With Mark Evanier

Jimmy: Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. It's an exciting day today cause we've got a guest in house and we're gonna get to talk about all kinds of great things, not just Peanuts, but all sorts of comics-related goodness. And I'll be your host for the proceedings. My name's Jimmy Gownley and joining me as always, are my pals, co host and fellow cartoonist Michael Cohen.

Michael: Say hey.

Jimmy: Harold Buchholz.

Harold: Hello.

Jimmy: And our, producer and editor, keeping us out of trouble, Liz Sumner.

Liz: Howdy.

Jimmy: So today on the show we have a special guest. We have Mark Evanier here. Mark Evanier is a veteran comics writer, historian and biographer whose decades long career spans comic books, television and animation. He's best known for his long running collaborations on Gru the Wanderer with Sergio Aragones and Garfield and Friends with Jim Davis, as well as for his acclaimed work chronicling the life and legacy of comics legend Jack Kirby. Most recently, Evanier wrote the Essential Peanuts, a deluxe 75th anniversary collection that highlights Charles M. Schulz's most iconic strips, pairing them with thoughtful essays that celebrate the humor, heart and artistry of Peanuts. He's here today. Please help me welcome to the show Mark Evanier. Mark, welcome to unpacking Peanuts. Thanks for coming.

Mark Evanier: Well, thank you for inviting me.

Jimmy: You have had a spectacular career spanning decades in all of our favorite different media. Well, tell us, how did Schulz first come into your life?

Mark Evanier: Peanuts has been a part of my life as long as I can remember. It's like asking me, when did you discover chocolate? When did you discover, you know, sunshine? I mean, it's just been a part of my life. My father loved newspapers and we used to get four of them a day in Los Angeles. At the time, there were two morning papers and two evening papers which were produced by two companies. Each company had a morning and an afternoon paper and he would get all four of them. So I got four pages of comic strips every day in my life.

Harold: That's amazing.

Mark Evanier: And I'm not even sure which one Peanuts was in if it was in the day. No, I know it was in the. Either the Mirror or the la, Times, which were both came from the same company, but I'm not sure which was. The Mirror was the morning paper and the Times was.

Michael: No, definitely in the morning paper because that's where I'd read it.

Mark Evanier: And I just loved all the comic strips. But Peanuts was one of my favorites. And then one day I discovered Peanuts reprint paperbacks. my parents used to go to this bookstore on Westwood Boulevard, not far from UCLA, not that far from where we lived, where these little sweet, little old ladies would rent current bestsellers for 2 cents a day.

Harold: Wow.

Mark Evanier: you could get non current bestsellers at the public library. And we did. But my parents wanted to read the current bestsellers. And they would go in and they would buy these books and then take them home and read them as fast as possible, because it was, after all, two cents a day.

Harold: Sure.

Liz: Yeah.

Mark Evanier: And sometimes, sometimes the copy they had would have two bookmarks in it. The bookmark to as far as my father had read and the bookmark to where my mother had read. And they would switch back and forth on the books and get them back there quickly. And when I was in the store, there was a table for books for sale of all these $1 paperback reprints of comic strips. There was, I remember, a B.C. book that was there, and I remember there were Pogo books there, and there was Peanuts books. And I. Every time we went there, they'd buy me one of them until I had them all, which at that time, I think there were about four or five out. And then we. Then they. Since I couldn't buy more Peanuts books at that moment, that's when I bought BC books and Pogo books and Mr. Mum, a couple of comics books that nobody remembers, but which I loved back then. And I just avidly read Peanuts, and I liked Peanuts and most of these strips better in the paperbacks than in the newspapers. I was frustrated that the paperbacks did not have every strip in them. It was obvious. When I got the first Peanuts book, the Holt Rinehart one with the blue cover, I realized that that was not the first year of Peanuts. It was sporadic. It went around, they jumped around. You could see Charlie Brown's design change an awful lot in that first book because, And I later learned that Schulz, as the strip developed, didn't want the early ones seen at that point because he had evolved, he thought he was doing a better work, and he skimped on the early strips in the first Peanuts books.

Harold: Now, could I ask you about your parents? It sounded like they were amazingly voracious readers, and they would take you to these great places where you could read. What was it about them, you think, that made them love it so much? Was it part of where they wound up, their vocations, or was it just a, passion for reading?

Mark Evanier: My father had what he considered the worst job in the world. He hated his job. he worked for the Internal Revenue Service. He was the person who came to you and said, I'm sorry, you haven't paid your taxes in three years. We're going to have to attach your car and your house or something like that. And people hated him. And my father was one of the sweetest men who ever lived, but he was a depression era kid, and depression era kids, the number one thing in their lives was, was to make a living for their family, to provide for their families. And my father took this job with the irs, thinking he was just going to pay the bills until he found something he wanted to do. And he never found anything else. And he worked for the IRS for his entire life as a result. When I was around seven, he sat me down and he said, and he had ulcers. He hated his job. He came home hating his bosses, hating the setup, hating the way at that point he would have cases on people who were big Republican donors. And he'd be told, oh, no, he gets off. We don't have. He doesn't have to pay his taxes, but go after these. These poor people more. Get every cent you can out of the poor people and leave the rich people alone.

Jimmy: but thankfully, that doesn't go on today.

Mark Evanier: Yeah, for God, you know, there's no. There's no more favoritism towards the wealthy in this country. So he sat me down and he said, Mark, you know, as you get older, you're gonna have to decide what you want to do with your life. Pick anything you want, as long as you love it. And I said, I think I want to be a writer. And it was a pause, and he said, do you have a second choice? Because every writer my father had met was broke.

Jimmy: Sure.

Mark Evanier: He had cases on them. As I got older, I occasionally would meet people who my father had tried to. Had had to try to threaten to put in jail or to, you know, attach their bank accounts. And they'd go, Evanier, I knew someone who does. Who was it I knew named Evanier. I met one. And I would go, oh, it's a real common name. There's thousands. There's actually about nine. But I would lie about that all the time. And, because. Because people just, you know, hated him for what he had to do in his line of work. 

