Happy Centennial, Sparky Schulz!

If you picked up a newspaper today, first of all, thanks for keeping journalism alive for another day; second, you may have noticed a lot of Peanuts references in the comics page.

Today would be the 100th birthday of Charles Schulz, Peanuts' creator.

Schulz was probably the very first inspiration sparking (wink, wink) my urge to cartoon — as he was to so many of my contemporaries. As a child, I had all the Peanuts books, including The Gospel According to Peanuts and The Parables of Peanuts — the former, autographed by its author, Robert Short. Peanuts didn't run in my local paper, but my grandparents would clip and save Peanuts from the Sheboygan Press for me every day even into my college years.

The Gospel According to Peanuts, Bantam edition, 1968, must have been my sixth Peanuts book.

So how to join in the centennial celebration of such a towering figure in our field?

Just last June, I highlighted Schulz's reference in Peanuts to a cartoon drawn by a mentor of his, Frank Wing, in the wee decades of the 20th Century. Five years ago, I celebrated April Fools' Day by featuring some of the more obscure characters he drew in Peanuts.

But for today, I decided to rummage through my own archives in search of cartoons I've drawn with a nod to Mr. Schulz.

I was a bit surprised to come up with only three.

Well, reaching back to some of my juvenalia, four. But that old, old cartoon essentially stole an idea drawn by Tony Auth and stuck Charlie Brown and a few other additions into it. It was utterly unoriginal, and I don't feel like giving that cartoon new life on the internets.

But here are the three that I don't mind bringing back today.

March, 2017

There was this caricature of Scott Pruitt, an anti-environmental activist and the Corrupt Trump Administration's first head of the Environmental Protection Agency, as Pigpen, the hopelessly filthy member of the Peanuts gang who could raise a cloud of dust ice skating.

I had hoped to find an occasion to work this caricature into a fully realized cartoon, but that never came about in the less than 17 months Pruitt was in the cabinet. When he resigned in July of 2018, he was the target of at least 14 federal investigations.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, July 5, 2005

This one from 2005 takes a Peanuts trope that long ago became a cliché in editorial cartooning. Perhaps the only other Peanuts trope we have rehashed more often is the Great Pumpkin.

Q Syndicate, January, 2014

So when I went to that particular inkwell again in 2014, I attempted to find something fresh and new to do with it.

Chris Kluwe was a punter for the Minnesota Vikings, and a vocal supporter of LGBTQ+ causes, which he claimed led to his being cut from the team. A subsequent investigation found testimony to support some of Kluwe's charges, but after getting bogged down by uncooperative witnesses, ended quietly. The Vikings settled the case by promising to donate some undisclosed monetary amount to LGBTQ+ causes.

I suppose that since I draw primarily for LGBTQ+ publications, a cartoon about young angst-ridden children isn't, well, sexy. But then, you could say that about a lot of the topics I draw about.

Oh, sure, I could easily draw cartoons in which Marcie and Peppermint Patty take their relationship to the next level. And yet that seems like cartoon blasphemy somehow, akin to drawing Snoopy with rabies, Schroeder playing bagpipes, or Charlie Brown winning the World Series.

So I didn't add to the reams of cartoons of weeping Charlie Browns and Snoopys when Schulz died very shortly after retiring the strip; the topic didn't fit either Q Syndicate's or the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee's needs that week.

Well, let's not end today's post there. 

I started this post talking about how Charles Schulz inspired me, and generations of other cartoonists, when we were youngsters. I'll leave you today with his very first published cartoon, in the nationally syndicated feature "Ripley's Believe It Or Not," when he was just fifteen years old.

"Ripley's Believe It or Not" by Robert Ripley, for King Features Syndicate, Feb. 22, 1937

"Peanuts" by Charles Schulz for United Features Syndicate, July 1, 1972

Q Toon: I See Your Punt

One thing I like about this cartoon is that it's not just a tribute to a cartoonist who was one of my earliest influences: he just happens to be from St. Paul, Minnesota.

