With Nat Gertler, Eisner-Winning Author and Comics Historian

Eisner-winning author and comics historian Nat Gertler is here to talk about his long association with Peanuts, preserving obscure Schulz art and comics, and why these characters still resonate within culture. Nat is the author of Charles M. Schulz: The Art and Life of the Peanuts Creator in 100 Objects as well as The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel.

Find out more about Nat at:   blog.aaugh.com and gertler.com

 

Transcript available at UnpackingPeanuts.com

Unpacking Peanuts is copyright Jimmy Gownley, Michael Cohen, Harold Buchholz, and Liz Sumner. Produced and edited by Liz Sumner. Music by Michael Cohen. Additional voiceover by Aziza Shukralla Clark. 

For more from the show follow @unpackpeanuts on Instagram and Threads, and @unpackingpeanuts on Facebook, Blue Sky, and YouTube. For more about Jimmy, Michael, and Harold, visit unpackingpeanuts.com.  

Thanks for listening.

Episode Transcript

VO (00:02):
Welcome to Unpacking Peanuts.
The podcast where three cartoonists take an in-depth look at the greatest comic strip of all time, Peanuts by Charles M.
Schulz.

Jimmy (00:18):
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's a special day today here on Unpacking Peanuts, and I'm going to be your host for the proceedings.
My name is Jimmy Gownley.
I'm also a cartoonist.
I did things like Amelia Rules, Seven Good Reasons Not to Grow Up and The Dumbest Idea Ever.
Joining me as always are my pals, co-hosts and fellow cartoonists.
First, he's a playwright and a composer, both for the band Complicated People, as well as for this very podcast.

(00:41):
He's the co-creator of the original comic book Price Guide, the original editor to Amelia Rules, and the creator of such great strips as Strange Attractors, A Gathering of Spells and Tangled River.
It's Michael Cohen.

Michael (00:52):
Say hey.

Jimmy (00:53):
And he's the executive producer and writer of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a former vice president of Archie Comics, and the creator of the Instagram sensation, Sweetest Beasts, Harold Buchholz.

Harold (01:04):
Hello.

Jimmy (01:04):
And making sure everything runs smoothly and keeping us out of trouble is our producer and editor, Liz Sumner.

Liz (01:10):
Howdy.

Jimmy (01:12):
And joining us today, it's a very special day.
It's always a good day when we have a visitor to the studio, but this is a very special visitor.
Today we have with us Nat Gertler.
Nat is a professional Peanuts nerd.
He has a Peanuts blog, had a Peanuts podcast, wrote stories for Peanuts, comic books, published several books of Schulz's non-Peanuts work and is the author of six books on Peanuts.

(01:37):
Most recently being the co-author of the Eisner award-winning biography, Charles M.
Schulz, 100 Objects.
Please welcome to the show Nat Gertler.

Nat Gertler (01:47):
So glad to be here.

Jimmy (01:49):
It's a big thrill for us to have you.
Thank you for coming out.
I want to start this off with asking you, where were you in life when Charles Schulz and Peanuts first intersected with you in your life?

Nat Gertler (02:04):
Well, I come from a family with their four kids, our parents had four kids, and mom didn't want to remember exactly who she was talking to at any given moment.
So she called us all Charlie Brown.

Nat (02:17):
that's got to have had some effect on my life, I reckon.

Jimmy (02:23):
That's amazing.

Nat Gertler (02:27):
And there were Peanuts paperbacks around the house.
So my early reading was definitely those little faucet paperbacks.

Jimmy (02:37):
Yeah, that's so many people.
That was my introduction to them as well.
Do you remember which ones?
Like, or what era?

Nat Gertler (02:45):
Well, I was reading mostly stuff from the 60s.
I was born in 65, but wouldn't have been reading for at least the first few years.
But all this and Snoopy 2 is one specific title that comes to mind.

Jimmy (02:58):
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I'm looking at that right now on my shelf in front of me.

Nat Gertler (03:02):
Okay.
Well, I'm sure you have a few Peanuts books.
I have a few.
I have over a thousand.

Jimmy (03:09):
Oh, my gosh.
A thousand.
Yeah.
And that is collecting all the way back from those early ones from your childhood?

Nat Gertler (03:17):
Well, yeah.
I mean, I didn't start collecting.
A number of decades back, I just wanted to read all the peanut strips.
I read the various books.
And so I started creating a list of, because as you know, if you go through the Peanuts reprints, there's bigger books that are made up of little books or little books that are cut out of pieces of the bigger books and things like that.

(03:38):
So my immediate goal was to buy the fewest books possible to get all the strips available.
And so I started making these lists just so I could coordinate what was in what and things like that.
I started putting those online, which is sort of the basis for my online Peanuts presence.
But eventually I started seeing all these books and finding the interesting things that happen when you look at the details of them and how they relate to each other.

(04:00):
And so I turned into a collector at first, because I was trying to avoid getting too many books.
That was a failure.

Jimmy (04:09):
How did that work out for you by the way?

Harold (04:11):
Yeah.

Nat Gertler (04:11):
No, it's a strange thing, but it's turned me into the man I am today, for better or for worse.
But I've got Peanuts books in Latin, I've got Peanuts books in Braille, I've got all kinds of things.

Harold (04:24):
So was it one of those things where you kind of became an early hub for Peanuts on online, and then people started to say, hey, I got this book, have you seen this thing?

Nat Gertler (04:35):
Yeah.
I posted on CompuServe back in the day.
Yeah.
In 1999, I set up a website to have the list and to also provide links to Amazon, which Amazon would give me a kickback for, if anybody ordered from them.
So I turned it into a little bit of a business there, and that is aug.com, aaugh.com, and these days, it's mostly focused on the blog that I have there.

Liz (05:01):
I'll put a link to that in the show notes.

Nat Gertler (05:03):
Appreciate it.

Jimmy (05:04):
Yeah, absolutely.
Everybody has to go check it out.
Now, I mean, obviously, Peanuts was the favorite.
Were there other comics that were making an impression on you when you were young?

Nat Gertler (05:14):
Yeah.
I got to be a comic reader.
As a kid, I read Little Archie's and Richie Rich's, and then Little Archie raised their price on Nickel, and Richie Rich didn't.
I was a Richie Rich man from then on.
Then when I got to college, somebody introduced me to the superhero stuff.
I'm now a publisher of comics.
I was a writer of comics, worked on various things people have heard of like Power Rangers, and Speed Racer, and well, Peanuts, of course, as well as my own creations, which far fewer people have heard of, such as The Factor and Licensible Bear.

(05:50):
It became my life.

Jimmy (05:52):
That is absolutely amazing.
It's so funny.
Those comic book companies don't understand the angst they put us through when they would raise their prices like that.
I remember when DC Comics went to 75 cents and Marvel was 60.
I was like, a dark year for me.
I didn't know what to do.

Nat Gertler (06:12):
Yes.
But also, if you pay attention long enough, you knew that the other price is going to go up in not too long.
It's when you get those little bullets that say, they still only 25 cents on them, you know you're within months of it being 30.

Harold (06:25):
Yeah.

Michael (06:29):
I'm a 12 cent kid.

Nat Gertler (06:32):
Okay.

