With Patrick McDonnell, Creator of MUTTS

Episode Transcript
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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.
This is Unpacking Peanuts, and it's a special day because we got a special guest, and I'm going to be the host for these proceedings.
My name is Jimmy Gownley.
I'm also a cartoonist.
You can find my work over there on Substack where it's GVIL Comics.
I've done things like Amelia Rule, Seven Good Reasons Not to Grow Up, The Dumbest Idea Ever, and my new book, In the Real Dark Night, is available on said Substack.

(00:44):
Joining me as always are my pals, co-hosts, and fellow cartoonists.
He's a playwright and a composer both for the band, Complicated People, as well as for this very podcast.
He's the co-creator of the original comic book prize guide, the original editor for Amelia Rule, and the creator of such great strips is Strange Attractors.
A Gathering of Spells and Tangled River.
It's Michael Cohen.

Michael (01:02):
Say hey.

Jimmy (01:03):
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 (01:14):
Hello.

Jimmy (01:15):
And making sure everything runs smooth and we stay out of trouble, it's our producer and editor, Liz Sumner.

Liz (01:21):
Howdy.

Jimmy (01:22):
Well, this is a really special day for us here at Unpacking Peanuts.
We have one of the greatest comic strip artists of all time in the house, Patrick McDonnell.
Patrick McDonnell's comic strip, Mutts, celebrated its 31st anniversary, having appeared in over 700 newspapers across 20 countries.
McDonnell has New York Times best-selling picture books, including the Caldecott honor-winning Me Jane, a childhood biography of Jane Goodall.

(01:48):
He's also worked with people like, oh, I don't know, Eckhart Tolle with Guardians of Being and the Dalai Lama, with Heart to Heart, a conversation of love and hope for our precious planet.
He's had two picture books published this year, The Gift of Everything and the 20th anniversary edition of The Gift of Nothing.
Please welcome to the show, Patrick McDonnell.

(02:09):
Patrick, welcome to Unpacking Peanuts.
Thank you so much for joining us today.

Patrick (02:14):
I'm so happy to be here.
It's always great to talk about Peanuts.

Jimmy (02:18):
It is.
Well, let's start here.
I remember in around 1996 or 1997, reading an interview with Mr.
Charles Schulz that said, your strip, Mutts, was the last great comic strip of the 20th century, which is a pretty good pull quote for a book.

(02:40):
Let me ask you this.
Let's take us back to the very beginning of that journey.
Where were you when you first encountered Schulz's work?
What impact did that have on you deciding to become a cartoonist?

Patrick (02:54):
Oh, my God.
The main impact.
I'll go a little further back.
Some of my earliest memories as a baby, actually, as I'm like a two-year-old, three-year-old, was my mom and dad met at Cooper Union Art School in New York City.
Neither one of them went on to become professional artists, but art was encouraged in the house.

(03:14):
My mom had collections of Walt Kelly Pogo books and Jules Pfeiffer books.
Those are some of my earliest memories just looking at how alive those pen and ink, black and white drawings were on the page, and I was just fascinated with it.
Then as I grew up, I'm a child of the 60s, so when I grew up, it was peanuts in the newspaper.

(03:39):
Just like today, peanuts was at that point exploding, it was everywhere.
I was just totally enthralled with peanuts, and every night I would read the paperbacks before I went to sleep and it was just everything to me was peanuts.

Jimmy (03:57):
Did you have a favorite era of the books when you were reading those?
But first of, were you buying the books?
Were they secondhand?
Where did you get the-

Patrick (04:05):
Well, I'm talking really young.
They were gifts from my mom and dad and my aunt.
I had an aunt who would cut out the daily newspapers and paste them in a book, and I still have that book.
I'm talking, this is like early, early 60s.
As I got older, I would buy the books, but they were all gifts.

(04:28):
Actually, it was like part of my Christmas, and in every Christmas stocking, there would be a peanuts paperback.
That was one of the things I looked forward for Christmas.
I knew I was going to get a new peanuts book.

Harold (04:40):
That's great.

Jimmy (04:43):
Some of my best Christmas memories were getting comic books in a stocking and spending the day doing it.
When did you decide that comics were more than what you just wanted to read, but that's what you wanted to pursue?

Patrick (04:56):
Really, really early on.
Again, because my mom and dad both went to art school, art was encouraged in the house.
As a little kid, I remember, it was funny.
Obviously, I'm sure there were times I tried to copy Snoopy and Charlie Brown, but right from the beginning, I was inventing my own characters and drawing my own silly things.

(05:18):
But yeah, early, I wanted to be a cartoonist at the age of probably three or four, which is true of a lot of cartoons.
With the National Cartoonist Society, we once did an interview with 12 cartoonists, and that was one of the first questions.
I think 11 out of the 12 pretty much set around four or five years old is when they decided they wanted to be a cartoonist.

Harold (05:40):
Yeah.
Three for me.

Jimmy (05:41):
Yeah.
What do you think it is about that art form that when it hits you that way so young that it just sticks for life?
Do you have a theory?

Patrick (05:53):
You know, maybe the magic of it.
To me, what I love about cartooning is the magic how these little abstract pen and ink drawings come alive on the page and you really connect with the characters and I guess as a kid to try to attempt to do that magic to make these little doodles come alive.

(06:14):
That's what it was for me.
And no one was better at it than Sparky.
Those characters are so alive on the page.

Jimmy (06:21):
Did you have a favorite one of his characters?

Patrick (06:24):
You know, two.
Snoopy, because I wanted a dog my whole life and my mom and dad.
My brothers and I were capable of having the dogs.
We had cats.
So, I mean, Snoopy was my dog until I was 30 and my first dog was Earl, the dog that had struck my strip.
But I waited a long time to get my Snoopy.

(06:46):
But then as far as the other characters, I was always taken with whineness.
His spirituality and his quiet.
And he seemed like the only sane, even though he had his blanket.
He seemed like he was the most sane out of the group.

Jimmy (07:05):
Yeah, it's definitely a sliding scale in that cast, but I hear what you're saying.

Patrick (07:09):
You know, I loved Charlie Brown, obviously, but he was depressed a lot.
And I don't know, as a five-year-old, I wasn't that depressed.

Jimmy (07:20):
Well, that's good to hear.
Now, the first, maybe not the very first I heard about you, but the first thing that I read of yours, even before I saw Mutts, because I grew up in a tiny little town that didn't have much going on, what was your book about Harriman, your crazy cat book?

(07:43):
And we talk a lot about how Schulz was so influenced by Crazy Cat.
What's your feeling about Harriman's work?
And what do you see in common between him and Schulz?

Patrick (07:57):
Well, those were probably my two biggest influences.
And it's funny, I was growing up with peanuts, and then it wasn't until I was a teenager that I discovered Crazy Cat.
And it's funny, as a teenager, I started losing a little of my interest in cartoons, and started playing drums and want to be in a rock band and all that.

(08:19):
But discovering Crazy Cat and discovering Robert Crumb got me back into like, oh yeah, cartoons are crazy and could be a lot of fun.
But yeah, when I first saw a peanut, I mean, Crazy Cat, it's an amazing comic strip.
I mean, it still looks so new and fresh even today.
When I saw it as a 13-year-old, it blew my mind what you could do with comics.

(08:43):
I'm sure, you know, I've talked to Sparky about Crazy Cat, and it was the same thing, just like how far you could go with a comic and how personal you can get with a comic.
And to tackle different topics, you know, that Crazy Cat would tackle different topics.

(09:04):
And I think underneath it, the kindness and the love, and I think that's underneath of all the great comics.

Jimmy (09:09):
It's funny because we talk about it, you know, not infrequently on this podcast, you know, Crazy Cat.
And I always think that for our listeners who aren't like super aficionados of the forum, but are just Peanuts fans, I always picture they have some weird image of what Crazy Cat is, like possibly like a slightly older Garfield or something like that.

(09:29):
But it's so far removed from what you could even explain to people.

Liz (09:34):
Yeah.

Patrick (09:35):
Yeah, you know, Sparky, you know, was just a cartoonist through and through, you know, most of our talks were about other cartoons and Crazy Cat was a big one.
He loved Popeye.
We loved talking about Popeye and Washtubs.
Yeah.

Jimmy (09:53):
What did he have to say about Popeye, for example?

Harold (09:56):
Do you remember any?

Patrick (09:59):
No, he said that Popeye, this might even be in one of his interviews, but Popeye gave him the freedom that you could get a little surreal and still keep the strip.
He said that Popeye gave him the liberty to have Snoopy get on top of the doghouse, and make believe he was a flying ace.

(10:19):
Because Popeye, even though it was set in its own reality, would have really crazy episodes with the goon, and just invent crazy surreal things, but still hold true to the strip itself.
I think he thought Popeye gave him the opportunity that you could get a little surreal with your strip, and it could still work.

Harold (10:41):
It makes total sense.

Jimmy (10:44):
Yeah, absolutely.
Now, could you tell us, because we talk about, obviously, Schulz doing this day in and day out for decades.
It's an abstract thought for us.
You're probably possibly the one person in the world right now who understands what it's like to be Charles Schulz and be a daily cartoonist at that level.

(11:05):
Can you take us back to the beginning of turning Mutts into a comic strip?
What was that process like?
How long did it take?
What was your learning curve like?
Could you just tell us about that?

Patrick (11:19):
Sure.
Well, the first thing I'll tell you, when I think about it, it's really funny.
As we all talk, so we all wanted to be cartoonists since we were five years old, and mainly for me because of Peanuts.
When I finally got to do Mutts, all those years, and I didn't do Mutts until much later.
I was in my 30s when I started Mutts.

