes of the 2017 and 2016 calendars too.
This is not where I actually keep my calendars when they’re in service because I also rely on their bulk to keep a couple of mathematics books that I never use standing up.

So what happened is after Amazon cancelled my order on the grounds they didn’t know how to get me the calendar they ordered, I followed the link they provided to the page on Amazon for ordering calendars. And that, through I think the company that sets up those kiosks in the malls from like October through the 26th of December selling calendars, got me this inside a week. Not clear why Amazon couldn’t think of that. But then my understanding is that in the earliest days of the English East India Company, each successive voyage to India was organized as its own venture, and because of the travel times there’d be overlapping periods when one year’s ship hadn’t yet left and the next year’s ship had arrived, and they’d be rivals for trade prospects, sometimes getting so heated that rival trading crews would open fire on one another despite theoretically all working for the same company. I assume Amazon is like this still, and the “ordering calendars” division and the “delivering calendars” division are particularly fierce rivals and routinely launching raids on one another, taking hostages, and holding them for ransom, and between that and the miasma, scurvy, and the Horse Latitudes there’s nobody left who can actually do anything calendar-related.

So anyway I’m glad to have this and to have everything back in order and not have to worry about …

Calendar with Charlie Brown in school talking to Linus: 'My stomach hurts. I think I worry about too many things. The more I worry, the more my stomach hurts ... the more my stomach hurts, the more I worry ... my stomach hates me!'
If they just want the comic to be larger so it’s easier to read, why don’t they just stack the comic strip, which was always four identically-sized panels back then, in two rows of two comics each? And maybe print the stock art of the characters in the lower right corner smaller so there’s still space if someone wants to make a note?

You know, there’s no way the aspect ratio on that comic is right. I know the classic four-panel era of Peanuts and those panels look wrong. But if they cropped the panels then the word balloons wouldn’t fit. Unless they completely rejiggered the word balloons, cutting and pasting text around so that … what, they could make the panels a little bit taller but also completely wrong? But who would do that?

Same comic strip as before, but the panels aren't so tall and narrow, and Charlie Brown's balloons in the second through fourth panels are rearranged to fit in a taller, narrower space.
Charles Schulz’s Peanuts for the 27th of February, 1968, and the 27th of February was the last Tuesday of the month, so why are they printing that as the comic for the last Friday of the month in 2018? February 1968 had the same days of the week through to Leap Day; why are they changing this too? They haven’t had to avoid any Ash Wednesday or Leap Day jokes in Peanuts that year, and the only Easter joke is the one that actually ran on Easter 1968.

Hm.

This is the most baffling comics-related bit of reworking stuff since earlier this week in the Bud Sagendorf Popeye rerun.

Author: Joseph Nebus

I was born 198 years to the day after Johnny Appleseed. The differences between us do not end there. He/him.

7 thoughts on ““Update” is Not a Calendar Joke but Sounds Like it Should Be”

  1. “It’s Been a Long Year, Charlie Nebus” brought to you by Little Debbie Zingers and your local bottlers of Coca-Cola (Except Irving at the Kangaroo Cafe who refuses to support any Peanuts specials made after1974)and your local McDonald’s

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    1. I have to say that Irving kind of has a point, although It’s Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown is far better than its reputation suggests. Granted, its reputation suggests that watching it is only slightly preferable to being in a house fire, but still.

      It’s Magic, Charlie Brown has a striking amount of body horror in it, too. Not sure that’s what anyone is looking for, but you’d think it was some crazy early-70s cartoon for the way it pans out.

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  2. Just curious…did Schultz ever canonically have Patty acknowledge that Snoopy was a dog and not a weird kid with a big nose, and that his doghouse was not the Browns’ guest cottage?

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    1. He did! In a sequence from March of 1974 Peppermint Patty decides to not go to school anymore and sit with Snoopy atop Chuck’s adorable guest cottage. Marcie tries dragging her back to her senses and that doesn’t work out well for the doghouse. But when that’s done, Marcie lays some harsh reality on Peppermint Patty:

      https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1974/3/21

      And she remembers this for a while; next time she’s in the strip she brings it up and how embarrassed she is right away: https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1974/04/08

      And for a while Peppermint Patty remained aware that Snoopy is not just a funny-looking kid with a big nose. But at some point Schulz either forgot he’d established that or figured the jokes worked better the other way. He made the same decision at some point regarding the Little Red-Haired Girl having moved away.

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