Michael (06:33):
I never bought a 15 cent comment.

Nat Gertler (06:36):
I don't blame you.
They're not worth it.

Liz (06:39):
What about one of the double ones or the 25 cent?

Michael (06:41):
Oh yeah.
Well, an annual every now and then.

Nat Gertler (06:44):
A giant sized.

SPEAKER_2 (06:45):
Yeah.

Jimmy (06:47):
So how did you go from being a Peanuts fan to being, you know, really a Peanuts historian working closely with the Schulz folks?
How did that happen?

Nat Gertler (07:01):
Well, as I said, I had the website and I was blogging or effectively blogging since late night, since before Schulz retired, late 1999.
Especially when he announced his retirement was when I started doing a newsletter, the event that got turned into a blog after not too long.
And so I had been blogging a lot.

(07:23):
And then at one point, I got contacted and I helped the Schulz people out with a couple of minor things.
They hired me to work on the dialogue for a video game that never came out, a computer game.
And then at one point, I got contacted by a publisher that said, we found your blog.

(07:44):
We want to do a book about Peanuts.
Do you think you could write a book?
Well, what these guys didn't know is that I'd written by that point, probably about 20 books.
They completed his guide to PowerPoint, things like that.
I did a lot of tech books.
I was used to being a writer.
That became the Peanuts Collection.
That would be my first book.

(08:05):
It was one of these hardcover slipcase, got a lot of removable things, full-color history books, something to put on your coffee table.
If you still drink coffee, if you drink tea, you put it on your tea table.
Then from there, I was in.
I was one of the people.

Harold (08:25):
On the Peanuts, the family side, same deal.
They found you through the website or did you reach out to them once you go in things?

Nat Gertler (08:34):
I'm trying to remember when I really first dealt with the family or the studio.
Noah is in contact with Paige Braddock at the studio, who is there for a long time, just recently retired.
That, yeah, she's now, I think, creative emeritus person there officially.

(09:02):
But I was in contact with them and I really, sometimes I don't remember things.
That's actually into my advantage.
I make lists of things because I don't remember them and that lists may be way up to day.
So the full details are lost of time.

Jimmy (09:16):
Now, we have been going through, obviously, every strip from 1950 all the way up to 2000 and we were doing it primarily through the Phantographics books, which we've collected and which we love.
But there is a last Phantographics edition, a volume 26, that contains stuff that were comic strips by Schulz, artwork by Schulz, but that were not part of the main strip and you were involved with curating that?

Nat Gertler (09:46):
Yes.
I sort of led the team.
It wasn't official leadership, but I sort of led the team that dug out all this other stuff that was beyond the strip and put it together for Phantographics.

Jimmy (10:00):
Did you have an idea of what you were looking for?
What's that process like?

Nat Gertler (10:05):
Well, first let me explain how this started.
This wasn't something where Phantographics first reached out to me.
I worked with Tim Chow and Derrick Bang on collecting material.
This is something, I think it was Tim Chow that reached out first saying, oh, they're going to get to volume 25 of this, and there's only going to be half a books worth of material.
Maybe we should start lining up to see if we can find half a book worth of other peanut stuff that they could use to fill this out and just offer it to them.

(10:34):
We're all Peanuts nuts.
We're all Peanuts nerds.
We started to work on that and we were a little bit in touch with Fanta Graphics and during that time and being in touch with Fanta Graphics, I actually put together another Peanuts book for them.
Something called Charlie Brown's Christmas Stalking, which collected two peanut stories that had appeared in women's magazines in the 1960s.

(11:00):
Peanuts themed Christmas stories, you figure that's something that shouldn't be lost.
Peanuts and Christmas have a very strong link.
I came up with the concept for that book and did the basic design for them.
Then they took it and ran with it.

Jimmy (11:14):
What year would that have been?

Nat Gertler (11:15):
Oh, you're asking me for numbers.
We're probably 2010-ish, but I would have to check.

Harold (11:23):
I've got it here somewhere.

Liz (11:24):
We could find that out on your blog.

Nat Gertler (11:27):
You can find that on my blog.
You find the book is still available at Amazon.
I'm sure it has a publication date there.
But yeah, that information is out there.
It's probably on my personal website, gertler.com.
If you go to a link for peanut stuff, it will show you the date for everything that I've done.
Great.

(11:47):
So we gathered stuff, and then at one point we heard, oh, they're going to fill out the rest of Volume 25 with little folks, the pre-peanut strip.
And it's like, okay, so they aren't going to need this stuff.
But they knew we were collecting this, and Kim Thompson from Fanta Graphics, no longer with us, unfortunately, contacted us and said, we need a Volume 26.

(12:11):
And the reason they need a Volume 26 is a lot of their sales come from the two book sets, the box sets.

Harold (12:19):
Oh, yes.

Jimmy (12:20):
They need an even number.

Nat Gertler (12:22):
Right.
They get those into things like Costco and stuff like that.
So they needed to get that, to sell that Volume 25 with this introduction by Barack Obama and things like that to maximize sales of that.
They needed a Volume 26.
And could we come up with roughly a full book's worth of stuff?
They were going to have a long talk, and they had a long interview is what they told us at first for the back of the book.

(12:46):
So we needed to fill out most of a book.
And we were able to do that.
We were able to find a lot of stuff.
There were things we didn't already have copies of, but we knew existed like a lot of the ads for the Ford Falcon, that feature original peanut strips advertising the Ford Falcon.
So we did a lot of digging, stripped through our collections of course, did a lot of digging and came up with a lot of material.

Jimmy (13:13):
That's absolutely amazing and very, very cool.
And I never would have thought that it had to do with the fact that they had to have 26 books.
That is just some wild behind the scenes.

Nat Gertler (13:25):
Yeah, I'm sorry if I burst some illusions here.
It's a good book.
It's a book that should exist in any way, but it does exist because because of even numbers.

Jimmy (13:38):
Was there anything that was your favorite of the stuff that you found that you thought, oh, thank God we found this and we're getting this in the book?

Nat Gertler (13:45):
Well, I was always glad that we got the stuff from the Brownie Book of Picture Taking into there.
It was a 1950s guide to using your Brownie camera.
And if you're a collector of Peanuts books, you have the first original book that was just titled Peanuts.
You'll see on the coverage Charlie Down looking down into a box that's aimed at some of the other characters.

(14:11):
But anyway, it's a Brownie camera.
The picture doesn't make sense because we don't use cameras anymore when you look down into them.

Jimmy (14:17):
Right, right.

Nat Gertler (14:18):
Right.
But I wouldn't be surprised if that's why the Kodak contacted and wanted to get Peanuts to illustrate this guide.
But this guide has roughly a week's worth of strips on the Peanuts characters using cameras.
And they're perfectly reasonable.
If it appeared in the newspaper, you wouldn't have gone, oh, there's something wrong here.

(14:42):
This doesn't belong here.
It's not like the ones where they're talking about the Ford Falcon.
You wouldn't expect the characters in the strip to be talking about the Ford Falcon, but using a camera, it's great.
And so this is really a lost week's worth of Peanuts strips.
I was so glad to get that in to the official listings.

Jimmy (15:01):
Yeah, that is really cool.