(11:41):
But that whole time, I never once thought about the reality of the job.
I knew you had to do a comic strip every day, but then when you actually have to do a comic strip every day, I always wonder if I would have kept that dream alive if I really thought about.
What it was.
The insaneness of it.
It really is a crazy job.

(12:01):
It truly is to do it.

Jimmy (12:03):
No days off, 365, the earth.
Crazy.

Patrick (12:05):
No vacations and just keep on working.
But anyway, how I started.
I was thinking about wanting to become a cartoonist.
I always loved doing arts.
I went to the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
I was open.
I took everything, painting, sculpture.
Even though I was thinking about doing comics, I also just wanted to learn about art in different forms.

(12:31):
I did have had Will Eisner, the artist of the Spirit as a teacher, believe it or not.

Liz (12:36):
Wow.

Patrick (12:37):
For a cartoon class.
He was great.
Will was great because, Will was one of those unique human beings that have a right brain and a left brain.

Harold (12:46):
Yeah.

Patrick (12:47):
Because he was really into business.
What was great about his class, he not only taught us how to tell stories and draw, but he really talked about how do you make a living at this, which was a very smart way to teach kids.
Because you just think about art, you don't think about how to make a living with it.

Harold (13:03):
Right.

Patrick (13:05):
So I did that.
At that point, the newspaper comic strips, this was before Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side.
So comics were, and even before Doonesbury, if I think about it.
So comics were looking a little dull to me as a teenager in art school.
So I didn't immediately do that.

(13:28):
I took illustration classes, so I went out with my portfolio and I started getting illustration jobs at different magazines.
The first one was The Village of Oys in New York.

SPEAKER_5 (13:38):
Oh, wow.

Patrick (13:39):
So then it was paying the bills.
I started working for Sports Illustrated, Time Magazine, and Forbes.
It was an interesting, fun way to make a living with art.
I had a cast of characters.
It's funny.
Even though I was doing illustrations for different magazines, I had this guy with a big nose and a mustache who eventually became Ozzy and Mutts.

(14:05):
I also drew what I thought was a generic little crazy dog with a circle around his eye and who eventually became Earl.
I did that for about 10 years.
I also did a monthly comic strip for Parents magazine called Bad Baby.

(14:26):
I was getting to do that a little bit, but it was just once a month.
Here's a sobering thought for me.
I did Bad Baby for 10 years and I eventually just ran out of baby jokes and didn't feel like doing it anymore.
But 10 years of a monthly comic equals about three and a half months of a day.

Harold (14:45):
Right.
Wow.

Patrick (14:46):
When I thought about that, when I started Mutts, it was like, oh my God, three and a half months.
So anyway, after my poor wife had to listen to me complain for about those 10 years saying, I really should do a newspaper comic.
I should really do a newspaper comic.
Finally, I took some time off and came up with Mutts.

(15:07):
Now, the other thing that happened in the meantime was I finally got a dog.
The dog was Earl, was everything I'd wanted a dog to be.
He really was Snoopy.
He was just a fun, great Jack Russell terrier.
At that point, it's funny, I was drawing this little dog and the art director told me that I was drawing a Jack Russell.

(15:29):
I didn't know I was drawing a Jack Russell.
This was way before Jack Russell became popular.
I had to go before the Internet, so I had to go to the library and look up Jack Russell.
I was like, oh my God, it's my cartoon dog.
Then eventually, we moved out of the city and moved to the suburbs so I could get a dog, and I got this little character named Merle.

(15:52):
I don't know if you know this, but Charles Schulz named her.

Jimmy (15:56):
Oh, really?
Not now.
Wow, tell us that.

Patrick (15:59):
Yeah.
Well, going back to the Bad Baby comic, so they did do a paperback collection of my bad baby strips.
I got that to Charles Schulz.
Charles Schulz used to have a great friend named Mark Cohen.

Jimmy (16:14):
Oh, the art dealer, right?

Patrick (16:16):
Yeah.
And he would contact people that Sparky liked, and he would cook people up with Sparky, and we'd all go out to dinner, Mark and Sparky and me.
But he invited me to dinner before I did Mutts, when I just did the Bad Baby book that Sparky liked.

(16:38):
So I got to meet Sparky before Mutts, and then I started working on Mutts, and I was having a hard time naming the characters.
Sparky said, well, why don't you name them after your own dog Earl?
And I said, this guy might know what he's talking about.
So Sparky named Earl.

(17:00):
I had a whole bunch of different names.
And to tell you the truth, I didn't want to do Earl, because I didn't think Earl was like a really great comic strip name.
So when Sparky gave it the blessing, then we're all like, That is so cool.

Jimmy (17:12):
Oh, it would have been great if you would have went there like, Hey, Sparky, I think I got this.
All right, keep it to yourself.
That is amazing.
Well, that is definitely a sign, I think from on high that you're on the right track.
Was it a struggle to sell it once you had the sample?

Patrick (17:32):
Well, you know, to tell you the truth, I did get to fly out to California and show Sparky what I was going to sell and he gave it to Seal of Approve.
And I'll tell you the truth, right then, I felt like I didn't even have to sell it.
I got Sparky to.
Sparky liked it.
I was done.
But you know, I sent it to the syndicates, which are strange, you know, I don't know if I remember the story, but Universal, who had Calvin Hobbs at the time, wrote me and said, we don't do talking animal strips.

(18:06):
But 10 Features took it, and I'll tell you when you say how long it took to make.
I once had the pleasure to meet Chester Gould's daughter, Dick Tracy.
And she invited me, there was a Dick Tracy Museum.
I'm not sure if it's still there, but there was a Dick Tracy Museum in Illinois.

(18:27):
And she invited me to come out and give a talk.
And then I went out to dinner with the family, and they asked me, Oh, tell us how you started Mutts.
And I told them, well, it was the first strip I did, and I sent it to King Features.
And they said yes.
And the whole family was so quiet.
I was like, that's been something horrible.
I said, what's wrong?
And his daughter told me, the story with Chester Gould and Dick Tracy is that he did a hundred strips before they accepted Dick Tracy.

Harold (18:54):
Wow.

Patrick (18:55):
Different strips.
So when they heard I only did one, they were like, what?

Harold (19:01):
So Patrick, to choose one, why did Mutts come up top for you?
Why do you think you picked that one and say, this is the one I'm going to create and submit?
What was it about?

Patrick (19:12):
Well, because in my illustrations, I've been drawing this little dog in the sky with a mustache for a long time.
And I knew the dog would be, and especially now that I had this dog, a little girl, who was so much fun and giving me ideas.
I thought that to do a strip about a dog would be the way to go.

(19:32):
My initial drawings that I showed King had Ozzie and Earl, and Earl, I just had him like, it was a little orphan Annie-ish in the sense that he would leave the house and go on adventures.
And I had a meeting with elephants and rhinoceroses.
And finally, my editor said, where is this dog living?
And he suggests that maybe it should be a little more domesticated.

(19:56):
So then I played with the idea of that maybe next door there was a cat.
I literally, when I first did it, I thought it was good for maybe two weeks worth of jokes.
But just the way cats are, they come into your life and take over.
Before you know it, Mooch became the lead of this strip.
And then I realized I had a cat and dog strip.

(20:18):
And then, as you know, when you do a daily comic strip, it's not like a novel.
You don't know where it's going.
So it's like life every day.
You don't know what's going to happen next.

Harold (20:29):
Was Mutts always called Mutts or when you started out, did you have a different name?

Patrick (20:33):
Again, I could show you my notebooks.
I've actually had one of my, The Art of Mutts.

Jimmy (20:38):
Oh, I love that book, by the way.
Sorry.

Patrick (20:42):
That book has one of my pages from my notebook where there's probably like 50 names for Mutts that I'm trying to choose.
I forgot how much went to the top, but Mutts went to the top.
And it took me a long time to name the characters and the script.

Harold (20:57):
Yeah, I feel for Schulz not liking his own title the whole run of his script.

Patrick (21:04):
That's such a sad story that his whole life he never liked.

Harold (21:09):
It's so strange that we engaged with it because Peanuts equals the strip.
We don't think about it for him, but for him it was an abstract thing that is attached to his strip that he looked at so differently than say I would.

Patrick (21:21):
Isn't that funny?
I mean, Peanuts is the perfect name because it's Peanuts, but he never liked it.

Jimmy (21:30):
I love that Art of Mutts book and one of the things that really stood out to me that is your Sunday strips looking at some of the stuff in that, and the color you do for it.
Can you talk just a little bit?
I'm one of my favorite parts of being a cartoonist is just being a colorist, and I know this is a little off the top, but I think you're one of the great colorists of comics.

(21:52):
Can you talk a little bit about where you got your sense for that?
Because it also kind of carries over to your children's books and stuff like that too.
You just have an amazing color sense.

Patrick (22:04):
Thank you so much.
Well, I'm going to give one of my first plugs here.
But right now I'm working on Abrams' coming out next fall.
We're going to start doing all the Sunday page, starting with the first.
So two volumes are going to come out next October, the 94, 95, 96, 97, and 98.

(22:25):
So I've been looking at those.
Again, when you do a comic strip, you definitely learn in public.
People see your mistakes.
So it took me a while to get the colors, how you'd printers.
Now people do it on the computer, but back then you had to do a whoop.

(22:46):
I used watercolors.
I would watercolor the whole Sunday, and then I had to number each color with the number the printer had.
I had to learn how to do fades.
It took a while.