Well, I became a writer right out of high school. I was actually writing a little bit while I was in. Still in high school, but I became a professional writer. So I sold my first work, about two weeks after I got out of high school. Graduated high school at the age of 17. And I'd never done anything else.

Harold: I mean, and where, where was that too? How did you get started?

Mark Evanier: I was in West LA. I was living in west LA. I tell people I made the long hard struggle to Hollywood. All the way from West Los Angeles. Yeah. And when I was about two weeks out of high school, I thought, well, it's time to start, become a professional writer, what I want to do. And I went to his big newsstand that was on Cahuenga Boulevard. I think it's still there, but it's much reduced in Hollywood. Not far from the comic book shops we were talking about before this interview started. And, and I went through all these magazines trying to find something that was published in Los Angeles. I felt that I wanted to have an editor whose office I could step into instead of doing it all by mail. I wanted to sit down, I wanted to have a, relationship with an editor. I felt I would learn more that way. And I found a couple of magazines that were being edited in Los Angeles and I went home and I wrote articles that I thought they would want. And finally one day I screwed up my courage and I took the bus into Hollywood where a couple of them were. And I went to one company and I walked in and I said, it was a magazine that. It was actually what it was. It was Laugh In magazine. It was kind of based on the TV show. It was kind of a cross between a movie fan magazine and a Mad magazine imitation. And it was about Laugh In. And I walked in and I asked this reception and one of the few really, really scary moments of my life and I said, I'd like to speak to the editor. I'm a, I'm a young struggling comedy writer. And she gets on the phone to the editor in the next office and says, I have a young struggling comedy writer out there. And the editor said, I'm in a meeting now. Tell him if he comes back in 45 minutes, I will see him. So I went out, found a pizza place, had a slice of pizza, came back, showed my stuff to the editor and I walked out with a check for $900. He bought three articles from me for $300 a piece. I brought like six articles in.

Harold: He bought half of them and $300 apiece in 1961.

Mark Evanier: Well, they were not. They were multi page articles. It was one of the things that doomed that magazine. It went out of business before most of my stuff saw print was. It was way budgeted wrong. And they had just fired the old editor and brought in a new guy who I think was only there for about eight weeks, but that was enough to launch my career. And then I wrote some other things for other magazines. The publisher had. And I made some contacts, and all of a sudden I was freelancing here and there.

Harold: And then you could tell people you wrote for Laugh In.

Mark Evanier: Yeah. Now, meanwhile, about three weeks after I started writing for Laugh In magazine, I met a man named Jack Kirby.

Jimmy: Can you tell us who he is?

Mark Evanier: The name sounds familiar. A lot of Kirbys. I think he has something to do with every good comic book of the 60s.

Michael: so where did you meet him?

Mark Evanier: Well, we had a comic book club at the time, and I was the president of it. We met every Saturday at a park located right near the intersection of the Santa Monica Freeway and the San Diego Freeway. And we would just, you know, like a little mini comic convention. Everybody would bring their extra comics and sell or trade them, and we'd discuss comics and we'd debate who was the best artist for Batman and things like that. It was kind of a fun club.

Michael: I sure wish I knew about that. Why didn't you invite me?

Mark Evanier: Well, we invited everybody we could. We've had flyers at the comic book shops in Hollywood. We passed out that I designed these, wrote these flyers and things.

Michael: We would have been there.

Mark Evanier: And on the July 4th weekend, there was a science fiction convention. This is before there were any comic book conventions in the state of California, but there was a science fiction convention which was kind of close, at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, which I did not attend because I was writing stuff like crazy for Laugh in magazine and because I had a girlfriend at the time. So I skipped the science fiction convention. But several of our members went, including the officers from our club. Jack Kirby and his wife Roz and the rest of their family had just moved to Southern California a few months before. That was a very big thing for the industry. Jack Kirby. You know, at that point, he was, you know, it was incredible. We have a comic book artist living in Los Angeles. Oh, my God. Or actually he was in. At that point, he was in Irvine. And he wanted to meet some of the local comic fans and maybe find some people who could assist him in some of the projects he had planned. So he and Roz went to the convention. They showed up, they paid admission. He was not a guest of the convention. they paid admission. And it got around the convention that Jack Kirby was there. The officers in our club went up to him and introduced themselves. They were thrilled to meet him. Oh, my God. A guy who actually wrote and drew. Not only someone who wrote and drew comic books. Who wrote and drew, you know, the important comic books. The comic books, Kirby was a super. I had met a couple of people in the industry before then. I met Jerry Siegel and Bob Kane, and an artist named Ken Landau also. I had met a few people in comics. I tell people. I leave out the part about Ken Landau because he was not a superstar of the industry at the time. A wonderful artist, but not famous the way the other guys were. I sell people. I met the co creator of Superman, I met the co creator of Batman, and I met the co creator of everything else. That was my joke at the time, which has been stolen from me many times. so they invited Jack to come to the club and be a guest lecturer, which he never did. But Roz invited the board of directors to come to their house in Irvine and just meet him and interview him or whatever we want. Wow. they were just trying to get to know the local fan community and this seemed like a place. So being the president of the club, I came along on this. Now, I don't know how much this story you want to hear because we're way off the subject of Peanuts.

Jimmy: We want to hear all the stories.

Mark Evanier: Okay, well, I'll take care. This way. This was very bizarre. My life has been full of incredible coincidences. The way we went down, the day we all went down to see Jack Kirby was a, Tuesday. It was the day the new comics came out in Los Angeles on newsstands, which is where we used to buy them. And I had to walk, take a bus down to a certain area and walk several blocks to the place where we were going to meet. I was going to meet the other guys who were in summer school at the time, and we were going to get picked up at the school by the parents of one of the kids who was going to drive us down to Irvine because none of us drove. So I took the bus down to this corner. I bought the new comics that had come out and the first Marvels of the month. This was July of 1969, we're talking about had come out and they had an ad in them, for a company called Marvel Mania International, which was a LA based company that was doing fan merchandising for Marvel. They were going to sell posters and, and decals and Marvel merchandise by mail. And this was the closest I had ever seen to a comic book company in Los Angeles. There actually was one, but I never thought about it. Gold Key Comics had an office in Los Angeles, but.