Harold (15:03):
It's so funny.
So I'm assuming you're somebody who loves the hunt.

Nat Gertler (15:09):
A lot of my books are coming from me going through old newspapers, and when I'm looking for something, finding something interesting to the side on the same page and going, hey, what's that?
And now I've got a book out that's-

Harold (15:24):
New rabbit hole.

Nat Gertler (15:26):
Yeah, yeah.
I've got a book out that's just 410 pictures of bicycles from newspapers of the 1890s.

Jimmy (15:36):
Oh, I was going to do that.

Nat Gertler (15:39):
Well, that's the title of the book.
I didn't have a better title for it.
That title explains the book.
Or I've got a book of these advertising comic strips that appeared in Safeway Supermarket ads during World War II.
And while any one of them is a little, oh, my husband loves me now because I'm saving money with Safeway.

(16:00):
You start reading through them, they start talking about things like using your ration coupons at Safeway, driving with others to Safeway to save on gas for the war effort, carpooling, buying war stamps and the whole picture of the home front emerges if you read these strips that were just supposed to be advertising a supermarket.

(16:22):
So that's sort of fascinating thing.
Or I'm looking at something else.
I find something, Peanuts.
There was, before there were the Ford Falcon ads, which many people think are the first use of Peanuts for advertising something that isn't Peanuts.
Blue Cross of Connecticut was using Peanuts in newspaper ads, was using Peanuts images in newspaper ads.
And I've never seen anybody talk about this.

(16:44):
I know I've read Peanuts histories.
I've written Peanuts histories.
This was just a little forgotten thing.
And given how much commercial user has been a peanut since, I think it's something that shouldn't be forgotten.
So I love finding stuff like that.

Jimmy (16:56):
Wow, that's really, that's really wild.
Even to think that it would be just for like one state.

Nat Gertler (17:01):
Yeah, well, it was, Peanuts was a small thing.
It wasn't advertising installment.
Now, as it turns out, advertising insurance ended up being very good for Peanuts in the long run.

Harold (17:12):
Yeah.
Small beginnings lead to big things.

Jimmy (17:15):
Yeah, limps.
So can you tell us a little bit about your most recent Schulz book, The 100 Objects?

Nat Gertler (17:22):
Yes, I was contacted by the museum was working on this.
It's a Charles Schulz Museum, wanted to have out a book for his 100th anniversary.
Their curator, Benjamin L.
Clark, was already had pulled out a 100 likely items to make up.
Each item would be a spread about that item that belongs to the museum and would explain Schulz's work that way.

(17:47):
So they wanted somebody in who, Benjamin has some writing experience.
They wanted to have somebody else in to have a hand in that, but also somebody who knew Peanuts and could think of new stuff, drag out new stuff, suggest other things.
So I co-wrote that with him.
And that came out, I guess, for the 100th anniversary.

(18:10):
And the next year, it won an Eisner Award for Best Comics Related to Book.
So I finally got enough.
I've been nominated for three Eisner Awards, never for the same sort of work, never in the same decade, but it's good to finally have one.

Harold (18:25):
That's actually incredibly impressive that shows the breadth of what you've been doing.

Nat Gertler (18:31):
It shows I'm a very inconsistent person, yes.

Jimmy (18:37):
Do you have a favorite of your Schulz-related books?

Nat Gertler (18:44):
That's hard to say.
Well, I did a book called Be More Snoopy, which is part of a Be More line that they already had out of Be More Wonder Woman, Be More Darth Vader, whatever.
It's almost a self-help oriented, built around a character thing.
That book is out and it's the book that's gotten into places like Hallmark is carrying a book I wrote.

(19:06):
Costco had it for a while.
It's good to see things like that place.
It's been through multiple printings.
But the first review I got on hallmark.com was somebody who had bought it for their trans grandchild who was going through a lot of suffering, and they thought this would be the exactly right thing for them.

(19:30):
That just hit me in a very special spot.
I've got trans people in my life I care about.
I was actually the Peanuts consultant for recent all-trans and non-binary production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
Yeah.
This is part of my life.

(19:50):
Congratulations.

Jimmy (19:50):
Where was that?

Nat Gertler (19:52):
That was in the Los Angeles area.
I was just held at a church.
Somebody dear to me was the director of it, and it was just for a couple of weekends, but I went to see it and it was a very high-energy production.
It was really good.

Jimmy (20:09):
That's fantastic.

Nat Gertler (20:10):
I got to tell them because I wrote up a piece for their program.
I got to mention things like Charles Schulz saying, originally Woodstock was not a male.

Harold (20:21):
Wow.

Nat Gertler (20:22):
Yeah, that's from a 1980 piece he wrote for TV Guide.
Oh, wow.
Things like that.
We've talked about Peanuts and gender, especially things like the TV specials.
They've had the same people play Pigpen and Peppermint Patty, and that's been true of people of both genders.

(20:43):
There's been a lot of cross-gender casting.
But I was able to put together a nice little piece for them on that.

Jimmy (20:50):
Isn't it amazing that this work of art, that's not current.
It hasn't been produced in 25 years.
But that the characters have that richness and depth, that happens with these characters.
It just doesn't seem like there are very many works in pop culture that have that long-term resonance.

Nat Gertler (21:18):
Yeah, they maintain a richness.
There's things in Peanuts that you really have to look at them in the right way, but once you see it, it's there and there's a lot to be found.
There's a lot of different legitimate ways of looking at Peanuts.
There's also things like, there is a series of Peanuts film strips.
The Charlie Brown Career Education Program came out in 1979.

(21:40):
For people, anybody listening who doesn't know what a film strip is, think of PowerPoint, think of early PowerPoint, still images and some audio that goes with it.
But think of these as little animated shorts that they forgot to animate.
For this series, they introduced a character named Dolores, a Latina Peanuts character.

(22:03):
She was utterly forgotten about.
I got a hold of these film strips and I was going through them.
I was like, wait, here's some representation.
It wasn't that there was no Latino content in Peanuts.
We did have one character, Juan Peterson.
But here's a Latina character that had been forgotten about.
It was probably put in for representation in something that was aimed at large body of school children.

(22:27):
But I started writing about her, did a episode of my podcast about her, the first episode, and people started being aware of it.
People started to notice it.
I saw the images I put up of Dolores getting shared elsewhere and put into Peanuts wikis and things like that.
Then she popped up in a Snoopy online game.

(22:48):
Probably by the time this comes out, it'll be too late to find out, but it looks like she may be in the next Peanuts animated special.

Jimmy (22:55):
No way.
That's cool.

Nat Gertler (22:57):
There's certainly a character who looks a lot like her in the images we're seeing from Stoopi Presents, a summer musical where there's a character who is one of the camp roommates of Sally who certainly visually appears to be Dolores.
Whether they say she's Dolores or not, I don't know.

Jimmy (23:17):
That's very cool.

Nat Gertler (23:18):
Yeah.
If she is Dolores, I'm going to give myself a little bit of credit for having dug her out of the bin.

Jimmy (23:26):
That is amazing.
Do you think there's still stuff to be found?
I mean, it's so well-documented.
There's a museum.
Is it still a thing?