Jimmy (23:00):
That is actually one of the parts.
I think your coloring in that period didn't, for some reason, suffer from, it seemed like everybody else was struggling with the fact that as it moved from the watercolors to the digital, a lot of the fades got ridiculous.
A lot of people were into the little things they could do.
I don't feel that Mutts ever had that problem.

(23:23):
It always felt like painterly.
I don't know if there's a question in this, but it just looked so beautiful.
I don't know if there's a way you could describe how you avoided those digital traps.

Patrick (23:32):
Again, I'm not a tech person at all, so I think the computer color, yeah, that felt like for a while there, we looked really dark on the page.
It was too much.
I still did it the old-fashioned way and just learned tricks on how to get fades and different and adding blacks and stuff like that.
For me, it was, obviously, I'm a big fan of the old comics.

(23:57):
I'm like, God, when you look at the colors in Little Nemo.

Harold (24:00):
Oh, God.

Patrick (24:01):
Yeah.
You look at the colors of those old comics.
I mean, it's a-

Harold (24:05):
Kathleen Alley.

Patrick (24:06):
Yeah.
We talk about that we keep on getting more technical and improve this, we improve that, but we haven't improved.
I wish I could do the colors that Little Nemo.
You can't do it today.
Yeah.
For whatever reason, how the printing press worked back then.
So I tried my best to try to copy those Little Nemo colors with the printing process they had while I was doing it.

Harold (24:35):
So you were booking at Little Nemo and saying, how do you do this and I want to recreate that?

Patrick (24:40):
Yeah.
How do you get a red like that?
How do you do a fade like that?
Some of them I'm proud of.
I don't think you can capture with the way.
When you look at those things, they're like lithographs and engravings.
The colors are so gorgeous.

(25:02):
But I managed to fake some of that.
But thanks for, there was an important part of the process to me to make.
Again, I'm going old-fashioned here, but the excitement of having the Sunday comics, they're in color now, so you wanted them to be as fancy as possible, at least I did.

Harold (25:22):
Yeah, well, Patrick, when Mutts came out, it was such a breath of fresh air in the comics page, and it had a real sense of innocence and joy and thoughtfulness to it.
And I was in a town that didn't have Mutts, and my mother-in-law, she knew how much I loved it.

(25:43):
She would clip it for me every day, drop it in an envelope every two weeks, and I had Mutts.
She did that for years for me.

Patrick (25:51):
You know, when I do book signings, that's how a lot of people got to see their comics.
A mom or an aunt who loved it would mail them to them.
It's a sweet, old-fashioned way to see art for them.

Jimmy (26:06):
It sounds like something we're talking about from hundreds of years ago.

Harold (26:09):
It was great.

Jimmy (26:11):
In my town, we had to travel by cart for a few days to get our clippings.

Harold (26:16):
Right.

Patrick (26:17):
We were talking about newspaper comics.
It is old-fashioned.
I live in Princeton and just last week, I gave a talk at there's a graphic novel class at Princeton.
I asked the students if I even read the comics and of course, they didn't.

(26:38):
But even worse was no one in the class ever held a newspaper.

Harold (26:42):
Oh my God.

Patrick (26:43):
Isn't that scary?

Harold (26:45):
That's never held a newspaper.

Patrick (26:48):
None of them ever read a newspaper.

Harold (26:51):
That's pretty good.
That's crazy.
Yeah, really.

Michael (26:55):
Hey, Patrick.
This is Michael.
I was looking at your bio and I found a very curious item there.
It says you wrote a graphic novel for Marvel focusing on Jack Kirby, and I'd really like to hear more about that.

Patrick (27:13):
That was the most fun book I ever did.
It's called The Superheroes Journey.
With my editor at Abrams, he has the Marvel license and he just off the top of his head one day asked me, what I want to do a book with the Marvel characters?
I said, oh my God, who wouldn't want to do a book with Marvel characters?
So I put together, I was surprised Marvel said yes to this, but I did a book where I took pages and panels from the original 1960 stuff I grew up with, the Kirby and Steve Titko stuff, and made a new story with my art, new panels, new pages, and weaved it together as like a big nish-mosh.

(27:56):
It's a really interesting, I think, a spiritual story about Mr.
Fantastic trying to find love to Tated Tree.

Michael (28:05):
Does it work as a story?

Patrick (28:07):
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, no, it's a lot of fun to do.
You don't see any Kirby in my mind.

Michael (28:17):
So can you draw in that style if you felt like it?

Patrick (28:21):
Well, actually, I think I became a comic strip artist because I wasn't good enough to do Kirby stuff.
I could do silly cartoons, but to do actually anatomy and superheroes.
You can see in the book, I draw this book sort of like I would have drawn when I was nine or ten years old.
Not that I was trying to be nine or ten years old, but I just kept it very free, didn't do any penciling and kept it loose like a kid was drawing it.

(28:46):
So it's a combination of those drawings with Jack Hervey and Steve Ditcombe, and somehow it still reads as a continued story.
I think it's just the power of the costumes and the characters that you'll just follow anything that looks like Spider-Man.

Michael (29:00):
So you colored that too, right?

Liz (29:02):
Yeah.

Harold (29:04):
Sure.
Well, I mean, we were talking about that with peanuts and how Snoopy is not on model.
Every pose, you got a different size stomach and leg, and you have the right to change to whatever feels right and whatever looks good.
I got the superhero's journey from you, I think, in Baltimore.

Michael (29:24):
Oh, okay.
Yeah.

Harold (29:28):
I thought it was so cool that you got the opportunity to do that with the Marvel characters.
Like you say, I hadn't seen anything ever do anything like this.
It seems like, was it a Charlie Kochman or who do you work with?

Patrick (29:39):
Yeah, Charlie was the editor.

Harold (29:41):
Okay.
Yeah.
He's like, hey, he had the vision.
Yeah, what if Patrick did this?
I thought it was so cool that it came together and you got to do it, because it's unlike any other Marvel thing I've ever seen.

Patrick (29:55):
Like I said, we took a gamble.
We gave them a one-page synopsis of what I planned on doing.

Harold (30:02):
Yeah.

Patrick (30:03):
But then when I was actually doing it, Charlie decided, this is so strange.
They're not going to understand if I just sent them random pages.
So we didn't send them the book until it was done.
There was a chance they might have said, we're not going to print it.
They were actually really easy to work with.
They only changed one or two things.

(30:25):
Actually, there were some mistakes on my side.
I think I'd said Bruce Banner became the Hulk with, I think I said gamma rays, but I'm not sure, I forget again.

Jimmy (30:37):
It was gamma rays, definitely, yes.

Patrick (30:39):
Yes.
Then I said something, I said different rays than they were saying, oh, no.
But they were really easy to work with.
Like I said, it was the most fun book I've ever done.

Michael (30:50):
Well, they couldn't keep it straight either.
The Hulk's secret identity name kept changing, forgetting what it was.

Jimmy (31:01):
Well, now you have been doing children's books for some time now.
What was that transition like?
What did you learn from the comics that was able to make that transition and what are you working on now and what's just out now?

Patrick (31:15):
Well, with children books, as much as I wanted to be a cartoonist and a comic strip artist, I also just love drawing silly pictures.
Doing a children book was always my list too.
But boy, I tell you, again, the reality of doing a daily comic strip kept me really busy.

(31:35):
It wasn't until about 10 years into the strip that I started having a little time and realized that maybe I could do other things.
I had done a two-week long story around the holidays about Buch wanting to give Earl a gift.
Earl had a dog bowl and a chewy toy, so Buch thought he had everything, and decides to give him nothing.

(32:01):
The story was him looking at during the crazy holiday season, to try to find nothing amongst all the craziness, and so he ends up giving him a box of nothing, but it's also the gift of sharing your time with somebody.
Looch finding this stillness underneath all the noise.
It's a little bit of a Zen children book.

(32:22):
But so I had that idea and I actually sold it to Little Brown.
So the first picture book I did was a Mutts picture book, and that was called The Gift of Nothing.
And believe it or not, boy, so the last Thanksgiving, my niece said to me, well, you did a book on nothing, why don't you do a book on everything?

(32:44):
I laughed and thought that was a funny idea, but boy, that idea stuck.
So this year, there's the Gift of Nothing 20th anniversary edition coming out, and I did a book called The Gift of Everything, which once again trying to find the perfect gift.
And this time, it goes from inside to outside, and this time, it finds everything.
Everything is a gift.

Harold (33:05):
What a great counterpoint.

Patrick (33:07):
Yeah, those are both out right now.
And there's a lot to do.
What's nice about the children books, one thing with the comic script is, it's always the same size, it's always about three panels, you use Bane, Penn, and Eek, there's not that much experimentation.
On the Sundays, you can experiment a little bit, but there's a routine to it.

(33:32):
And what's nice about the children books is, I could, well, for instance, this gift of everything I did with four color pencils, red, yellow, blue, and black, and I've never done a book in color pencils before.
So there's just room to get hardy and have fun.
So the children books, not only could I do different mediums, but just different story-wise, I could do a 32-page story or a 40-page story, and it's nice to have that room to play with.

(34:04):
Also, do different characters.
I ended up doing, I think, five books with the Mutts characters, but then I did plenty of, I think I've had 14 children books altogether.

Harold (34:16):
Wow.

Patrick (34:16):
I've done different characters from Cavemen to Frankenstein.
So it's been a lot of fun.
You get to do different things.

Jimmy (34:25):
Well, your color pencils look great.
I'm looking at the PDF here and it just looks fantastic.
Was it hard for you to switch your medias and considering you have been doing pen and ink?
By the way, I want to talk specifically about your pen and ink technique and your tools, but we're going to wait for the strips for that.
Was it difficult for you to switch it up like that after so much time?