Jimmy: Oh, right.

Mark Evanier: M. Parts of my life, I had never thought of working for them. I later did, but. So I see this ad for Marvel Mania International, and the address is a post office box in Culver City. I'm about two miles from Culver City when I found this, which is exciting. Like, oh, my God, is Marvel. Got a branch out here. Is this how you know. It's a contact with an industry that I felt 3,000 miles away from. So I went to a payphone, I asked directory assistance for the number of Marvel Mania International. They connected me with the office. A man answered there. I told him I was the president of local comic book club. He said, oh, great. We just starting our merchandise. Our ads are out today. Come over to our office. Come right now if you want to. We want to meet you and. And meet all the other local fans. Wow. And I said, I'm sorry, I'm going down to Irvine now to meet Jack Kirby. And they went, oh. And at first the guy who I later realized was kind of clueless about comic book history, but he did know who Jack was. And he said, oh, okay, Jack, my best and come by tomorrow. And he gave me the address to the office and so helped me. The office was about four blocks from where I was at that moment. 

So I went down with my friends. We met Jack Kirby. We spent the day with him. One of the loveliest human beings you could ever want to meet. He was so giving. He answered all my stupid questions. he was. And we got. I got to see the pencil art to an issue of Fantastic Four he was working on. In fact, I was then a little bit of an artist. I was drawing a few things. It's a side of me I gave up when I got into the industry because everybody else I could have worked with was better than I was and faster than I was. But we gave Jack some of the fanzines we put out, and they had some of my drawings in it. And Jack said. And Jack realized I had this primal urge to bond with the industry that had given me so much joy. I still didn't think I had a career in comics. That was not. I thought I lived in Los Angeles. They don't make comic books in Los Angeles. So, he said, you draw? And I said, well, a little bit, yeah. He said, here. And he showed me a page of Fantastic Four. I Think it was number 98. It was the one with the monster from the sea. And it was like the issue was two thirds finished. And I was stunned by how beautiful his artwork was in person. The pencil artwork, before even the best inkers got hold of it, had things in it that you would never see in a printed comic. It was just, my jaw dropped off, caromed off the linoleum. I said, so he said, would you. Here, I want you to draw. Finish this hand here. It doesn't have a hand on it. And I thought myself, I am not worthy of doing that in the worst Marvel comic by the worst artist. I am, certainly not worthy of doing this in Fantastic Four for Jack Kirby. And Jack is forcing me into his chair. Jack Kirby’s chair and saying to me, go ahead, draw the hand, please. I want you to do this. I'm assisting. You do this. So I finally realized, wait a minute, Jack has an eraser. And even if he didn't change it after I left, which he probably did, it's going to, I thought it was going to go to Joe Sinott, his main inker. Actually. That issue ended up being inked by Frank Giacoya, also a wonderful inker. So I drew this hand and Jack went great. And I realized what it was. It wasn't tough, to. He wasn't testing me as to be a potential assistant artist for him. He didn't need an assistant artist. He tested me. What he saw was he recognized in me this desire to bond with comic books. and he just would give me the. My friends loved comic books, but none of them had any aspirations to be writers or artists.

Mark Evanier: And I did, obviously. And he wanted to encourage me as I saw him over the years, encourage everybody who came to him. You could come to Jack with the worst artwork in the world and he would go, you're great, you're terrific.

Jimmy: Keep at it.

Mark Evanier: Only way, the only way you could get, not get approval from Jack is if your work was either highly derivative, you were copying someone else, or you just knocked it out. You hadn't tried hard. It was effort behind.

Harold: Sweet of him to let you do that.

Mark Evanier: And even it prompted originality. He loved it. And I tell people that if I had emerged from my association with Jack able to draw exactly like him, he would have considered me a failure. At least I hadn't invented anything. He was all about innovation and doing something new and taking whatever he was doing to the next level. I must have heard the phrase the next level a thousand times around him. And he was so giving. 

Anyway, so. So we talked about Marvel Mania a little bit and he said, that guy doesn't know anything about comics. You know, all about comics. He needs someone like you working there. And I said, yeah, right. And the next day when I walked into the Marvel Mania offices and met the people there, the guy who ran the company, owned the company, said, now Jack Kirby tells me I ought to hire you. 

Jimmy: Oh wow.

Mark Evanier: He hired me. he omitted the part where I was paid most of the time. And it was a terrible company. It was a fly by night, rip off operation that I worked for for maybe nine months. I don't even know. But it was a professional job in appearance, even if there's no cash in it. And I was making money writing other things and I was going to college at the same time. So. And then that was in July of. That was all happened in July of 1969. In February of 1970, Jack and Roz walked into the Marble Mania offices unexpectedly. They came to visit and they were living in Irvine at that point. So that was quite a drive for them. And they were there to confront the head of the company to demand all the money that Jack had not been paid. And the head of the company was in Europe at the time. So they didn't get it. But they took, they took me and they took my friend Steve Sherman, who worked there out to lunch. They had met Steve because Steve and I went down to visit Jack a few times on Marvel Mania business. And Jack sat me down. We, went to Canter’s Delicatessen on Fairfax. Jack sat us down and said, swore us to secrecy and said, I'm leaving Marvel. I'm going to go to work for DC. I need some assistance. Would you guys like to work for me? And I say, tell people. Steve and I thought for a long time about this. We thought for a half a second and we said, yes, yes. We had no idea what we'd be doing if we were paid, what we'd be paid if we were paid, if we had to pay Jack. I don't know, we just thought, both of us thought, we want to be around this man. There is so much to learn from him. There is so much. And not just about how to write and draw. 

Jack was such a mensch. He was such a upstanding, honest lovely man. And if you don't want to take my word for it, ask anybody who knew him. there's not a lot of people left. This is a long time ago. Steve isn't even around anymore. but anybody who knew Jack will tell you what a wonderful person he was, what a wonderful person his wife Roz was, how supportive they were. And, and they kind of, you know, semi adopted Steve and myself and, and took us, and. And Jack took us under his wing, if you want to use a bad analogy. And it was just a very wonderful experience. And meanwhile, I was writing other things and I'm talking too much about myself here, so. No, I've told you the basic story. I have been fortunate.