Nat Gertler (23:34):
Yes.
But I've been finding stuff.
As I said, I think it was like last year, I found that insurance ad to set.

SPEAKER_2 (23:42):
Yeah.

Nat Gertler (23:43):
The year before or while we were working on the book, I ended up on my hands a college magazine, just made for college, that had an original Schulz Peanuts cover that was, I believe, the first Peanuts magazine cover.

Jimmy (24:02):
Oh, wow.

Nat Gertler (24:04):
Somebody offered it to me because they had a copy, but nobody generally knew this existed.
The museum didn't know it existed.
I wanted to put it in the 100 Objects book.
But the problem was the 100 Objects book was supposed to show things the museum had.
So I had to donate my copy.
I made the sacrifice just so it could be in there.
Wow.

Jimmy (24:24):
That is taking one for the team there.

Liz (24:29):
One of our listeners sent us a question about a strip for the University of Michigan gargoyles.
Do you know that one?

Nat Gertler (24:37):
I have seen that one.
It's got Snoopy making a gargoyle face standing on his talkhouse.
There's a few strips like that or single panel items that Schulz did for various student papers.
I'm not sure we've identified them all.

Jimmy (24:53):
Well, listen, how about we take a quick break now?
You have selected some of your favorite strips, including some that people may have not seen before.
So we'll take the break and come back and talk about those.

Nat Gertler (25:05):
Great.

Jimmy (25:06):
All right, we'll be right back.

Liz (25:08):
Hi everyone.
I just want to take a moment to remind you that all three hosts are cartoonists themselves and their work is available for sale.
You can find links to purchase books by Jimmy, Harold and Michael on our website.
You can also support the show on Patreon or buy us a mud pie.
Check out the store link on unpackingPeanuts.com.

Jimmy (25:30):
And we're back.
Did you miss us?
Okay.
So we are going to go through the strips picked by Nat.
Nat, can you tell us what was your criteria?
What made you select the strips we're about to check out?

Nat Gertler (25:44):
Well, they're ones that strike me more strongly than they probably would most people, at least most of them.
I wanted to include a couple that were outside of the daily strip, a couple of things that we put in Complete Peanuts.
Keep calling it 26.
The number 26 appears nowhere in this volume.

(26:04):
The volumes aren't actually numbered officially.
It's Complete Peanuts 1950 to 2000.

Jimmy (26:09):
Yeah, we were trying to fit, because we were referring to it as volume 26.
And then we realized that it doesn't have numbers on it.
Just before we started recording, we were going through that.

Nat Gertler (26:20):
Yeah, well, it's one of the ones with Charlie Brown on the front.
That's how you would get it.

Jimmy (26:26):
All right, so I'm going to read these and then we will discuss them.
Okay, so this is from the Brownie Book of Picture-Taking.
It reprinted in the Complete Peanuts 26.
And it begins.
Lucy is standing there and she is holding a photograph up to the sky.
And she is with Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

(26:46):
And she says, I don't understand it.
And Snoopy looks at it with curiosity.
And then she looks closer at the photograph and says, the grass came out nice and green.
The sky is blue.
And look at all those flowers.
The colors came out perfectly.
At this point, Charlie Brown and Snoopy are leaning in to look at the photograph.
But then Lucy concludes with, but the dog is black and white?

(27:09):
And Charlie Brown and Snoopy both kind of look out at us.

Nat Gertler (27:14):
Yeah, there's a little bit of a breaking of the fourth wall.
They're giving us the glare.
Yeah.
But that is, and if people could see this again, it's in the volume.
There's a lot of little bits of business going on here.
There's the photo and the envelope the photo is in, and those are constantly changing positions.

(27:34):
Everybody's looking around, even though the camera stays pretty still, everything is in motion, everything is doing something.
You can see that Schulz is really working every little bit of this.

Jimmy (27:45):
Yeah.
He's just a great artist.
Aside from the style and the quality of the line and all that stuff, but he just really does make the characters act well, they emote well.
It's just always a really interesting looking comic strip.

Nat Gertler (28:02):
Yes.
Well, the one thing I'll note about this strip that's funny is, the strip itself isn't black and white.
The page has color printing, so you have to already know that Snoopy is black and white.

Jimmy (28:13):
Oh, yeah.

Nat Gertler (28:16):
Except in some of the comic books where he was colored light blue for some reason.
But yes.

Liz (28:22):
What year was this?

Nat Gertler (28:24):
The Bonnie Book and Picture Taking.
This was 1954, 56.
I'm sorry.
I should have written that down.

Michael (28:30):
It looks like a Snoopy 54, maybe a 53 Snoopy.
That was a good year.

Nat Gertler (28:37):
So anyways, it was quite early to be exploiting the Peanuts characters.

Michael (28:41):
Yeah.
I got a comment on the square balloons.

Nat Gertler (28:46):
We presented in the book as a normal strip format.
What you're looking at there is the way it appeared in the Brownie Book of Picture-Taking, which was as a square without panel borders.
But it seems clear that there were panel borders at some point when Schulz drew it, and then they were erased in order to do the design for this book.

Michael (29:05):
Oh, I see.
Okay.

Jimmy (29:06):
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, you would sometimes get that in those, the Fawcett Crest books, right?
Where they would chop up the strips and-

Nat Gertler (29:15):
Yeah, and we would move some of the panel borders.
They would extend the grass line and things like that.
And going back to the Complete Peanuts 26, one of the things is some of the things we found had obviously been, when they were run, re-changed from how Schulz had done it, and where we could, we got it back.
The back cover of Complete Peanuts 26 has a, something that looks like a Sunday strip, but it's actually got more tiers.

(29:42):
It's a longer thing.
But I originally ran in Look Magazine, where they ran it really small, as a bunch of individual panels running across multiple pages.
And I always, that always horrified me because we couldn't reproduce from that.
There's too bad, the thick panels are too small.
Reproduction quality is too bad.
And then the original art was found and went up for auction.
And so I stole a picture of the auction scan.

(30:05):
And that's what we got to use on the book.

Jimmy (30:08):
Well, ever since those auction sites have started putting up the high-res scans, that is such a boon to collectors and fans of original art.
They could just look at it and...

Nat Gertler (30:19):
Yeah, you get in really close on it and see all the mistakes.
Although the problem with Schulz art is there's not a lot of mistakes usually.
I've seen some complaints.
They came out with that one book that was all reproduced from the original art.
And people were like, no, I want to see all the whiteout.
I want to see all the paste-ups.
It was like, no, they're generally not there.
You just got it right.
Or he threw it away.

Harold (30:40):
What do you think of that classic Peanuts in the upper left-hand corner, the white letters on that little black rectangle, but the quotation marks?

Nat Gertler (30:50):
Yeah, well, you can tell the error.
There's an error with quotation marks and there's an error without.
But I actually discovered a bit of history behind that.
I was reprinting a strip called The Wolf, which was a single-panel strip that turned into a four-panel strip called Willie.
They wanted to put the four-panel strip in the same place that the single-panel was running in some papers.

(31:12):
In fact, they were alternating between single-panel and four-panel.
That was the first United Feature Syndicate strip to put, they put the Willie name in the upper left-hand corner so that it would work with the way that people actually use single-panel strips.
So when Peanuts took that up, not at the very first but within the first year of its run, that was probably coming off of having been used in Willie.