(34:47):
Go, all right, now I'm a color pencil artist.
Here we go.

Patrick (34:50):
No, I think what's great about art is it's just fun to have a new medium and to see where it goes.
I also feel like the less you know about art, sometimes the best art act.

Jimmy (35:04):
Yeah.
You don't know what you can't do.

Patrick (35:06):
Exactly.
I look at my early Mutts and I'll tell you something funny about the difference between me and Sparky.
I love my first years of Mutts with all the mistakes and all that.
It just looks so loose and silly and free.
I didn't know what I was doing and it shows, but there's an art to that.
I think if you look at most art mediums, it's usually the first few years that the best stuff comes out.

(35:32):
There's no rules.
People don't know what they're doing.

Jimmy (35:36):
Yeah, it gets codified after a while, I guess, and then you get in your own groove.

Patrick (35:42):
Yeah, but I had the pleasure and honor to, Sparky asked me to pick the strips for the 50th anniversary book.

Jimmy (35:51):
Oh, wow.
Great.

Patrick (35:52):
The Golden Celebration.

Jimmy (35:54):
In my hands right now.
There you go.

Patrick (35:58):
He told me if it was up to him, there'd be nothing before 1960 in that book.
Wow.
He was such a perfectionist that he didn't feel like he knew what he was doing yet.
He would rather not see where I'm the exact opposite.
I love my early stuff.

Jimmy (36:14):
That's crazy.
Well, we love the 50 peanuts too.

Patrick (36:19):
I disagreed with him.
I think early stuff's fantastic.
I'll tell you the truth.
I think if you really asked him, he thought his early stuff was great too, but he didn't think it was on par yet of what he was able to do.
And you can see the growth in those 10 years is a lot.
But still, those really early ones have such a charm to them.

Jimmy (36:42):
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Well, listen, how about we take a break right now and then come back.
Patrick has selected a handful of his favorite peanut strips that we are going to go through one by one, and have some more fun.
So how about you characters out there go get a beverage and a snack and meet us on the other side.

SPEAKER_5 (37:04):
Hi, everyone.
We love it when you write or call to tell us how much you enjoy the show.
But don't just tell us, tell your friends, tell complete strangers, share your appreciation in a review.
It doesn't have to be on Apple podcasts.
Sixty percent of you listen on other apps.
Some of those apps have review sections.

(37:24):
Think of all the poor peanuts fans out there who haven't found us yet.
There are review instructions on our website at unpackingpeanuts.com/spread the word.
Thank you for your support.

Jimmy (37:38):
And we are back.
Did you miss us?
So Patrick, we have asked you to select a number of good old peanut strips and you've picked some for us.
How did you go about this process of winnowing 17,897 strips down to just six or so?

Patrick (37:58):
Well, you know, I had a little practice because, as I mentioned, Sparky asked me to pick the strips for the 50th anniversary book.
So I went to that book because I knew I already whittled them down to how many were in that book.
And I have to tell you, that was an interesting process in terms of, this was before the Internet.

(38:21):
So United Features literally mailed me, there was two boxes and each box was probably about four feet high.
It was just reprints of Xeroxes of every, the whole 50 years.
So my apartment was just filled.

(38:41):
There was just piles of peanuts, peanuts drawings throughout the whole thing.
And it was nice to be just immersed in that.
And there was strips I didn't, I didn't read the newspaper every day and didn't have every book.

Jimmy (38:55):
And those early ones, some of them had never been reprinted.

Patrick (38:58):
Exactly.
Like the Charlie Brown ones, there were certain ones that he didn't want to be.
I'll tell you another interesting thing with the book.
He told me, I picked it.
There was a series where Charlie Brown wanted to be a cartoonist which shows gags to people.

(39:19):
I didn't ask him why, but when I saw him, I said, oh my God, this is going in the book.
Those were the only ones he took out.

Harold (39:26):
Wow.

Patrick (39:27):
Isn't that interesting?

Harold (39:27):
My only theory on that is that he knows he's a cartoonist among cartoonists and that we would have a bias toward the strips, not based on their quality, but based on the content.

Patrick (39:38):
Yeah.

Harold (39:39):
That he wouldn't trust the choice as it being a strip.

Patrick (39:45):
But anyway, when you asked me to pick a handful of them, and that is a tough thing.
I don't know.
I went to my 50s book and just flipped through it and just picked things that stood out for me.
So those are the ones you got.

Jimmy (39:59):
Awesome.
Well, I'll tell you what, we're going to start going through them right now.
I'll read them and then we'll talk about them on the other side.
So here is Patrick's first pick.
You may be familiar with it out there.
It is October 2nd, 1950.
Patty and Shermie are sitting on the little steps in their neighborhood and a tiny little bald-headed figure is coming down the road.

(40:22):
And Shermie says, well, here comes old Charlie Brown.
And then Charlie Brown crosses in front of them as Shermie continues, good old Charlie Brown.
Yes, sir.
Good old Charlie Brown.
And then in the last one, Shermie's mood changes to utterly and he says, how I hate him.

(40:42):
So what is it about that that makes it so special?

Patrick (40:47):
Well, I mean, other than being the first strip that started it all.
You know, for this really mild guy from Minnesota, Charles Schulz was a revolutionary.
Yes.
That strip, when you think about what was in the newspaper at that time, I mean, that humor, everything about it was different, you know, and started off the strip in such a great way to start the strip because it just said, hey, here's something you haven't seen before.

(41:16):
And, you know, when we look at it now, it just looks like a cute little kid strip.
But, you know, I'm sure when that came out, that was a powerful statement and all those early strips just had a different feel about them.
You know, the less is more school.
And just the sentiment of that.
And it's just a more sophisticated joke.
You know, most comics then were a little more slapsticky.

(41:40):
And yeah, it just has a very 50s feel to it.
I feel like, I always, you know, it's funny, I mentioned that my mom had Jules Feiffer books in my house.
And I feel like Feiffer and Schulz had a lot in common.
It just had a feel of the psychological moment of the 50s and how artists were rethinking what's funny and what's art.

(42:04):
And Boyce Farquay was right there for such simple newspaper strip from a guy from Minnesota.
It really was out there.

Jimmy (42:12):
Yeah, in 1950.
So it's not like he's responding to the General Zeitgeist of the 50s.
It's so early, you know?

Patrick (42:18):
Yeah.

Jimmy (42:19):
He's kind of creating it.

Patrick (42:21):
Creating it, yeah.
I feel like that strip really says that, you know, it's such a funny, truthful, you know, serious strip at the same time.

Jimmy (42:32):
Do you remember when you first saw these really early?
Because they were hard to come by.
They weren't reprinted for years and years.
Do you remember the first time you saw these really, really early Schulz ones?

Patrick (42:42):
Well, you know, actually, the whole Reinhardt book started with the 50s stuff, right?
And those were...

Jimmy (42:49):
Not the first year.
I think he cut a lot of that stuff out.

Patrick (42:52):
Yeah, okay.
Well, we're still kind of 50s.
So, yeah, it's so...
You know, to me, I feel like as a kid, I was looking at these really early ones.
I probably didn't know I was missing the first two years, but now that you're asking that, but I do feel like I knew a lot of them.
So I must have seen them somewhere, but I don't know where.

Harold (43:14):
Artistically, Patrick, when you look at like 1950, 1951, 1952, what artistic influences do you see on Schulz that he was carrying into his work?
Or does he just seem like he's out of the blue, his own thing?

Patrick (43:29):
Artwork-wise, that's a tough question.
I never gave that thought.
I think story-wise, he talked about Percy Crosby's Skippy a lot.
I think the idea of the looseness of Skippy, but also just psychological.

(43:50):
Skippy had a lot of different ways of telling cartoons.
So I think you could see Skippy in it a little bit.
But boy, artwork-wise, that's a good question.
I never gave that thought.
I think he came to the box looking unique.
Have you thought about it?
Have you ever thought who he was?

Harold (44:07):
When we went through these bit by bit, it does seem like Schulz is Schulz.
It really does feel that way.
But the one thing that popped out in the first couple of years was when Schroeder was introduced.
I kept thinking of Gerald McBoing-Boing in UPA.

Patrick (44:21):
Yeah, that's interesting.
Now that you're thinking about it, it does have a little bit of that animation feel to it.

Harold (44:28):
Because he certainly doesn't live in that kind of squash and stretch line of action school that animators just had baked into their work because they lived that.
There is a stiffness to it that you wouldn't see in animation.
So it just seems to be very, very unique that he came up with something that worked for him.

Jimmy (44:47):
One of the stylistic things I really noticed looking at this really early is how far apart the eyeballs are compared to.
By the time the 60s come, they're almost touching the noses.

Patrick (45:01):
Well, when you look at them, you just realize how strips develop over the years.
We were talking about it earlier, but I look at my early butt strips.
What's funny about it too is if you put a gun to my head, I wouldn't be able to draw them like that.
I'm sure Sparky wouldn't be able to draw these later in life.

(45:24):
I was listening to your podcast recently when you were talking about Snoopy.
It is amazing how the characters just develop, and you don't even know that they're developing.
It's never a conscious vision to say, I'm going to draw Snoopy different.
It just happens.
I've seen it in my own strip, but like with Peanuts or Crazy Cat, it does seem as the artist gets older and the strip gets older, the characters get a little more hefty.

(45:52):
Yeah.
And a little more, they get solid.
They never get looser.
They get more solid.

Harold (45:57):
A little more rough bound.

Patrick (45:59):
Yeah.
Yeah, more heavy.
I don't know what the reason for that is, but it happens to just about everybody.