Jimmy: I actually have a fanboy question.

Mark Evanier: Oh, okay. Sure.

Jimmy: All right. So one of the things we talk about on, the podcast is just that the various, like, periods of creativity Schulz went through, and then also, you know, how pop culture at times seems really exciting and maybe less so in five or six years. Well, I'm a child of the 70s and 80s, and I think whatever was going on in comics in the 80s was really, special and spectacular. And you were a big part of that. You wrote an exceptional run on Blackhawk and you created Crossfire, which Michael and I were talking about. both of those with Dan Spiegel, 

Mark: co created Crossfire, co created 

Jimmy: with, Dan Spiegel. Right.

Mark Evanier: Dan Spiegel and Will Mineo. Right.

Jimmy: Well, those are brilliant comics. Could, you tell. Just talk a little bit about that period? Could you feel that things were happening?

Mark Evanier: I would slightly disagree with you. I, I think that may have been a function of your age. Nope. No. No. Because I think that there's always exciting stuff happening in comics. If there isn't right now, wait a year or two and it will be. The, industry keeps reinventing itself, although it hasn't been doing a good job of that lately, but it will. And I was excited by comics of the 50s. I was excited by comics of the 60s. I was excited by comics of the 70s, 70s and the 80s. In the 70s, I became very, very aware through my association with Jack Kirby how badly run and sometimes maliciously run the comic book companies were. I think the DC comics in the late 60s, early 70s was very badly run, particularly from the standpoint of how they treated the talent. And Marvel wasn't much better. And what happened in the 80s was that suddenly there were new kinds of distribution of comics available. Prior to the 80s, DC Marvel, Harvey, Archie and a few others had a lock on the marketplace and no worry about competitors. At the time Jack Kirby went to work for DC in 1970, there were this handful of publishers in the business, none of whom had been in the industry less than 15 or 20 years, there was no such thing as a new comic book publisher. In 1970 were, one or two attempts that lasted a year or two, but there were no. If you were going to write and draw comic books, you worked for Gold Key or DC or Marvel or Archie or Charlton and, three or four others, and that was it. And those companies had a lock on it. And therefore no, reason to treat the talent any better. 

Anyway, in the 80s, in the early 80s, distribution changed. And I don't know if you want to get into the weeds of this, but comic books were now being sold by the direct sales marketing, which sold directly to comic book shops and to other things. Instead of going through newsstands, newsstand distribution died off. The direct distribution flourished. And all of a sudden it was possible for Pacific Comics to start in business or First Comics or Eclipse Comics or all these other companies. And at the same time, there was an awareness, a heightened awareness that people were buying comic books because of the talent.

Jimmy: Uh-huh.

Mark Evanier: Before that, the theory was people are buying Superman because it's Superman. And in the 80s, people were buying Superman because they liked the way that writer or that artist did Superman. And all of a sudden there was this whole new impetus to treat the talent better, to get them share in the windfall if their characters became multimillion dollar properties. And so you had an incentive. If comics were better in the 80s, it's because an awful lot of talented people stayed in the business instead of getting out and doing something that paid better.

Jimmy: Yeah, right. Because you could tell it was done with love. Absolutely.

Mark Evanier: When I. In this. In throughout the 70s, I. I met. I'm not gonna say everybody, but an awful, 90% of the people who wrote and drew comic books I grew up on and loved, most of whom. And I knew the new people getting in too. The new people all thought they were in the business temporary because they thought the business was temporary. And distribution was dying. there didn't seem to be any other method at the moment. And most of the people I met who were talented in comics treated it the way you might treat in another profession. I'm going to work at McDonald's until I find my. Get my foothold in my real profession. And the guys who'd been in it a long time were just kind of willing to be treated badly because they didn't know where else to work. If you had spent your life writing and drawing comic books for DC or Marvel, it wasn't hard. It was, Seemed inconceivable to make a real career shift from that. And so you put up with a lot of bad treatment. And then the 80s there was better treatment. And anybody who did a great comic book that you loved in the 80s probably would have not have been at state of the industry if they'd been treated like Siegel and Schuster or or even Jack Kirby in the 60s. They wouldn't have been in the business. They would have gone out to something else. I was a little unique among the people who got into comics when I did because I never got fully into comic books. I never made my entire living off them. I was living in Los Angeles. I was as interested in writing for television and other media. I loved writing for stand up comedians and as I was in writing for comic books. And so I was doing a lot of different things, which in hindsight was a very smart business move on my part. But I didn't do it because, business move. I did it because I wanted to just do all these different things and I didn't want to slam any doors.

Harold: Right.

Mark Evanier: So I was in the 70s, I was writing network television shows, I was writing comic books, I was writing gags for comedians, I was writing books, I was writing just anything. And as I tell people, if you do enough different things in this world, you don't do any of them very well. People think you're versatile. The guy with the longest resume is often the person that nobody ever hired twice.

Jimmy: Right.

Harold: Don't put.

Mark Evanier: So, you know, that's it basically what I did I answer your question?

Jimmy: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, absolutely.

Mark Evanier: And comic books have gone up and down since then, but I don't know anybody these days who aspires to spend their life. I mean, there are probably some people aspires their life writing and drawing comic books because DC and Marvel are no longer comic book companies. They're parts of large multimedia companies. And one of the things they do is comic books. And Superman is as much a movie character or a TV character or a toy character as he is a comic book character.

Jimmy: Right.

Mark Evanier: That, that distinction. There's no longer a distinction there. And you know, and he's like Bugs Bunny. He's a property that the company owns and they merchandise him wherever they can. so that's what comics are now. And it's a very unshaky business. So I'm not working that much in comics these days. Not that I don't love the form, it's just that, you know, there's comic book company. I have this habit where people call me up that editor at a comic book company calls me up and says, we got this. We need to have someone write this book of this character you've loved your whole life. Would you like to write the comic book? And I said, yes, yes. And I don't even ask what the money is. I just, I figure, you know, I can figure that out later. But I have found I have had good luck leading with my heart in accepting assignments. And then the editor is fired. Oh, no, I don't say tell us much because I'm afraid to scare editors off from wanting to hire me. But a very high percentage of editors who said, I want to have Mark Evanier write this comic book were later Walmart readers.

