Schulzs Youth

by Charles M. Schulz and Jerry Scott

Book Overview

From the mid-1950s through the late 1960s, while Charlie Brown and Snoopy were turning into international superstars, Peanuts creator Charles Schulz was also creating a series of single-panel cartoons about teens. Featuring a foreword by "Zits" and "Baby Blues" writer Jerry Scott, this volume collects hundreds of these teenager cartoons. While some of this material has seen print in earlier collections (the last one published in the 1980s),...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0975395890
• ISBN13: 9780975395899
• Release Date: July 2007
• Publisher: About Comics
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful 'Religious' Humor

This book by Sparky Schulz is simply a DELIGHT It is a wonderful example of Sparky's creativity -- before and beyond his creation of the successful Peanuts Cartoon Strip.

This is like going back in time

This book is amazing and is so much fun. Every page is like looking in a window back in time at the youth of the past. The simple and happy nature. The common expectations. It is adorable and while enjoying, the reader can also learn a few lessons without even trying. This is a treasure for anyone who has or does work with youth in any way. It is also enjoyed by teens who can see themselves, their friends, and sometimes their grandparents in each cartoon. Great buy and a treasure to share.

Schulz' take on godly teens

This volume reprints Charles Schulz' "Young Pillars" panels for the Worldwide Church of God youth magazine. Perhaps to distance himself just a bit from his concurrent work on PEANUTS, Schulz typically signed these works with a lowercase cursive "cms." Schulz' gags here, many of which involve (no surprise) Biblical and church-related references, are very much in the spirit of his PEANUTS gags, calculated to produce smiles and chuckles rather than guffaws. Schulz does make efforts to generate running gags involving such topics as bowling dates, rattletrap jalopies, and teens awkwardly trying to teach Sunday School lessons to seated children who look very much like well-dressed members of the PEANUTS gang, but he's usually content to make a gag with a single point and get off the stage. The earliest panels are comparatively realistic-looking, as if Schulz (just as in his syndicated panel IT'S ONLY A GAME) were consciously trying to make them so, but the familiar Schulz abstraction soon takes over. By the end of the run, the characters resemble nothing so much as contemporary PEANUTS participants stretched on a rack. In one unusual stylistic quirk, the faces of certain female characters -- especially good-looking ones -- are drawn so that there is a gap between the tip of the nose and the mouth. The closest thing the feature has to a recurring character is a skinny male skyscraper with a face like Charlie Brown's and a shock of hair resembling that of a ruffled rooster, but he doesn't ever develop a distinct personality. The message was clearly "the thing" in this enterprise, a sharp departure from the character dynamics that fueled PEANUTS. The book also includes Schulz' illustrations from another WCOG publication, "Two-by-Fours", which feature neatly-coiffed preschool kids carrying off mildly amusing religious-themed gags. Obviously essential for a Schulz completist, but whether this collection will interest anyone else is very much an open question.