Jimmy (46:06):
I'm trying to figure out the reason in real life why that happens.

Patrick (46:11):
Well, I wonder if there's some connection there.

Jimmy (46:13):
It might be.
Absolutely.
Because we do talk about how he becomes like old man Snoopy, where he's golfing and taking care of the birds.
He's not so much running around being a terror.

Patrick (46:26):
Well, not even what he does, but just how he looks.

Jimmy (46:29):
Yeah, he's got it.

Patrick (46:32):
Yeah, more solid and heavy.
Boy, you really could see that in Crazy Cat too.
I love the early ones where he's just like this loosey, scratchy little thing.
Then as he gets old, he just gets heavier and more solid.
God, I didn't want it to happen to my characters, but it happened to my characters.
You can't avoid it.

(46:54):
But when you look at these, I mean, they almost look like babies.
They were so young and so far from what was going to happen to them.
Yeah.

Jimmy (47:06):
Poor Sherm, he only has a few more years left in him.
November 3rd, 1961, Charlie Brown sitting at his table.
He's got a little inkwell and his dip pen, and he's writing to his pen pal.
He writes, Dear Pen Pal.
But then of course, he smudges the word pal.
Then he writes, Today, I take pen in hand to write, How have you been?

(47:30):
It is getting more sloppy and smeared as it goes along.
And then in the third panel, it's, Everything here is fine.
The weather has been warm, which is blocked out.
Please, which is smeared out.
Right.
And then the last panel, underneath all the smeared ink is Regards, Charlie Brown.
And the ink is not only covering all of his signature, but it's covering all of Charlie Brown.

Patrick (47:56):
You know, I know we're on a podcast and there's no visuals, but I think all the ones I picked are, I'm a visual person.
I think all the ones I picked are really more visual than words.

Jimmy (48:07):
That's a comic.
That's perfect.

Patrick (48:09):
But I picked this one just for how gorgeous he is as a piece of art.
Even his abstractions are like beautiful abstractions.
They're like abstract paintings as the ink is all messed up and top of Charlie Brown and his face covered in the ink is just.
And also, one of the things Sparky told me was that he was most proud of the strips that didn't have any words.

(48:36):
That he thought that the comics was a visual medium, and if you could tell a gag that way, you will accomplish something.
And even though this has words in it, the words really aren't important.
To me, it is a wordless gag, really.

Harold (48:51):
I never noticed this before, but it's cool to see that he has that little smudge at the end of his own signature.

SPEAKER_5 (48:57):
Yeah, that's how I see a lot of them.

Jimmy (49:00):
So here's my question.
And now I don't know if this is still true, but I read in an interview with you years and years ago that the way you ink is you had a fountain pen that you dipped in ink.
You didn't fill it, but you dipped it in ink, and that's what you inked with.
Do you still do that?

Patrick (49:16):
Yeah, I still do that.

Jimmy (49:18):
Wow.
Harold, tell us, how did you arrive at that?
What's the pen?
All that kind of geeky stuff.

Patrick (49:23):
Well, the pens changed over the years because they stopped making them.
Right now, I buy the cheapest pen on Amazon.
The reason that came about when I was an illustrator, magazine illustrator, I used Crowquill pens, and was dipping in the ink, and then I realized for the comic strip, because there's so much work involved, I said maybe a fountain pen that could hold its own ink, would be the way to go and just be more like drawing with a magic marker to assert it, like a little more.

(49:53):
But then I found out your fountain pen inks weren't waterproof, and I didn't want my originals not to be waterproof.
But then I got used to the fountain pen, so then I just took the fountain pen to the bottle of ink like it was a regular pen.

Jimmy (50:12):
I have never heard of anyone doing that.
Your work has such a clear visual style.
You can tell it from one panel.
How much of it do you think has to do with the fact that you're inking with such a non-traditional tool?

Patrick (50:28):
I guess that might have a little to do.
But I feel like my work looks the same whether I use it.

Jimmy (50:33):
No matter what.

Patrick (50:34):
A magic marker or a fountain pen.

Harold (50:37):
That's amazing.

Patrick (50:39):
It just was a quirk of mine, and I just like the way the pen felt.
The fountain pen is a little sturdier.
When you use a real quill pen, they have a habit to splatter.
The fountain pen nib was a little sturdier, so I didn't really have that many accidents happen.

(51:00):
Like Charlie Brown in this.

Jimmy (51:03):
How long will one hold out for you?
How many strips could you get?

Patrick (51:07):
That was the other thing about it.
Because they're sturdier nibs, they lasted a long time.

Jimmy (51:12):
Right.
That's great.

Patrick (51:13):
Yeah.
That was one of the reasons.
And they broke in faster.
So for me, I can recommend it.
Charlie Brown should have used a, well, maybe he wasn't a quill pen then.

Harold (51:26):
Yeah.
I did that for lettering.
I had an old Estrebrooke that was a vintage one, and it only took that ink for so long.

Patrick (51:35):
Yeah.

Harold (51:35):
It was caged up and it's done.
And then I said, okay, I love the look of the lettering.
So yeah, you just dip it in.

Patrick (51:42):
It was definitely easier for, lettering with the quill pen was definitely tougher than the fountain pen.

Harold (51:48):
Now, your lettering changed over time.
Was that your own choice or did someone say, hey, we want this to be more consistent?

Patrick (51:56):
Well, I'll tell you, and I feel guilty about it, and I'm upset about it to tell you the truth.
At some point, I had a font made.
There's quite a few years where it's computer lettering, which I didn't do.
I'm not a computer person.

(52:17):
I hired my brother to do that for me.
The reason I did that was for two reasons.
One was I really don't like lettering.
It's hard.
But two, it happened.
At some point, I was not only doing children books, but Fox Animation hired me to do a Mutts movie.

(52:39):
They bought the rights for Mutts.
It took me about a year with my lawyer to get the right to actually write the movie, because I didn't trust Hollywood to do it.
For eight years or maybe even nine years, we were working on this Mutts movie, and it was just taking up so much time.
I had to find a little, like Parky, I believe the whole strip should be done by me and nobody else, but there were quite a few years where I had to do that.

(53:09):
It was still my lettering, it was my fault.
But I do feel like those don't look as good as when I lettered myself.
In the last couple of years, what happened was we finally got the green light for the movie and then Disney bought Fox.
When mergers like that happen, your projects go out the window, but Mutts went out the window.

(53:35):
When that happened, I was able to have time again to do my own lettering.
But for those eight, nine years, on occasion, I did my own lettering if I felt like the strip really called for it.
So for a while there, I did do my own.
That's probably the reason why it looked different to you.

Jimmy (53:56):
I do a monthly comic strip for Scout Life magazine, which used to be Boys Life magazine.
The first two I handed in, and they were hand lettered, and the guy's like, you made a typo here or whatever, just send me the font.
There's no font.
He was like, why is there no font?
I'm like, I do it by hand.
He's like, why?
The younger guy is like, are you out of your mind?

(54:18):
You know you could type it.
I'm like, I know.

Harold (54:21):
Jimmy's been nominated, what, eight times for?

Jimmy (54:23):
No, just four.

Harold (54:24):
Oh, just four times for best lettering.
Because it's tough.
It's so organic and fun.

Patrick (54:32):
Well, I admire letterers for sure because I feel, for me, it was such a tough part of the strip, and going back to Sparky, oh my God, he has such a beautiful font.

Jimmy (54:43):
Yeah, and that's what he started with, doing lettering at the timeless topics.

Patrick (54:47):
Yeah.

Jimmy (54:48):
Now, tell us, just before we go on to the strips more, tell us about the very first time that you met Schulz.
What was your stress level like?
How did that go?

Patrick (55:00):
Well, this is a classic first meeting.
So I was doing magazine illustrations and wanting to become a newspaper cartoonist, and I was at a Sports Illustrated party.
Do you know the illustrator, Arnie Roth?

Jimmy (55:16):
Oh, sure.
Yes.

Patrick (55:17):
Yeah.
So Arnie was there.
I got to know him as an illustrator.
He and his wife, Carolyn, convinced me that I could join the National Cartoonist Society.
I took it for granted you had to be a newspaper cartoonist to do that.
He goes, no, no, if you're doing numerous illustrations like him, that you could still become a member.

(55:37):
So my God, I was never a member of anything.
I become a National Cartoonist member.
So I jumped on that, he sponsored me and I got to become a National Cartoonist member.
So I went to my first Rubens, that's where all the cartoonists got together to give out the awards.

(55:59):
So for the Rubens dinner, you have to wear a tuxedo.
So my wife and I were all dressed up.
I'm in my tuxedo and was in Washington DC and I pressed the elevator button to go down to the award ceremony.
The elevator opened up and the only people in the elevator was Charles Schulz and Jeannie, his wife.

Jimmy (56:18):
Oh, wow.

Patrick (56:20):
Charles Schulz was wearing a plaid tuxedo.

SPEAKER_5 (56:24):
What year was this?

Patrick (56:27):
I'm going to say, this was before Mutts.
I'm going to guess it was, Mutts started in 94, so I guess it was maybe 92.

SPEAKER_5 (56:35):
Okay.

Patrick (56:38):
Or maybe 93.
It was close to when Mutts started.
But so the elevator opens and not only had a plaid tuxedo, but he had on his French Medal of Honor.
His huge medal around his neck.

Harold (56:53):
Oh my God.

Patrick (56:54):
You can imagine, I was just humming and I was like, so I just, what can you say?
I saw him at the building.
It's what an honor to me.
He goes, don't call me Mr.
Schulz, call me Sparky.
I was like, okay, Mr.
Sparky.
That was my first meeting.
Then after that is when I sent him the bad baby book and then Mark Cohen.