Harold: Well, Mark, so, you know, we've talked a lot about on this podcast that Charles Schulz came in kind of in a sweet spot for comic strips where you had steady business and were treated based on performance for what you did, and that he was able to be rewarded for that. You know, we're talking about these other media where they're, they're up, they're down, and sometimes you, you just have to by necessity switch your, your job or how you approach your job because it goes away. And you know, the thing right now I think a lot of people are looking at that's new for comics is that virtually every major publisher who wouldn't touch comics, they're now, all in the world. And it's, it's also a little bit more reward for performance with some guarantees. You, it's slightly closer to what Schulz was going through, but then it's, it's a project by project basis. But Schulz, he got the opportunity for 50 years to work in an industry that, while it was changing all around him and was certainly in decline by the time he was, you know, in his 50th, year, we got the opportunity to see an artist kind of step into a space and in an unbroken way make the art he wanted to make. And that, that seems like a pretty rare thing for a 50 year run of a certain style.

Mark Evanier: It's an amazing body of work. And one of the reasons I wanted to do this book when I was offered it was I thought, oh, someone's going to pay me to read the entire run of Peanuts. I thought that would just be an exciting thing to do. I'd never read it from day one through continuously. And I kept forgetting to make notes because I was enjoying the reading so much. I started making notes and I suddenly realized I haven't made a, I've read the last six Months of it. I haven't made a note. I better go back and make some notes. but when they came to me and asked me to do this book, I just thought, sure, this is getting one of those. Mark, we'd like you to write this book. And I said yes. I didn't ask how much I'd be paid. I didn't ask what the deadline was. I didn't ask. As it turns out, the deadline was nearly impossible, but we made it.

Harold: Wow.

Mark Evanier: And I'm purposely using we, because this is not a solo effort. I had an awful lot of support behind me because Mr. Schulz, among his many, many smart things he did in his life, he left behind these wonderful support teams. keep the characters faithful and true. And there is this magical place in Santa Rosa, California. Have you folks been to the Charles M. Schulz Museum?

Jimmy: Yeah, I have.

Harold: Yeah.

Mark Evanier: And the people there love Peanuts, and they love it. When you ask them a tough question they don't know the answer to. They love going to look it up and researching it. And they helped me an awful lot. They're the people there. There's this company called Charles Schulz Creative Associates, which, you know, Jeanne Schulz has installed all the right people to protect Peanuts. People that Schulz hand picked in many ways himself. And they keep the integrity of the characters. I worked over the years for companies that didn't care what you did to their properties as long as the check cleared. I worked for Hanna Barbera and ended up getting a reputation in the building for complaining about the way Yogi Bear was being drawn on T shirts or the way Fred Flintstone was being depicted in the dolls. And I fought. I was the editor of the Hanna Barbera comic book division for a while.

Harold: For the Marvel ones.

Mark Evanier: Well, this is for some. We did for all sorts of different countries. Marvel published some of the American ones. and. And I would fight with the people who were in charge of the merchandising over what they were allowing out into the marketplace. And. And, I loved the characters so much, I didn't want to see them drawn by the cheapest possible talent they could get in Peru or something.

Harold: and, 70s were terrible for them.

Mark Evanier: And one of the many things I loved about Charles Schulz and also about Jim Davis, who I worked for on Garfield, was this. This. You know, we. We don't. We don't just grab every offer that comes along. You got to do it right. The merchandise must be good. The characters must be drawn faithfully. They must be in character. It's not just, you know, grab the bucks and run, which. Which bothers me tremendously.

 So I found and I understood more about Peanuts by working on this book and meeting the people who'd worked with Schulz's last few years and talking to them. And I had a number of wonderful sessions with Mr. Schulz himself. I was unable to bring myself to call him Sparky. He kept saying, call him Sparky. He signed autographs for me. Spark to Mark from Sparky. And I. How you know my words? My lips could not form the word Sparky. I had the same problem with Joe Barbera, and I worked for Hanna Barbera and with a few other people. I've been fortunate to work with an awful lot of the people who built my childhood. People who I can, remember watching TV shows that these people did. And later I am working with the people themselves, even directing them or writing for them in some cases. Wow. you know, this is just an amazing thing to me, to bond with all this stuff and to realize this. I. If my father was still alive, I'd want to say, hey, dad, remember when I watched that cartoon show, tv? I just got paid a lot of money because I knew those characters. Yeah. You know? Yeah, things like that.

Harold: Can you share some of the stories of, your personal interactions with Schulz? The things.

Mark Evanier: Here's the first time I met Charles Schulz. This is in the book, but I'll tell the story because it's a good story. Story. I was friends with a comic strip artist named Russell Myers, who at the time, in the early 70s, was writing and drawing the Broom Hilda comic strip. By the way, do you know what Russell Myers is doing at the moment? He's writing and drawing the Broom Hilda comic strip.

Harold: What year is it now? It's like 50 something plus.

Mark Evanier: Well, no, this is. I met. I met Russell in. We became pen pals in 1970 or 71. Wow. And we met in person at, I think the third or fourth San Diego Con. The exact date is in the book. And he was down at the comic convention. I have been. I am one of a, handful of people, I think it's five who have been to every single San Diego comic convention. Wow. I have people who brag. Oh, I've been to 10 of them. I've been to 15 of them. How about. I've been to all of them, 55 of them. so. And Russell and I are standing talking one day. This is at the old El Cortez Hotel where they were for a few years. And we're standing, talking at this convention, and a newspaper, some newspaper in the Midwest, had just dropped Nancy, Nancy and Sluggo. And, villagers with flaming torches were surrounding the building to cancel their subscriptions. And how dare you take our Nancy away? And I said to Schulz to, Russell, how many papers is Nancy in? He said to me, quote, this is verbatim. I don't know. Oh, there's Sparky. He'd know. And Charles Schulz is walking, past us, and Russell, knew him and says, and asked him, how many papers is Nancy in? And Schulz didn't know either. But we started talking about the protests, and I was introduced to him. He said, you know, editors don't understand how much people love those characters. They become part of your lives. And he goes on and on for about three minutes, talking about how people feel about losing their Nancy. And I have two thoughts in the mind. One is, I am meeting the most successful comic strip creator in this history of mankind. A title I think he still has to this day, posthumously. And that's one concept that is bulging in my mind. The second one is he doesn't realize that, but he's talking about his own strip because everything he was saying about Nancy and Sluggo was true of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, except for the fact that no newspaper would ever be stupid enough to cancel.