(31:36):
Wow.

Harold (31:37):
Yeah.
Made me wonder if Schulz wandered in quotes because, air quotes, so for people, I don't like this.

Nat Gertler (31:44):
Yeah.
I don't really mean this.
I'm quoting somebody else when I put it there.
That's a wise thought.

Harold (31:49):
Now, it's been so long since I've seen, I mean, really looked at these early mid-50s Peanuts strips.
Does this to your eye look like the characters are stretched horizontally, Nat, or does this look pretty much the way they were at that time?

Nat Gertler (32:09):
There were some reproduction situations with the Brownie Book.
I haven't considered that particular one quite so directly, but I wouldn't be surprised if you're right.
The reproduction in a Brownie Book is actually poor because they're using reproduction meant for photographs.

Harold (32:25):
Oh, interesting.

Nat Gertler (32:26):
Black and white work, because they're printing photographs.
They're showing you how to take a photograph, and here's the resulting photograph.
If you look at some of the strips in The Complete Peanuts books, you'll see when Linus's hair shoots up, it's actually very badly reproduced, it's thin and dotty.
That's just because the only source we had to go from was the actual turning point.

Harold (32:49):
The half-turning line art, essentially.
Oh, yeah.

Jimmy (32:52):
Now, that must be a pretty valuable collector's item these days, right?
I would think the Brownie book.

Nat Gertler (32:59):
They can be had.
I think I've got a couple of them.
I think you can find them for 20 bucks or so.
It's not insane.
It's not like the first printing of Peanuts, the first volume of Peanuts or something like that.
They made a lot of them.
They were a buck at the time, and I've even looked through old newspapers and found them on sale for half off.
Which is not surprising because they were really effectively to promote the use of that camera.

Liz (33:24):
Well, I'm really curious because my sister had a brownie camera, and most of my childhood is documented by her brownie camera pictures, but they were not in color.
I am surprised that they're talking about the grass being green and the sky being blue because it was all gray.

Nat Gertler (33:41):
Well, it's Kodak, so Kodak is wanting to sell you the expensive film.

Harold (33:45):
You can put whatever film you want in, right?
You can do black and white, you can do color, but they were the budget camera.

Nat Gertler (33:50):
Yeah, the aperture still works with either.

Harold (33:53):
The person buying a brownie might be using black and white film because it's a budget camera and they're on a budget, but you could put the color film in if you want it.
This is up to you, and I don't know what the premium was on that back in the day, but I'm sure they were trying to get us to use color.

Nat Gertler (34:07):
I imagine it was a premium not just on the film, but on the process.

Jimmy (34:10):
Yeah, right, right, right.
Well, that brings us to another, the conclusion of another episode of Unpacking Photography.
I'm not a good photographer.
I worked at a TV station years ago, and we used to do like Christmas tapes for the Christmas party, and my footage was too poor to be included in a Blair Witch parody.

Nat Gertler (34:35):
Well, I will apologize for taking this podcast off of its meantime.

Michael (34:40):
Yeah, exactly.

Harold (34:42):
I was just thinking of all the photos of my thumb I've taken all around the world.

Liz (34:46):
My father used to take pictures of his ear because he'd turn it backwards.

Jimmy (34:54):
No, my family, it was just, you would get the top of people's heads and just vast empty space.

Liz (35:00):
Yeah.

Jimmy (35:00):
The sky, the room.
It was just...
All right, let's go to the second strip here.
This is from the Ford Falcon ad campaign, also reprinted in The Complete Peanuts 26.
And it is Charlie Brown kneeling by Snoopy, and he's actually lifting up Snoopy's ear and kind of looking inside of it.

(35:21):
And Lucy's peering over Charlie Brown's shoulder.
And Charlie Brown says, Did you ever notice what it says on the inside of Snoopy's ear?
And Charlie Brown continues with, It says, The new Falcon is America's lowest priced six passenger car.
And Snoopy looks very proud of this.
And Lucy says, Go on, Charlie Brown, is that what it really says?

(35:44):
And Charlie Brown says, I was just kidding.
It really says, Genuine leather.

Harold (35:49):
Which shocked Snoopy.

Nat Gertler (35:54):
Yeah, I love this one because it's got one of those, this is can't quite be reality, but he got to treat it as reality and levels of reality is tricky in Peanuts.
There are some times they get into something that can't quite be reality and it works.
And there's things like, you know, when the kids, it's one thing for Snoopy to imagine his doghouse is an airplane.
It's a different thing when other kids think they can actually get a plate on his doghouse.

(36:18):
And that one, he has like, no, you know, Sparky, with fast respect, think you went over a hidden line right there.

Harold (36:25):
This is Feed for Dream Peanuts.

Jimmy (36:28):
That is one of the things.

Nat Gertler (36:30):
But we totally accept things like conversations between Snoopy and Woodstock.
And we never sit there and go, which is more magical, that Snoopy understands bird speak or that Woodstock can apparently read Snoopy's thoughts?

Jimmy (36:42):
Yeah, right, right.

Michael (36:45):
Well, this brings up the question, what color is the inside of a dog's ear?
Is it white?

Liz (36:53):
Sometimes it's pink.

Jimmy (36:54):
Yeah, if it's healthy, it should be pink, right?

Michael (36:56):
You think so?

Jimmy (36:57):
Yeah.

Michael (36:58):
Even a black ear?
Yeah.
Okay, let's check that out sometime.

Nat Gertler (37:05):
Check it out.
It might say genuine leather.
It might say another dog.

Liz (37:09):
And what year is this one?

Nat Gertler (37:12):
That would be the early 60s.
They're from the Ford campaign.
I don't remember exactly which year.
They did original material for about three or so years.

Liz (37:21):
My father's favorite car was his 62 Falcon.

Jimmy (37:24):
Nice.

Nat Gertler (37:25):
Well, I've heard many good things about it, mostly from Peanuts.

Jimmy (37:28):
Isn't it amazing that he was doing all of this extra work himself?
Like, it just seems like it's an incredible amount of work to just do the daily strip, let alone to be doing comics for the camera and for the car.

Nat Gertler (37:42):
Yeah.
Well, though, he was a productive guy.
He was very efficient at doing his strip.
He'd do a lot of planning and then he'd do a lot of work quickly.

Jimmy (37:52):
Yeah.

Harold (37:52):
Nat, have you ever heard people say how long it took for him typically to do a daily strip?

Nat Gertler (37:59):
I imagine I have, but I've imagined I've forgotten.
You know, but you and I also know that creating a work, there's a lot of think time that isn't sitting there at the table or on the clock, and you got to be ready for it.
You're planning things.
And then, you know, you already know what you're going to do before you actually touch the paper.

(38:21):
I've heard it said that he did his dailies for the week.
He actually did the art in a day.
Whether that's true or not, I don't know.
I do know that we have some comic book material that he drew in The Complete Peanuts volume, and according to his assistant at the time, he did 24 pages of comics material in a day.

Jimmy (38:45):
Oh my gosh.

Nat Gertler (38:46):
Which, if you've heard of 24-hour comics, is an actual challenge as they put cartoonists too.