(57:22):
Then I actually got to fly there.
He was so generous with his time with cartoonists.
I mean, you could find so many cartoonists that will tell you how he would spend two hours with them in his studio.
When you think of how busy that guy, I don't know how he did.
I wouldn't have cartoonists come to my house for two hours.

(57:42):
But we went out to dinner and we just couldn't be more generous enough.
At that point, I gave him the bad baby book, but that's when I was thinking, I really do need to do a comic strip.
That was the start of me working out Mutts.
That's how I got to know him.

Harold (57:59):
Well, Patrick, I have to go on record before everybody here.
I've never been so starstruck with meeting somebody whose work I knew than you when I met you.
I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to.
I think it was a small press expo, a little event you had done outside of the small press expo early on when Mutts was starting.

(58:20):
I was surprised how much emotion was just welling up.
It hits you at one time, you've never met me, but I've met you through your work.
It just all builds up in one moment and you just lose it entirely.

Patrick (58:36):
That's very sweet of you.
If you ever want to come to Princeton, I'll spend two hours with you.

SPEAKER_5 (58:40):
I bet you.

Harold (58:41):
I bet you.

Jimmy (58:43):
Not in his house, though.

Harold (58:45):
Someplace else.

Jimmy (58:45):
No.

Patrick (58:46):
Yeah.
What was nice was Sparky was everything you'd want.
The guy that drew a peanut in the bay, he was just so kind and so funny.
He really was funny.
You would think that, but he was funny.
I'll tell you once, towards the end of his life, they redid Your Good Man, Charlie Brown, and he wasn't feeling well, so he couldn't go to the premiere, and you offered Karen and I his tickets, but he said there was one caveat.

(59:18):
I said, what's that?
He goes, at the end of the show, you must stand up and scream, author, author.
Which I did.

Jimmy (59:28):
Amazing.
May 23rd, 1967, Linus is sitting outside in the grass, and three tiny little birds come up to him.
Linus gently leans over and pats them on the head.
Pat, pat, pat, pat, pat.
He's contented by this, and the birds are really contented.

(59:49):
They go away smiling and sighing, sigh, and then Linus looks out to us and says, I think I found my calling.

Patrick (59:58):
Yeah, well, you know, for me as a kid, you know, Sparky was a big influence in many ways.
I mean, my love for cartoons, you know, much is about my love for cartoons and my love for animals, and Snoopy was a big part of that.
And this series was a big part of it.
When I was young enough when I read this, I tried patting birds on the head for a while.

Jimmy (01:00:22):
Oh, that's adorable.
How'd that work out?

Patrick (01:00:25):
It didn't work out.
I wasn't as spiritual as Linus, so it didn't work out.
But just the thought of it, I would like quietly sneak over to see, could I do that?
So that's why that strip has a person.
I just thought it was, you know, underneath peanuts, it just, you know, for all the yelling and depression, there's so much kindness, you know, and the idea of a kid patting birds on the head.

Michael (01:00:55):
But he did end up being ostracized about it.

Patrick (01:00:58):
Oh, yeah.
No, of course.
Crabby's sister gave him a really hard time.
But yeah, those strips were my favorite as a kid, so they're still my favorite today.

Jimmy (01:01:10):
Oh, that's fantastic.
Do you have one particular era, like if you had a rough day and you just want some comfort comics to read, do you have one particular book or era of Peanuts that you would go to?

Patrick (01:01:23):
I think it's most people, but you see it with comic books too.
You love the stuff you read as a kid.
So for me, it's all the 60s stuff.
Maybe you guys could do this.
This is the place to disagree about it.
But I think that was him at his best.
All that early 60s stuff was just amazing.

(01:01:44):
I was able to read the first time Snoopy went on top of his doghouse and was the flying ace.
The first time Linus was patting birds on the head.
So all that early 60s.
So I think drawing-wise, it's just so strong.
To me, that's the magic of Peanuts, just how beautiful the art was and the stories were great.

Jimmy (01:02:06):
Yeah.
Oh, here's a strip you might have something to say about.
January 28th, 1999, the whole gang is at a museum.
And we got Sally, Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, and the little pig-tailed girl, all looking at, what did we decide this was?
It was a Monet?

SPEAKER_5 (01:02:27):
The port at Tuke.

Jimmy (01:02:30):
Ah, there you go.
So that's what they were looking at.

Patrick (01:02:32):
Hey, I have to thank you.
You were the guys who figured that out, huh?

Jimmy (01:02:35):
Yeah.

SPEAKER_5 (01:02:36):
It's true.
It's true.
We get credit.

Patrick (01:02:40):
That's fantastic, because I had no idea what it was.
I never asked them.

Jimmy (01:02:43):
So now you know.

Patrick (01:02:44):
Yeah.

Jimmy (01:02:45):
And way over on the right, we see Rerun, who is looking at a beautiful portrait of a little puppy.
We may know because it is, in fact, Earl from Mutts.
What was that like seeing that?

Patrick (01:02:59):
Wow.
I can imagine.
It's insane.
To this day, I can't believe it.
It's right here in my studio, hanging near my door.

SPEAKER_5 (01:03:07):
Oh, wow.

Harold (01:03:09):
How did you first find out about it?

Patrick (01:03:12):
This is a good story.
So I was visiting Sparky in California, and I was at his ice skating rink.
Here's another thing Sparky would joke.
He would say, do you know anyone else who owns two Zambonis?

Jimmy (01:03:30):
Well, that makes sense though, because you need a spare.
If you're going to get one Zamboni, you got to get two.
Everyone knows that.

Patrick (01:03:41):
At the ice skating rink, he has a little cafeteria called the Warm Puppy, and he had a reserved table, which is really sweet.
They still have that table with a reserved sign on it, and you can't sit at it.
But I was sitting at the reserved table waiting for him.
He approached me and he was hiding something behind his back.

(01:04:03):
He said, Patrick, I have something that's going to knock your socks off.
Then he handed me that, to do that Earl.
My Earl was in a Peanuts comic.
Obviously, my socks went flying across the room.
In his day, they still fly off when I look at it.

(01:04:27):
So he handed that to me.
What can you say?
You realize how beautiful Peanuts is, how beautiful the world is, how beautiful Charles Schulz is, the kindness of doing that.

Jimmy (01:04:40):
Well, and how good you are as a cartoon.
It is one thing to say in an interview, boy, I like Mutts.
That's one thing and that's great.
It is quite another thing for him to put it in his life's work.

Harold (01:04:53):
Right?

Jimmy (01:04:54):
That is the highest compliment he could possibly give a cartoonist.

Patrick (01:04:58):
Again, it's mind-boggling.
When I think of the five-year-old kid at Christmas Eve, reading Peanuts with flashlights, and thinking that my dog is in Peanuts, just crazy, crazy.
He told me, he says, he says, most people aren't going to know what this is about.

Jimmy (01:05:19):
I knew what it was about.

Patrick (01:05:20):
But he said, but you and I will know what this is about, which is really sweet.

Jimmy (01:05:24):
I love that he didn't care if people got it or not.

Patrick (01:05:28):
Yeah.
I think that didn't happen too often with him because-

Jimmy (01:05:31):
No, I wouldn't think so.

Harold (01:05:33):
We talked about this strip and how you could interpret it, because I think we came up with at least three different interpretations where it would work-

SPEAKER_5 (01:05:40):
We came up here before, and it's in the trailer for our podcast now, that conversation.

Jimmy (01:05:45):
Yeah, because quite aside from it being an incredible and deserved compliment to you, what a piece of just cartooning to be able to layer all that stuff into it.
It's one drawing.
Just one drawing.

SPEAKER_5 (01:05:56):
One wordless drawing.

Jimmy (01:05:57):
Yeah.

Harold (01:05:58):
Yeah.

Jimmy (01:06:00):
Amazing.

Harold (01:06:01):
Yeah, because I think, was it Liz, or you're the one who said, it works for anybody who knows about rerun.

Jimmy (01:06:07):
No, Michael said it.

Harold (01:06:08):
It was Michael.
Michael, you said, because we know rerun wants a dog.

Patrick (01:06:12):
Yeah.

Harold (01:06:13):
So that works on that level.
It works on the level of you specifically as a cartoonist and that being Earl, it works on the level that comics are art.
That is a statement that he flirted with a lot and kind of went back and forth saying, it's a business, it's not as high in art, but it is high as high in art.

(01:06:34):
I can't remember what the fourth one was, but they all worked for a reader wherever they were coming from.

Patrick (01:06:40):
Well, there's a fifth reason for me.

Jimmy (01:06:43):
Yeah, that's right.

Patrick (01:06:46):
It worked for me.

Jimmy (01:06:49):
That is so cool.

Patrick (01:06:52):
Yeah, the coolest thing ever.
I mean, I'm not teasing when I say that.
Every day when I walk in my suit and I look at that, I still can't.
It's still mind-boggling.

SPEAKER_5 (01:07:04):
It's still understandable.

Jimmy (01:07:05):
That's great.
Well, it's well-deserved and I'm happy.
It happened to such a nice guy and a good cartoonist.

Harold (01:07:12):
That's fantastic.
You did a strip back to him, right?

Patrick (01:07:18):
Yeah.
We came up with the idea that on the hundreds of anniversaries that all the cartoonists would do a peanuts tribute.
I wasn't sure what to do and then I thought, oh, I know what I'm going to do.
I had my world in the museum, the same museum and looking at a picture of Snoopy.

Harold (01:07:40):
That's so great.