Harold: It's never been proven in the wild.

Mark Evanier: We talked for half an hour, and that ended up segueing into having lunch together, the three of us.

Jimmy: Wow.

Mark Evanier: and I had a wonderful conversation with Schulz. It was the only San Diego con he attended. He was supposed to be at 

Harold: 1974, for the record. 

Mark: Yeah, 74. Thank you. He was supposed to be at a couple others, but he was a busy man. He had to cancel on a couple of others he was going to be at. But later I did some projects with Lee Mendelson I got to meet. I'll tell you a moment that you will love. And I didn't get this into the book somehow. you all know who Lee Mendelson is, right? Sure. Yes. Lee Mendelson was the producer of the Peanuts specials. A very important man in the history of Peanuts. A very important man in my life, too. He was the best producer I ever worked for, and I worked for him for many years. I wrote all the Garfield cartoons for a long time. And when Lee reached some a year, I forget, some multiple of 10 years that he had been in business, he flew everybody into Sebastopol, where his offices were, everybody who had worked on his various projects over the years, including associates he hadn't seen since the 60s. old army buddies of his. That. And he had this big gala. incredible. He flew us all at a hotel. He put us up in first class rooms. And there was this huge party that we were invited to go to to celebrate Lee's anniversary in the business. So my date. I wasn't allowed to bring my girlfriend. So my date for the party, because we were both staying in adjoining rooms at the hotel, was Mike Peters, a friend of mine who does the Mother Goose and Grimm strip. and Mike and I take the bus to. There's a free bus to a chartered bus to take us from the hotel to the country club. And we walk into the country club. And we have to walk through the country club because the party is in the back of the country club. We have to walk through the front. And there's a bar there, which has nothing to do with the party, but just a bar there. And standing at the bar as we walk in are Charles Schulz and Jim Davis are standing there wearing expertly tailored suits. I think they can afford them. And they're staying there with drinks, just chatting. And I walked up to. I said they both knew me. They both recognized. Oh, hi, Mark. I walk up and I slammed a $20 bill down on the bar and said, if you two guys are too cheap to pay for the drinks, I will. And Mr. Schulz and Mr. Davis got hysterical. It was I just. That joy that you made someone laugh who made you laugh, that you. Oh, that's awesome. 

You show your love for people who make you laugh by making them laugh. It's like I'm a member of the Magic Castle. The. The way magicians show their love for each other is by fooling them. I'll show you a trick you can't figure out, then you show me a trick I can't figure out. It's the same thing. You can do something funny. And, and Mr. Davis and Mr. Schulz just laughed. And I just. I just treasure that as a moment in my life. And I made them both laugh at the same time. That is fantastic. And rudely. I got to know. I met Schulz a couple of the times I met him at a National Cartoonist Society convention and a few other things. And every time.

Harold: How would you describe him as a. As a person, Mark? Just, how did it kind of come across to you?

Mark Evanier: I was surprised by how modest he was. That was the first revelation. I've known a lot of people of great accomplishments. TV stars, movie stars, directors. I have been fortunate enough I could name drop here for the rest of your entire podcast of three people. And all of them are willing to talk about themselves, as we are all willing to talk about themselves. I'm sitting here right now talking about myself to you people, but not all of them are willing to talk about other people. And my time with Schulz. He knew that I was a repository of some comic strip history that interested him. He knew that I knew a lot about Garfield, Garfield, but also about Pogo. He loved Pogo. And, I am one of the world's leading experts on Pogo, because I used to live with Walt Kelly's daughter and I inherited all of her archives. Oh, wow. I have, in my next room, I have like correspondence between Walt Kelly and Walt Disney. Oh, wow, man.

Jimmy: Are they arguing about who the first name?

Mark Evanier: No, no, no. They were arguing about Walt Kelly getting work for Western Publishing drawing Disney comics. Anyway, I want to get back on the subject of Schulz here. and he liked to ask me questions about comic strip history and comic book history and things like that. He was fascinated by. And I would ask him a question about the strip because I was fascinated by the strip and interested in the strip. And he would answer me, he'd always give me an answer and somehow botsama, we'd wind up talking about Skippy or lzc.

Jimmy: Ah, ah.

Mark Evanier: Or George Herriman or other people he admired or Milton Cuniff and other people he admired. And also he asked me an awful lot of questions about comic book fandom and conventions and why people were there and why certain things happened. So the first thing that I was really impressed with is how he was not self obsessed. If I had those achievements, not to mention that money, I would have talked about myself a lot more, frankly. What impressed me, the first thing that impressed me, was how self effacing, he was, how affable he was, how, you know, he had, he somehow had nothing better to do for those hours than sit and talk with me. I can, you know, I can't believe that he didn't. He didn't have other things. And he did. He had work all over the drawing board. He had people coming in and out as we were sitting in his studio talking, saying, oh, we need. They just called. They need that, proof of that thing approved. And it was very similar to what I used to see with Jim Davis when I was at his office. Because you're trying to balance your creative needs and the need to get us two strips done. Today and get a Sunday page off or whatever with all the costs, the things of managing the industry you're in.

Harold: Sure.

Mark Evanier: And that's one of the things those two men bonded over a little bit, I think. But, he was funny, he was pleasant to be with. He was genuinely appreciative when I would compliment him on something that, put it this way, where he felt I understood what he was trying to do. Yeah. Okay. Everybody says, oh God, I love Snoopy. Oh God, I love Charlie Brown. Fine.