Harold (38:53):
Yeah, but that's just a shame.

Nat Gertler (38:55):
Yeah, I founded an event called 24-hour comics day, so that 24-hour, 24-pages thing really perked up my ears when that was too big.

Harold (39:05):
I'm assuming he was not drinking black coffee at 4 a.m.
either.
Maybe he had to.
Maybe they had a deadline.
I don't know.

Nat Gertler (39:13):
I would not know.
I would not know.

Harold (39:15):
Wow.

Jimmy (39:15):
Now, let me ask you this.
You're a professional writer.
You've written a bunch of books, but was it different to write Peanuts?
Was that a special thing?
Was it strange?
What was it?

Nat Gertler (39:24):
Oh, yeah.
I mean, the idea that I was at times writing about Peanuts and at times with the comic books, actually writing Peanuts was abstract.
I mean, when I was a kid, I would think of Peanuts stories.
And in fact, I was thinking of sort of the dark night of Peanuts when I was 12.
You know, oh, what if all these horrible things happen?
Which is, of course, be an absolutely horrible thing to actually put out.

(39:47):
But to actually be officially creating material is felt strange and powerful.
Although not always as well paying as my other writing work.
So they got me cheap.

Harold (40:03):
Yeah, it's a tricky thing to take on somebody's work as such an individual voice.
And now it's my turn to do something that is like that individual voice, but it's not that individual voice.

Nat Gertler (40:15):
Right.

Harold (40:16):
I mean, Jimmy, you've done it too, you know.

Nat Gertler (40:17):
You're trying to get rid of self, but you're still bringing yourself to it.
And then also you're dealing with editors who may not always have the same idea of what it is you're trying to achieve.

Jimmy (40:28):
That never happens.

Nat Gertler (40:29):
You do.
So I'm certainly proud of some of the comic book work.
I'm proud of the book work.
So, yeah.

Jimmy (40:40):
March 24th, 1963.
It's a Sunday and we're at the old ball field and Charlie Brown has his clipboard and is talking to Schroeder.
And he says, and I've got Linus down for right field.
And Schroeder says, Linus?
And then of course the strip can starts on, for real on the second tier.
And Schroeder says, right field, are you sure?

(41:03):
And Charlie Brown says, of course I'm sure.
Watch.
And as he says, watch, he tosses the ball up in the air and hits a high fly ball out to right field where Linus is already standing there.
You see Linus clock the ball in the sky, run into Charlie Brown's house, see Sally, who is playing with blocks.

(41:24):
He helps her make a gigantic skyscraper over the panel.
Then he runs upstairs, runs into someone's bedroom, sticks his hand out the window and plunk catches the fly ball perfectly.
Then it cuts back to Schroeder and Charlie Brown at the ball field and Schroeder says, all right, who you got down for left field?

Nat Gertler (41:46):
Yeah, this ties into my love for Linus' prodigy.

Michael (41:51):
Yeah, he was a genius.

Nat Gertler (41:53):
He was a genius.
He would pull off things.
He was the guy who blew up half a balloon and have it be a semi-sphere.
He was constantly giving him those things.
He was a kid and a kid has potential and he was pulling things off.
I'm somebody who had a non-traditional path through education.
I started college at 14.

(42:13):
Wow.
So I'm just saying that I associated with that, even though I couldn't do certainly these specific things that he did.

Michael (42:21):
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
What?

Jimmy (42:23):
You started college at 14.
Tell us that.

Nat Gertler (42:28):
Well, I had skipped one year along the way.
I had skipped, I guess, fourth grade, it was, and I was taking some advanced classes along the way, and I did my freshman year of high school.
I tried going to experimental school for half a semester, but the experiment was failing, I got out of there, and we started thinking about this college that specialize in taking younger students, place called Simons Rock Early College, now known as Bard College at Simons Rock.

(42:54):
Oh, Bard.
Yeah, so mostly people started there at 16 or 17, but I was always socially inept, so I wasn't losing much by skipping over years.
And this ended up being a pretty good fit for me.

Harold (43:09):
So where is Bard College at Simons Rock?

Nat Gertler (43:12):
Well, that's a good thing to ask right now, because they just closed the campus that I went to in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
It's really sad for me.
They, as a sort of place, they needed 400 students to survive.
They had 300.

Harold (43:27):
Oh.

Nat Gertler (43:28):
So they'd been around for decades.
It started as a girl's school so that when I went there, I was the sexy co-ed.

Harold (43:34):
Fantastic.

Nat Gertler (43:38):
So now they've created a new campus near Bard College in a campus that used to belong to the Unification Church that has been taken over.
And they'll be doing the Simons Rock there, but they're also losing much or all of the faculty.

Harold (43:54):
So they didn't move it to Annandale on Hudson, where the main Bard College is.
It's now in a unique spot again.

Nat Gertler (44:01):
I don't know exactly where.
Off the top of my head, I don't remember.
This was, unsurprisingly, not a set of questions I was prepared for.

Jimmy (44:09):
It's an incredible story, though.
I'm just blown away.

Nat Gertler (44:12):
Yeah.

Liz (44:14):
Great Barrington is very beautiful.

Nat Gertler (44:16):
It's a lovely place in the Berkshire Mountains.
I'm so glad I got to spend my four years there.

Harold (44:21):
I will say my niece is attending Bard College.
Oh, wow.

Liz (44:25):
So they are connected.
The two Bard Colleges are related to one another?

Nat Gertler (44:29):
Bard bought out my college while I was attending.
I don't think they bought it out for me.
I don't think I was that good a draft pick, but you never know.

Liz (44:38):
Well, but speaking of smart people and colleges, the last panel with who you got down for left field, that doesn't sound like the kind of dialogue that he usually uses.

Jimmy (44:50):
Well, it's funny that you mentioned that because in the first one, it seems like one of the other, oh no, the guan right above it.
I don't remember Lucy saying like G-W-A-N instead of go on.

Nat Gertler (45:04):
Yeah.
She hasn't said that in the Daily Strip.
Well, the four things may have been very influenced by people at Ford.
Yeah.
There's definitely some Schultz in there.
Definitely the Schultz Manor...
The amount of downbeat final panels in advertising strips is sort of bizarre.
So that definitely shows the Schultz influence.

(45:26):
But there's definitely some things that were ran in the Ford stuff where one of my favorite little one panel where Lucy is saying some wonderful things and Charlie Brown thinks she's talking about the Ford Falcon and she was saying, Oh no, I was talking about American womanhood.
And you know, it's a sad ending.
But then you look at it closely and you realize Charlie Brown is standing on grass and Lucy is standing on a floor.

(45:52):
And they've taken art from places and built this.

Harold (45:57):
Oh wow.

Nat Gertler (45:57):
It may have been real Schultz lettering, if not, it's a good fake.

Harold (46:02):
My favorite panel in this strip that you picked is Linus stopping to evaluate the skyscraper that he has made before he runs up the stairs to catch the flyball.

Jimmy (46:13):
The art in this whole strip is great.
The going up the steps is fantastic.

Michael (46:17):
Yeah, it's great.
I am actually surprised that Charlie Brown can hit a ball that far.
Even if he just tosses it up in the air.