Jimmy (01:07:42):
June 19th, 1960.
Snoopy is lying atop the doghouse.
He's asleep, but then suddenly something semi-wakes him, and he goes on a little sleepwalking quest off the doghouse between two slats on the fence.
Through some weeds, he must be asleep because he has weed claustrophobia, as we know.
Walks out the weeds behind a bale of hay.

(01:08:04):
Is that what he's standing on?
A big, it's not a bale of hay, it's a big pile of dirt, I guess, with just a little feet on top of it, so someone is standing up on top of it.
But this doesn't fool Snoopy, who smells something, smiles, goes up to the top of the bale of hay, and we see at the top was Charlie Brown, who was trying to hide from Snoopy because he has a double dip of, I think, strawberry ice cream.

(01:08:28):
And Charlie Brown looks at Snoopy, who's sitting there smiling, standing there smiling, waiting for a lick of the ice cream, and Charlie Brown says, you drive me crazy.

Patrick (01:08:37):
And you know, again, it's a very visual thing, so I would hope all your listeners would go get a book, and look up that date.
And again, it's just how great he drew and how alive those characters are.
And how funny.
You always said, the most important thing in comics is, there have to be fun drawings that people like to look at.

(01:08:59):
And just the drawings make you laugh.
And Snoopy make believe he's sleepwalking.
The silliest look in drawings.
And in particular, if you go down to the, you guys all have it in front of you?
Yes.
Yes.
So if you go down to that last tier of strips, when he stops and his nose starts twitching, and he moves his head.

(01:09:23):
But boy, look at the smile on that face when he smells the ice cream cone.
And then the other thing, you may think about this one, but his eyebrows were off his head.
They're just blown.
Like, I don't think there's many cartoonists who do that.
And you just take it, I don't know how human beings learn how to read this stuff, but you just take it for granted that that's just like happiness, that your eyebrows are so perky and happy that they fly.

Jimmy (01:09:54):
Well, I do that all the time in my comics.
And I did a school visit years ago, and I was drawing the character and the kid raised his hand and goes, hey, why is her eyebrows off her head?
And I just like froze, like, I don't know.
They just are, I don't know, man, you broke me.

SPEAKER_5 (01:10:12):
So do you, Patrick, do you think that he's making believe that he's asleep?

Patrick (01:10:17):
Well, you know, I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I mean, it could be that he's asleep, but I love the idea that maybe it was.
I mean, he seems self, you know, Snoopy is always so self-assured.
And to me, it's even a little funnier than he might have just been faking that.

Harold (01:10:34):
I don't know.
Yeah, and why is it so cool that the Z for him sleeping is serif?
Serif, huh?
It's like this formality to his sleep.

Patrick (01:10:47):
The whole idea is silly too, that Charlie Brown is like on top of his, I don't know.

SPEAKER_5 (01:10:52):
He knows, he knows.

Patrick (01:10:53):
I always thought it was the biggest pitcher's mound when I was a kid.

SPEAKER_5 (01:10:56):
Yeah, yeah.

Patrick (01:10:57):
But the fact that he's hiding up there with his ice cream is such a silly thought too.
Again, this is another strip that I told you he said that he was most proud of ones that didn't have words and you really didn't even need sparking.
I mean, Charlie Brown is saying you drive me crazy.
To me, the whole thing is a psychic.
Just the movement of it and it is like a little animation.

(01:11:21):
I mean, you can feel him walking, you can feel him sniffing the air.
To me, that's the magic of Schulz that he really could portray all those emotions so easily.

SPEAKER_5 (01:11:34):
We haven't talked about the second to last panel, where he's defying gravity.

Harold (01:11:42):
Walking up that tall.

Jimmy (01:11:44):
If you just took that last panel and just removed the smile on Snoopy's face, it's totally different.
The fact that he's smiling there gives it that conspiratorial, hey, how about a lick of that ice cream kind of thing.
It's a sixteenth of an inch or an eighth of an inch of a bed line.
Yeah.
Crazy.

(01:12:06):
April 5th, 1964.
It's a Sunday.
We start off with one of those symbolic panels.
It's a Linus head sculpted out of a bar of soap.
Then we cut to Linus and Charlie Brown walking outside, and Linus says to Charlie Brown, have you ever done any soap carving?
Charlie Brown asked, soap carving?
Linus says, yes, it's great.

(01:12:27):
I've been working on this model of an old sailing vessel.
Then they walk back to Linus' house as Linus says, I want you to see it, Charlie Brown.
I carved it all by myself.
They're inside now, Linus continues.
I'm especially proud of the good job I did on the sails.
It took me three days to do just the sails alone.
And then we see Lucy coming out of the bathroom, having washed her hands with still soap and suds all over her hands.

(01:12:53):
And she says to Linus, if you're going to get your hands really clean, you've got to work up a good lather.
This is horrifying to Linus, whose hair goes straight up to the heavens.
And now we see Lucy continuing to wash her hands as Linus covers his eyes and she says, lots of soap and hot water, that's what does it.
And she's back in the bathroom, she's rinsing off her hands and she tosses what remains of the soap over her shoulder to her brother.

(01:13:20):
And then Linus presents this little nub of soap to Charlie Brown and says, I had planned to show you an authentic replica of an American Clippership.
Would you settle for a canoe?

Patrick (01:13:31):
Well, there again, even though I think it's a really funny premise and a great joke, I'm going to talk about the visual.
So everyone at home, find the strip.
And starting with the first panel where he said, have you ever done any soap carving?
You know, it's amazing that you look at it on the fourth panel too, I want you to see a Charlie Brown.

(01:13:56):
But the fact that Peanuts characters float.
I don't know if any other cartoon has done that.
And I only do that when they're running, because they're running so fast that their feet aren't touching.
But to have characters walk and be floating is, and again, it's a Peanuts thing, you just take it for granted.
And I think that adds to the charm of them, that they're like walking.

(01:14:19):
I mean, that one, two, three, fourth panel.
I mean, if you just look at that, like if you just saw that without the rest of it, you'd say, what are they doing?
Like floating to home?

Jimmy (01:14:32):
Yeah.
And yet, it can sort of feel the bounce of it.

Patrick (01:14:37):
Exactly.
And I'm just thinking of it now, but boy, they captured that in the Christmas special.
They had that same feeling of how they walked a different way.
They had a certain walk.
And I mean, that's part of it.
And then in that first panel too, the way Charlie Brown has his hands in his pants, which I don't think there's just such a nice flow to that.

(01:15:02):
And then the simplicity, the magical cartooning that you don't need to show that much to establish a place that, that beautiful tree in that little bush is enough, you know, and got that gorgeous steps going up to the house with the railing is just really, really nice.
And you realize you don't have to show much, it will show a place.

(01:15:26):
And-

Jimmy (01:15:28):
You have a wrought iron, just a squiggle of the pen line and you know it's wrought iron.

Patrick (01:15:33):
Yeah, and I think what he was better than anybody's expressions, I feel like a comic strip is really close to a Broadway play or anything off-Broadway play, probably even more so, that as the cartoonist, you're the director, you design the set.

(01:15:53):
And like theater, you don't need that much of a set.
Because you play sometime and there's just a chair and a window and that's enough because it's theater of the mind.
And I feel like comics are theater of the mind, that you don't need that much of a setting to get a feel of space.
And you let the readers do a lot of the work.

(01:16:14):
But then even more important is the acting.
And I think what made Peanuts, what made Charles Schulz was, boy, he had the best actors for his jokes and for his writing.
I mean, he really knew how to express things.
And again, the magic of, it's just two little squiggles, two little dots, but his characters really acted out his jokes so well.

Harold (01:16:40):
He tended to underplay the emotions.
And I think that pulls you in.
You absolutely do that, Patrick.
I know you know that.
And, you know, Mooch could have a smile, but you just choose not to have the mouth.
And we have to lean in to read where Mooch is coming from.
And that is very rare.

(01:17:01):
I don't see a lot of people doing it, but I think it's super powerful because it does pull you in.
If it's overly expressed, it almost like pushes us back.
We have to step away from the work.
And Schulz is always pulling us in.

Patrick (01:17:15):
Yeah, when you think about the Mona Lisa painters that are using oil paint and doing all these perfect expressions and stuff, and here's this little kid drawing with just a few lines, and you know exactly what he's thinking or what he's saying.

Harold (01:17:30):
It's crazy.

Patrick (01:17:31):
Yeah, it is crazy.
Even the panel where Linus is saying, I'm especially proud of the good job.
Yeah.
I mean, Charles Schulz's hands were so abstract.

SPEAKER_5 (01:17:44):
Yeah.

Patrick (01:17:45):
But at the same time, so expressive.
I mean, that hand next to Charlie Brown's face is just so...
And being so proud of this thing.
And then, my God, look how great the lather soap is.
Like, it's like perfect.
You can feel that lather soap.
And then when he goes a little...

(01:18:05):
You know, and he wasn't afraid of exaggerating.
I mean, Linus's hair sticking straight.
And look at his hands in that one too.

SPEAKER_5 (01:18:13):
Yeah.

Patrick (01:18:14):
The next panel where his hands is covering his face.
What's great about it is Charlie Brown is so used to Linus, and especially the craziness of Lucy.
That's him.
Just, yeah.

Liz (01:18:28):
Yeah.

Patrick (01:18:29):
Another day at the Van Pelt's house.

Michael (01:18:31):
Yeah.

Harold (01:18:32):
Yeah.
It leaves all the emotion to Linus, which is great.

Jimmy (01:18:35):
You know, if you go back to those arms too, if you see in the first panel, that last here, if Linus stretched his arms out, they would hit the floor.

Michael (01:18:43):
Yeah.