Harold: Right.

Mark Evanier: But he was interested. He really said, I really like the way in this strip you time the punchline and you, you know, the way you. Because. Because for years he was trapped on the daily strip in this four panel setup. If he had a great idea that could have been best done in three panels, he had to do four panels. He had a great idea that could have been best done in five panels, he had to do four panels or expand it to a Sunday, which was maybe not the right rhythm sometimes for a gag. Maybe. Some gags belong in four panels and some don't. And in later years, you know, the last period, Peanuts, he went to three strips, sometimes even one strip, one, one panel, three panels, one panel, two panels occasionally, and experimented with. He was changing the format of the strip, the last 10 years of it, experimenting with gray tones, experimenting with bringing some new characters in and things like that. when he could have coasted so easily, as many of his contemporaries did. I mean, there are comic strips. I'd rather not name a list of them that I don't think had a good idea after year 10, just kept recycling and doing the stuff over. I met one comic strip artist one time who's. He had in his closet a pile of originals from old strips. And he didn't give them away because what he was doing to do his new strips was taking an old one and re lettering it or changing an expression because it was like, you know, he could do a whole daily strip in, in 20 minutes if he did that. And he also wasn't drawing as well as he used to.

Harold: Yeah.

Mark Evanier: Which was, you know.

Harold: So did you sense Schulz's competitiveness when you.

Mark Evanier: I think he was self competitive. He was going to do the best damn strip possible. He wanted to do the best he wanted. He loved it. If people said to him, that's the best comic strip ever, who wouldn't love that? But I don't think he had a hostility towards his peers. And he admired. He certainly admired. He loved Russell Myers. We talked about Russell. He loved some of the other strips he loved Cathy. I remember he's going on about Cathy, how much he loved and he loved, Mutts and he loved. I mean, he, I don't think he, I don't think he said a bad word about any fellow cartoonist in my presence, if he said them, anyone around me, certainly. and he, you know, it's very rare in this world you get to meet someone who has no unfulfilled dreams. I can't think of too many others I met. Even people that you think had it all. Sometimes you could sense the frustration that they'd never been able to do this or that.

Mark Evanier: But Schulz, if he had frustrations of not being able to do anything, you know, it was, I want to do the strip longer. I want to keep doing the strip longer. One of the sad parts of the book in, the last chapter about Schulz, I mean, the last chapter is about his heritage, but the chapter before that is about his last years. And they're sad. It's a sad chapter. And I couldn't not make it sad and make it still accurate because he did not know when he drew the last peanut strip. He had medical problems. And if somebody had said to him, you know, Sparky, you're going to have to end the strip in two years, he would have had an amazing two years. He would have taken it as a challenge to make those two years soar and sing and to wrap up things and to do the best last attempt to Charlie Brown to kick the football and the best last strips of Charlie Brown thinking about the little red haired girl. And the best last strips with, you know, whatever it was, maybe resolve some things, end up some running jokes he wasn't going to have to need anymore. But instead, all of a sudden, it was over. And, he gave an exit interview to the Today show Al Roker for the Today show. He called Al Roker out and they did an interview which is just. I can't watch it without tearing up a little bit. and so there's that frustration. And then he somehow had the incredible impossible. If you wrote this, no one would believe it. Timing to die. The day his last strip was endemic. Oh, gosh, I don't understand. I mean, it's like Lee Mendelson called me up that morning and he said, Mark, you won't believe what happened. Schulz died this morning. Today is the day the last strip is in the paper. I mean, Lee couldn't believe it. He just. Who else has timing like that?

Jimmy: Hey, well, speaking of timing, I think it is the perfect time to take a break. And then we will come back in just a few seconds and discuss the five strips that you picked for us. So you characters out there in podcast land, go get a drink and a snack and meet us here on the other side.

BREAK

VO: Hi, everyone, thank you for listening and engaging with us. Your appreciation makes this effort a real pleasure. And now we're asking that you support our work. If you enjoy the show, we hope you'll join us on Patreon as a contributor. Those of you who can't, for whatever reason, that's okay. We've been there. We're glad you're here. Thank you for being an essential part of unpacking Peanuts.

Jimmy: And we are back. What'd you get? I got, I got a banana and a seltzer. Hope you guys got something.

Harold: I got a rock.

Jimmy: so, Mark, you help putting this book together. You have selected now five of your favorite strips. You read the entire run, just like we did for the podcast to put this book together. And, how hard was it after doing that for you to come up with these five strips to talk about today?

Mark Evanier: I just picked five.

Jimmy: I guess that's how I did it.

Mark Evanier: I. If you said those five are off limits, I would have picked five I love just as much. you know, it's the body of work that impresses me more than any individual strip. The fact that, you know, the, the. The. I. I love the fact that Schulz just kept doing this strip and getting it better and better and better until there was maybe no more room to improve. And he kept doing it, and it was fresh. And even in his later years, every so often that you'd read a strip and go, oh, he never did that before. Yeah. And, it's fun to watch the early. Read the early strips the way that it's fun to look at because of what, you know, it's going to come. It's like. It's like I, I say that like people who watched, I don't know. 

One of my passions is Laurel and Hardy comedies. People who watch the silent Laurel and Hardy comedies now read the title cards to themselves with the voices of Laurel and Hardy. I know from the talkies, but when people first saw those films, they had no idea what Stan and Ollie sounded like or, what their characters were fully developed. So now they impose those voices and those characters. When we watch the silence, those voices are not really there, but we put them there in our minds. We add what we know later of the characters. And I think when you read the early Peanuts strips, Charlie Brown is not really Charlie Brown that we know and love in the first year or two, but we pretend he is. We kind of impose it on them. They kind of read better now because the character is more fleshed out based on what was done later. But if you had read those strips when they first appeared, they would have been impressive. We can now read an early Peanuts strip and think, oh, Snoopy's going home to climb on his doghouse and go off to the red bear. Well, he didn't do that in the strip for another 12 years, or something like that.

Jimmy: Right, right.

Mark Evanier: We're just imposing that mentally ourselves. And those voices and the characters. I think there are people who now read peanut strips and mentally hear the music, the Vince Guaraldi music from the TV shows in their heads.