Jimmy (46:26):
Now is Linus your favorite character?

Nat Gertler (46:29):
Well, Linus is the character I most associate with.
As you guys know, there's a different character that Schulz was putting his creativity best into at any given point in the strip.
It was Charlie Brown, then it was Linus, then it was Snoopy, Peppermint Patty.
He put a lot of energy into Spike.
By the end of the strip, it's rerun.

Jimmy (46:49):
Yeah, we are just finishing up all the rerun stuff.
It's amazing that he just takes over the strip at the end.

Nat Gertler (46:56):
Yeah.
The last three years, I thought was a real creative upswing.
That was showed in the rerun material.
That's a character he had planned.
He wanted to throw away.
He wasn't happy.
He added it to the cast, but he found something to do with it.
He, like the rest of us, found something rich in the history of Peanuts.

Harold (47:17):
Yeah.
I always said that what character has two strikes against him like that.
They introduce him and they name him Rerun.
He looks so much like another character in the strip that people for years, we casually reading the strip, don't even know it's a different character.
Yeah.

Nat Gertler (47:34):
I've had to help correct a licenser who put out a shirt with Rerun on it, that they were advertising as a Linus shirt.

Liz (47:41):
Oh, wow.

Nat Gertler (47:42):
Yeah.

Jimmy (47:44):
You definitely watch Schulz try to struggle with that, changing the hair, giving him the overalls.
He definitely makes an effort towards the end to differentiate him.

Nat Gertler (47:57):
Yeah.
Well, he's a kid who wants to be a cartoonist who grows up without...
He has family members, but he doesn't access friends to them most of the time.
So you got to figure, Schulz was putting once again a lot of himself into that character, as he's put into many other characters in the past.

Harold (48:13):
Definitely.

Jimmy (48:15):
June 20th, 1980.
Charlie Brown, Linus and Udora are all sitting on little chairs.
This is a strip where they're actually at camp.
It's part of a longer sequence.
Linus raises his hand to ask a question.
He says, may I ask a question, sir?
I don't really wish to interrupt.
Charlie Brown gets off his chair and says, I think I'll leave.
As Linus continues, I also don't wish to be rude.

(48:38):
Just as a matter of curiosity, sir, and at this point we see everybody has left, and even Linus is alone, and he says, has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?

Harold (48:49):
Is he talking to a licenser?

Nat Gertler (48:51):
Yeah.
No.
This is Schulz being political in Schulz's own way, confrontational.
You're not quite 100 percent sure what he's being confrontational about, but you can understand the instinct that Linus is the one being bold and brave, but you know it's going to be trouble.

(49:13):
That phrase, have you ever considered that you might be wrong, is not the first time it appears in this trip.
In an earlier strip, Snoopy was writing a book on theology that had that title.

Harold (49:24):
Yes.
That there's an innocence to Linus as he's saying this.
He's just seeking the truth, right?

Nat Gertler (49:32):
Right.
Absolutely.
You can imagine that it shows himself who was on quite a theological quest over the years.
I'm sure and confronted a lot of people for whom the truth was not a question, but an answer, and probably had that feeling himself that he may or may not have stifled at various times.

Jimmy (49:56):
Well, it was one of the all-time great strips.
At both times it appears, it's fantastic, and it's something we should all ask ourselves now and again.

Nat Gertler (50:07):
It is a wise trip.

Jimmy (50:08):
Yeah.
It is.
Well, that too, for someone who humble beginnings, not super well-educated, working in a field that's not generally thought of as being able to produce philosophy or poetry, but he's doing both.

(50:31):
Do you have any insight into where that, like how, do you have any insight into how the heck this guy did this?

Nat Gertler (50:37):
Well, he was always a very internal kind of guy.
Just everything you see about it, it's clear that he had an inner monologue running frequently.
Like any other muscle, if you exercise it a lot, you build it up.

Michael (50:55):
Yeah.

Jimmy (50:57):
And you're doing it every single day.
But then I always get back to the thing.
Nobody else did.
Yeah.

Nat Gertler (51:06):
Nobody else has really reached that level.

Jimmy (51:08):
Yeah.

Nat Gertler (51:10):
But luckily we had him and luckily he found the right form almost by accident.
I mean, he wanted to do single panel.
He wanted to be all these things that didn't-

Jimmy (51:21):
An adventure strip.

Nat Gertler (51:22):
They wanted to do it.
And he did a sample of an adventure strip, but still he ended up with this thing, with a title he didn't like, did it for a long time and we're all the better for it.

Harold (51:34):
Absolutely.
This whole time we've been trying to explore, how did Schulz pull this off?
What is it that's so unique about him surviving 25 years after the last strip?
And one of the things that came up early was the idea that, you know, the original strips were primarily coming out of bull pens where there were artists working in major cities and newspapers that were rough and tumble.

(52:00):
And so a certain kind of person was creating those strips.
And then all of a sudden it was possible to mail something in from your apartment in Minneapolis and possibly get a strip sold.
And then all of a sudden you had these artists who were not city creatures.
They were living all over the country and it brought a completely different flavor.

(52:20):
And we certainly see that in Schulz.
And then he changes comic strips and everybody's now inspired by him.

Nat Gertler (52:27):
But you're probably right on the difference that shipping made.
And I think we saw that in comic books when FedEx arrived.
And suddenly it didn't have to be a New Yorker to work in comic books or the New York area.

Harold (52:40):
It's funny what logistical things will completely change a whole artistic media.
Yeah.

Jimmy (52:46):
Well, even the fact that this entire medium was embedded in another medium, newspapers, which had no use for it half the time and was in so many ways just the opposite.
But they were bound together inextricably.

Nat Gertler (53:01):
And as we watch newspapers crumble, that's a bit sad because we're taking the strip with it.

Jimmy (53:08):
Yes, very sad.
January 30th, 1998.
The Van Pelt family, the children anyway, are sitting on the couch.
Linus, Rerun and Lucy are watching TV.
But Rerun is telling them about his day.
And he says, someone at school today asked me if I had an older brother who dragged a blanket around.

(53:30):
No, I replied, I'm an only child.
Then someone said, but don't you have a weird older sister?
No, I insisted, I am an only child.
And so I go day after day, dodging questions from curious outsiders.

Nat Gertler (53:45):
I love that phrase, dodging questions from curious outsiders is beautiful.
But this tells us so much about Rerun.
This is so much, I am in my own world.
I do not relate to this world outside of me.
And so I decided to be that way.
And you can sort of understand, given his siblings, that he would be that way.

Harold (54:09):
And like his older brother, he's saying that innocent thing in front of somebody, that maybe he shouldn't say it in front of somebody.

Nat Gertler (54:19):
Yeah, he's not aware of that implication.
I'm not sure why he's choosing to say it right then and now, but he's not bothered by the fact that he's choosing to say it.
But Rerun, if you can define Peanuts characters by what they want and do not get.
He can do that for most of the characters.

(54:40):
Charlie Brown wants to win the ball game, wants a little red-haired girl.
These are the things he does not get.
Lucy wants Schroeder.
Schroeder wants to be left alone.
Obviously, these two things are not going to both succeed, if either of them will succeed.
But Rerun wants a dog and a bicycle.
That is the most normal possible thing for a little boy to want.