Jimmy (01:18:44):
And the next one, he can't even reach his forehead with them.
And it doesn't bother anybody ever, you know?
It just totally works.

Harold (01:18:52):
It represents the emotion of where the character is, and you can do that in comics, which is so amazing.
I mean, the fact that Lucy, when she's walking up to them, you know, they've been floating when they're walking.
Now Lucy is walking and she's grounded.
She's right on the bottom of that strip panel.
He knows how to change it up, and he chose how to break the rules.

(01:19:14):
And like that's that soap thing.
That's no sculpture of Linus in the opening throwaway panel.
You know, that would have had to have been a bar of soap that was taller than it was wide.
But it doesn't matter.
He knows how to get the idea across, and he can break all the rules because he knows what he's doing.

Jimmy (01:19:35):
Hey, now Patrick, speaking of Sunday Pages, we talk a lot about how he had specific panel breaks that he had to deal with.
But your strip is actually designed differently, correct?
You do not have to deal with any of those breaks.

Patrick (01:19:49):
It's the thinner version.
I got to play with title panels, which was a lot of fun.

Jimmy (01:19:56):
I loved those title panels.
I think they're so cool.

Patrick (01:20:00):
They're also throwaway panels because certain newspapers didn't use them.
But no, I didn't have that headache of having a few panels not be part of this trip in certain newspapers.

Jimmy (01:20:12):
Yeah, I can't imagine having to write with that.
Well, not just one more restriction.
You have that restriction and then the mandatory panel breaks on the other two tiers.
I don't know how anybody did such great strips with all those restrictions.

Patrick (01:20:27):
Well, sometimes those restrictions make you think harder.

Jimmy (01:20:32):
I guess the deadline makes you not be precious about it, so you got to keep moving.

Patrick (01:20:37):
Yeah, exactly.
Well, Sparky always said that as a comic book artist, if you're hitting 300, you're a super, like baseball.
Now, his batting average was a lot better than 300.

Michael (01:20:49):
Yeah.

Jimmy (01:20:52):
All right.
Here's our last one.
December 4th, 1964.
We have Frieda and Snoopy out in the snow.
Frieda says to Snoopy, perhaps we should split up and plan to meet back here in about an hour, okay?
And Snoopy takes off.
And we see, this is actually from the era where they were doing these little stamp-sized panels, tying in with happiness as a warm puppy.

(01:21:16):
So this one is happiness is loving your enemies.
And we see Snoopy with a couple bunnies.
Then back in the regular strip, Snoopy is actually out with a whole mess of bunnies, and they're dancing and having a good time for about four panels.
And then he bids them adieu.
And then it goes back to Frieda, pause out explaining that, hey, I guess I just didn't see any bunnies.

(01:21:38):
And Frieda says to him, didn't see any, huh?
Neither did I.
Then the two of them walk past Charlie Brown and Frieda says to Charlie Brown, Snoopy and I have been out hunting rabbits, but we didn't see any.
And then Snoopy passes Charlie Brown.
He gives Charlie Brown a big wink.
And then Charlie Brown says, now, what was that all about?

Patrick (01:22:01):
You know, another visual one for me, and again, it's the acting, and also Snoopy, I mean, God no wonder the world fell in love with Snoopy.
I mean, that character is so alive in that, and he doesn't say a word.
It's like a great silent, like Charlie Chaplin.
It's that to do all that acting and not say a word, you know exactly what he's thinking and his motivations and everything.

(01:22:28):
It's like, you know, just great cartooning.
And for me, the only, you guys probably know, you're the experts.
But you know, that little extra panel of happiness is loving your enemies.
Like, you know, he did that for, I think, a few Sunday pages.
I don't know how many, but just have that little extra bonus among everything else is just great.

(01:22:48):
But you know, again, just the joy of him dancing, I mean, just fantastic.
But to me again, going back to the acting, you know, when Reedus says, didn't see any, didn't see any, even did I look at his face?
You know, totally convinced.

Michael (01:23:05):
Totally.

Patrick (01:23:08):
I don't know why I didn't see any.
You're like, do that.
And then, obviously again, the wink.
Those little V's showing that it's a wink.
I mean, there's not too many cartoonists that could draw a wink like that were just perfect.

Jimmy (01:23:27):
Yes.

Harold (01:23:27):
Yeah.
It's like, Schulz was like, he drew it.
And then he's like, oh, they're not going to see that.
And then how do I make people pay attention to V's?

Jimmy (01:23:36):
Yeah.

Harold (01:23:36):
All over the top of his head.
I mean, have you seen that before?
Did he just figure that out on the fly?
And it's crazy.

Patrick (01:23:43):
Yeah.

Jimmy (01:23:45):
Yeah.
And not only drawing the wink on a cartoon, but it's a dog too.
Who drew a wink on a dog?

Harold (01:23:52):
With the eye that we shouldn't see.
Right.
It's crazy.
And Joy.
I mean, he captures Joy in this undiluted way that I don't know how you get someone to experience Joy.
Just by looking at something at a split second, you get Joy.
I mean, how many artists have an opportunity to do that?

Patrick (01:24:13):
Yeah.
You know, I'm sure like, well, you guys must know it.
Like when you draw certain things, I always like to see a camera on a cartoonist's face.
When you're drawing someone mad, you usually make a mad look on him.
Imagine seeing Sparky drawing this one and I get it.
It's that magic that the feeling she was feeling just like, came out in his fingers onto that pen, into that ink, just flowed on the page.

(01:24:42):
He just knew how to capture that.
I don't know, even to this day, I mean, I've been drawing Mutts for over 30 years, but I don't know how you teach that.
I don't know how you even, how do you do that?

Jimmy (01:24:55):
Do you think part of it has to come from the fact that you're doing it every day?
Like, and not just drawing every day, but you're drawing something every day that you know the world will see.
I mean, not many people do that.

Patrick (01:25:08):
Yeah, no, like I said before, it's a crazy job.
And just doing it every day, just practice, practice, practice.
You can't help but get a little better at it, you know.
And you really learn your characters.
Like I said, for me, Mouch kind of writes his own jokes.

(01:25:28):
And I'm sure for Sparky, drawing Snoopy was a joy for him.

SPEAKER_5 (01:25:34):
And your audience knows your characters.

Patrick (01:25:38):
Yeah, that's why it's such a unique art form, you know, that people get this in their newspaper or on the line now every morning, you know.
And after a while, that's, I mean, Peanuts is a prime example that they just become part of your family, part of your, you know, you see them more than many of your relatives.

Jimmy (01:25:56):
Well, thankfully, that's great.
Well, Patrick, this has been an absolute blast for us and an honor to have you on the show.
We love your work.
Listeners out there, if you don't know Mutts, you're probably not listening to this podcast.

(01:26:16):
But find all the books, read it online, read it in your paper.
It's the best.
Patrick, where can people find you?
And what is out now that they can get their hands?

Patrick (01:26:25):
Well, you know what I should say?
Boy, I should have said it up front.
But, you know, there's, did you guys pick up, there's the 75th anniversary book called The Central Peanuts?

Jimmy (01:26:35):
Yes, and we had Mark Avenir on, talking about it.
Oh, good, good, good.

Harold (01:26:39):
And Love's your introduction to that.

Patrick (01:26:42):
Yes, I wanted to mention, I wrote the introduction for that.

Jimmy (01:26:44):
You don't need to give Charlie Cotchman any more publicity.

Patrick (01:26:50):
And as far as Mutts go, you know, you could go to mutts.com, you could have it delivered to your email box every morning for free.
You could see in the papers that it's still in, and it's still in quite a few papers, knock on wood.
And again, I have two new children's books out, The Gift of Nothing and The Gift of Everything.

(01:27:10):
Next year, there will be the Sunday Strip.
And boy, I have to tell you, this was, boy, we could talk for another four hours.

Jimmy (01:27:16):
Let's do it.

Patrick (01:27:19):
This is one topic I could never get tired of.

Jimmy (01:27:22):
Well, you are welcome to come back any old time you want.
This has been so much fun.

Patrick (01:27:27):
Really?
For us.

Jimmy (01:27:28):
Yeah.
So thank you again.

Patrick (01:27:30):
I'll take you up on that.
We should do it again.
Maybe when the new books come out next year.

Jimmy (01:27:33):
That would be perfect.

Harold (01:27:34):
Let's do it.

Jimmy (01:27:35):
Let's do it.

SPEAKER_5 (01:27:36):
It's a date.

Patrick (01:27:38):
Also, I think I have to say that I'm on the Board of Directors in the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, so I need to plug anyone's anywhere near Santa Rosa.
If you haven't been, you need to go to the museum.
Yeah.
They did such a wonderful job.
It has all the warmth and happiness of the peanut strip.
They really captured peanuts in that museum.

Jimmy (01:27:59):
Absolutely.
It's a magical place.

SPEAKER_5 (01:28:02):
We are big fans of the Schulz Museum.

Patrick (01:28:05):
You guys do a wonderful job as you're keeping up the peanut spirit.
It's really great.

Jimmy (01:28:10):
Thank you.
That means the world to us.

Harold (01:28:12):
Thanks, Patrick.

Jimmy (01:28:13):
All right, characters.
You come back next week when we'll be talking about something else.
Well, we'll still be talking about peanuts, but some other aspect of peanuts.
Until then, from Michael, Harold, and Liz, this is Jimmy saying, we have good cheer.
Yes.

SPEAKER_5 (01:28:28):
We have 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 Unpacked Peanuts on Instagram and threads.

(01:28:48):
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.

Patrick (01:29:00):
Do you know anyone else who owns two Zambonis?

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