The back story is that Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe spoke out in 2012 against a proposed Minnesota state constitutional amendment excluding gay and lesbian couples from marriage rights; he also spoke out rather emphatically in support of the Ravens' Brendan Ayanbadejo. According to Kluwe's account on Deadspin, Vikings owner Zigi Wilf expressed approval of Kluwe's outspokenness, but head coach Leslie Frazier and Vikings General Manager Rick Spielman cautioned him to tone it way down.

While Kluwe is critical of Frazier and Spielman for being wishy-washy, he portrays Special Teams coordinator Mike Priefer as a completely loathsome bigot:

"We were laughing over one of the recent articles I had written supporting same-sex marriage rights, and one of my teammates made a joking remark about me leading the Pride parade. As we sat down in our chairs, Mike Priefer, in one of the meanest voices I can ever recall hearing, said: 'We should round up all the gays, send them to an island, and then nuke it until it glows.'"

Kluwe alleges that Priefer had it in for him over Kluwe's pro-gay stands, and that's what eventually led to his being cut from the team. Vikings management has launched an investigation into Kluwe's charges.

Q Toon: This He Said, And Nothing More

As Marylanders have been preparing to vote on a referendum to overturn their state's marriage equality law, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendan Ayanbadejo spoke out strongly against the measure back in March.

"Gay and lesbian couples want to marry for similar reasons as we all do: love and commitment. It’s time to allow them the opportunity to build a family through marriage. It’s a matter of fairness. This is why I’m asking Marylanders to join me in supporting marriage equality for same-sex couples.
“Having the freedom to marry means committed couples and their children will have the same crucial protections under the law as other families. Churches can always have their beliefs, but government is supposed to treat everybody the same, and that’s equal. America is supposed to be the land of the free but in order for this to be true for all of us, then we must have the ability to marry whom we love regardless of their gender."

More recently, Ayanbadejo offered two tickets to the Ravens' first home game of the season this past Monday as part of a Marylanders for Marriage Equality fund raiser. Delegate to the Maryland legislature Rev. Emmett C. Burns, Jr. (D-Baltimore County), who is also founder and pastor of Rising Sun First Baptist Church, wrote a letter to Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti expressing his outrage:

"I am requesting that you take the necessary actions as a National Football League Franchise Owner to inhibit such expressions from your employee and that he be ordered to cease and desist such injurious actions. I know of no other NFL player who has done what Mr. Ayanbadejo is doing."

 Burns cc'ed his letter to the media, and has since learned of at least one other NFL player who agrees with Brendan Ayanbadejo.

"I've also been vocal as hell about the issue of gay marriage so you can take your 'I know of no other NFL player who has done what Mr. Ayanbadejo is doing' and shove it in your close-minded, totally lacking in empathy piehole and choke on it. Asshole."

So wrote Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe in a very profane but otherwise quite eloquent broadside to the preacher-turned-politician-turned-censor.

 "What on earth would possess you to be so mind-boggingly stupid? It baffles me that a man such as yourself, a man who relies on that same First Amendment to pursue your own religious studies without fear of persecution from the state, could somehow justify stifling another person's right to speech. ...

 "'Many of your fans are opposed to such a view and feel it has no place in a sport that is strictly for pride, entertainment, and excitement.' Holy fucking shitballs. Did you seriously just say that, as someone who's 'deeply involved in government task forces on the legacy of slavery in Maryland'? Have you not heard of Kenny Washington? Jackie Robinson? As recently as 1962 the NFL still had segregation, which was only done away with by brave athletes and coaches daring to speak their mind and do the right thing, and you're going to say that political views have 'no place in a sport'?"

It is Kluwe's letter on Deadspin that has turned this story from a local one to a national, but I've chosen to highlight the original center of controversy.

Besides, I'm a Packer fan. It's really, really, really, really, unbelievably, stupendously, insanely, Herculeanly hard to force myself to say anything nice about a Viking.