Jimmy (55:05):
Yeah.

Nat Gertler (55:06):
And normally, they can get them.
And the fact that he doesn't is a lot of what drives him.
So Rerun, as I say, Rerun those last three years especially fascinates me.

Jimmy (55:16):
Oh, I was happy to be able to tell Mrs.
Schulz how much I loved Rerun when I got to meet her.
And she said she felt that maybe it was because he had grandchildren around.

Nat Gertler (55:29):
Yeah, yeah, and that probably revived his ability, you know, direct contact with kids in a lot of ways.

Jimmy (55:35):
Yeah, yeah, he's a great, an absolute great character.
And it was, you know, there was no reason to expect there would be another great character in Peanuts at the end like that.
But it was amazing to see.
It's just one of my faves.

Harold (55:49):
Yeah, it is absolutely amazing that this character comes to slay.

Nat Gertler (55:52):
Yeah, I'm so glad he wasn't utterly thrown away at the end of the back of the bicycle period.

Harold (55:58):
Right, yeah, what a loss that would have been.

Jimmy (56:00):
Yeah, the character I think it changes the most is Linus, though, because Lucy is always the bossy older sister.
And having another brother doesn't change that.
But Linus suddenly becomes the middle child.

Nat Gertler (56:14):
Right, and he has somebody below him on the totem pole, figuratively.
I shouldn't use that totem pole reference, because the person at the bottom of the totem pole really holds everything up.

Liz (56:26):
Yeah, good point.

Jimmy (56:28):
Absolutely.

Harold (56:29):
Well, I'm with you on this strip.
This was my strip of the year for 1998.
I laughed out loud, I think, longer and harder than I had probably since some strips up in the 60s.

Nat Gertler (56:40):
Yeah, and I think I would have to check, but I think it's certainly the longest word balloon in the dailies.
I mean, being freed from the four-panel structure, let him do something like this, and it's just lovely.

Jimmy (56:57):
Yeah, he did some great single-panel strips, like panoramas.
We were just talking about, there's a week of just spike in the desert and it's raining.
It's not that it's even the funniest things in the world, but just no one drew rain like Schulz.

Nat Gertler (57:12):
Oh, yeah.

Jimmy (57:12):
And seeing spike out in the rain in the desert, just so evocative and beautiful.

Nat Gertler (57:17):
Yeah.
And he certainly earned the right to do something different, something else.
Absolutely.
Nobody was stacking Peanuts in a square anymore.
Right.

Harold (57:29):
Could I ask you another technical question that you may or may not know?
But we were noticing the artistry of the Zip-A-Tone and then later some of the really late coloring when the computer coloring came in.
Do you know?

Nat Gertler (57:42):
I do not.

Harold (57:43):
Was that?
I do not know.
Okay, because that is a question that we would like to kind of understand.
Who is behind that work?
Because it really is, in many cases, excellent and really supports Schulz work in those later years.

Nat Gertler (57:54):
Yeah, absolutely.
I have no idea to what degree Schulz was indicating things himself.
I mean, he used to certainly indicate the colors on the Sundays.
I do not know if that stayed true to the end or not.
If you look carefully through some of the strips in the later years, there are actually places where panels are reused and things like that.

Jimmy (58:13):
Oh, really?
I didn't realize that at all.

Nat Gertler (58:15):
I discovered that going through the complete Peanuts, that there would be this...
If you look at the details like Linus' hair, where if it comes out exactly the same twice...

Jimmy (58:28):
Yeah, yeah.

Nat Gertler (58:28):
Yeah.
It was rare, but I have seen a few of those in the later months.

Jimmy (58:34):
I just think he's talking about, at some points, he's having to hold his drawing hand with his other hand to steady it.
And looking at this strip of them on the couch, to draw all that or to letter it, to draw those letter forms, I can't imagine having to struggle with that tremor and letter all of that and have it come out so perfectly.

Nat Gertler (59:00):
Yeah, but he did it, he stuck with it.
And one of the things with the shaky line he developed, first, there's a little while when it's just a bad line, sort of, but then it becomes this wistful effect.

Jimmy (59:11):
Yes.

Nat Gertler (59:12):
It actually has a positive value to the strip.
So that always impressed me.

Jimmy (59:18):
Yeah, me too.

Harold (59:18):
Absolutely.
Definitely.

Jimmy (59:21):
Well, what are your thoughts for this art form as we wrap up?
Are you hopeful for comics as we...

Nat Gertler (59:28):
Oh, comics as a whole.
I mean, as a publisher, I see comics as the large thing.
I grew everything from publishing collections of single panels to publishing graphic novels.
So to me, comics is healthy.
Comics has a lot of good creative energy and some good purchase attention often at the graphic novel level.

(59:51):
The strip, the daily strip, we'll have to see how long people stick with that format online if the newspapers all pretty much effectively go.
They're given so little space these days that, I do a lot of reprinting of old strips and you could not print them clearly in the size that things are being printed today.

(01:00:14):
They have to be huge.
There's definitely something been lost and both the readership goes down but the value of the strip goes down.
That's going to be a sad thing.
I hope it finds a home but I can't be sure that the daily strip format will.

Jimmy (01:00:31):
Yeah.
Well, Nat, thank you so much for coming on this podcast.
Thank you for all of the work you've done with Peanuts and otherwise all these many years.
It was just a big thrill for us to have you.
And do you want to give anybody one more time where they can find you online or anything else you'd like to plug?

Nat Gertler (01:00:51):
Well, it's an honor to be here.
If they want to see the blog, which probably is the thing most likely they'd want to see, it's at blog.aug.com.
B-L-O-G dot aaugh.com.

Jimmy (01:01:05):
That's awesome.
Well, Nat, thank you so much.

Nat Gertler (01:01:08):
Thank you so much.
Yeah, thanks for that.

Jimmy (01:01:10):
Thank you.

Liz (01:01:10):
It was great.
Thank you so much.

Jimmy (01:01:13):
Well, that was a fantastic day.
So glad Nat was able to join us.
This is our finale.
This is our last episode in our first iteration.
Starting with our next episode, remember it will be twice a month.
Our first season is Unpacking Snoopy, where we're going to go through Snoopy's life on the page, and especially for you Gen-Zers out there who are just wild about Snoopy.

(01:01:42):
This is going to give you the insight that you're going to need.
So we hope you will join us there.
Go over to unpackingPeanuts.com, and you will be able to find out all the information that you need there.
Otherwise, for Michael, Harold, and Liz, this is Jimmy saying, be of good cheer.

Liz (01:02:01):
Yes.
Be of good cheer.
Unpacking Peanuts is copyrighted by Jimmy Gownley, Michael Cohen, Harold Buchholz, and Liz Sumner.
Produced and edited by Liz Sumner.
Music by Michael Cohen.
Additional voiceover by Aziza Shukralla Clark.
For more from the show, follow Unpack Peanuts on Instagram and Threads.

(01:02:23):
Unpacking Peanuts on Facebook, Blue Sky, and YouTube.
For more about Jimmy, Michael, and Harold, visit unpackingPeanuts.com.
Have a wonderful day and thanks for listening.

Jimmy (01:02:34):
That was fun.