Jimmy: Yeah, absolutely. So here we go. We are starting off with your first selection, which is 

February 27, 1955. It's a Sunday. And we start off with one of those, symbolic panels. This is a great one. We have a bust of Beethoven on the left and a bust of Lucy on the right. And Lucy's head is saying, phooey. And then, of course, Schroeder is at his toy piano, and he's pounding away. but we have the bust of Beethoven on the toy piano. Lucy's in her classic position but looking a little annoyed. As the strip starts up for real on the second tier, Lucy stands up and says to Schroeder, you and your stupid old Beethoven. Then she walks out of the room saying, schroeder never pays any attention to me. Well, by golly, I'll show him. Yes, sir. Then in the next panel, we see Lucy returning with a baseball bat, rushing straight for the bus to Beethoven. And she screams, charge. Before she smashes it into a million little pieces. And then in triumph, she puts her foot up on Schroeder's little toy piano and says, there. What do you think of that? And then she's confused as Schroeder walks away, then goes to a large closet with double doors and selects from two rows of spare Beethoven busts and puts it back on his toy piano. And Lucy says, I'll probably never get married. 

Jimmy: So what made you pick that one?

Mark Evanier: I remember laughing at it when I first read it. Yeah, that's all the reason you have to. I remember thinking, also, he's probably got some more out in the garage. Definitely. yeah, yeah. It's just. It's such a simple, funny strip. It's got a. The punchline is perfectly timed. The reactions in the faces are exactly right. Schroeder has exactly the right expressions. It doesn't really bother him that this, that this statue has been shattered, because he's got plenty of them. And he also knows that Beethoven will endure any assault by Lucy Van Pelt will not succeed. Beethoven will live forever.

Harold: Wow.

Jimmy: I love those little. The shelves of just the little Beethoven heads that he can pick from all six of them there. That's so great.

Mark Evanier: Yeah, yeah. And he's got some. He's got supplies. He's probably got, you know, he's probably got some more on order from Amazon and, you know. Yeah, I, I, the answer to all these strips is why did I pick them? Because I remember them making me laugh. That's, that's, one of the, one of the things, you know, some of the books that. There have been a lot of books about peanuts, as you know, and some of them are very dry, and they kind of forget the fact that the main goal of the strip is be funny.

Harold: Right.

Mark Evanier: And I think one of the reasons I was picked this position here was they thought I wouldn't neglect the funny.

Liz: Yes.

Mark Evanier: So, yeah, that's, that's why I picked that one. Any. Any. Do I need. Do I need more reason than that?

Jimmy: I think that's the best possible reason. 

April 27, 1958. It's another Sunday. They're all Sundays this week, so this is exciting. Charlie Brown is once again going out with his kite. He's going to try to make a go of it. And Lucy's behind him saying, going to give it another try. And Charlie Brown, with a look of stoic determination, says, yep. And then he's rigging the kite up as Lucy sits and watches him. Lies there and watches him, and he says, I figure if I'm ever going to get this kite up in the air, I've got to fly it where there aren't any trees. To which Lucy says, you're very wise, Charlie Brown. Then Lucy helps him out by holding the kite as he starts running. And Charlie Brown screams, okay, let her go. And he's racing, and the kite is struggling behind him. And Lucy's yelling after him, run, Charlie Brown. Get it up. Get it up. Run faster. Run. Then she races to see what has happened. And then the last panel, we see Charlie Brown with the kite having gone down the drain in the gutter at the curb. And a look of absolute frustration and anger is on Charlie Brown's face as he says, I can't stand it.

Michael: It's rare to see Lucy in a supportive role here. Yeah, I think there was one strip where she didn't let go, right?

Jimmy: Yes, I think so. Yeah. What's your thoughts about Lucy and Charlie Brown's relationship, Mark?

Mark Evanier: Well, I'll tell you about this strip first. I put this in, because if you remember, I told you a little while ago, my parents used to go to this bookstore in Westwood and they would buy me Peanuts books there. I have a very vivid memory of being in this store in a building which is now a falafel stand and reading this, just standing there at the table reading this Peanuts book that I was, that were gonna. That they were gonna buy me when they finished their browsing. And I came upon that strip and I laughed out loud and everybody in the store stopped and looked like, hey, what's that kid laughing at? And I felt very self conscious about it, like, oh, I've erred by calling attention to myself, by laughing at a joke at a bookshop. But I remember that strip very vividly and it's to me, a perfect example of the timing of Peanuts and the fact that you just don't see that last panel coming. And it's tricky with a comic strip because you look at a Sunday comic strip, your eye just doesn't see only one panel. You're seeing several panels ahead. But Schulz grabs you, kind of forces you to read the strip in sequence and, and not look ahead. And when I came to that panel, I didn't expect it, you know, I was, whatever, I don't know, I was 8 years old, 10 years old at the time. Maybe as an adult comedy writer I would see this punchline coming today, but I didn't see it then and it caught me and I just laughed out loud. That kind of, you know, surprise, shock laugh that is so wonderful because it's all appropriate. It's a perfect ending for the strip. It fits, but I didn't see it coming. And the relationship between Charlie Brown and Lucy is fascinating. How it ebbs and flows and how Schulz found all these nuances in it. Because, you know, Lucy had many sides. People forget that the first character who hugged Snoopy and said happiness is a warm puppy was Lucy.

Jimmy: Yep.

Mark Evanier: Your memory would tell you, oh, it was probably Charlie Brown or Linus, but it was Lucy because she had that soft, sweet side, even though she was a fussbudget, whatever that ever meant. And she was vulnerable at times. She had a vulnerability underneath her crabbiness. And that's one of the reasons you can do a very successful comic strip if the characters have one dimension. But, Schulz, you can't do it for 50 years. Your characters have to have multi dimensions. Unless you just, you know, decide to keep reprinting, recycling the old gags. And he didn't do that.

Harold: Yeah.

Jimmy: All right, coming up here on number three, this is one. I love this strip. This is 

February 22nd, 1959. And we see Patty and Lucy standing out in the yard. And Lucy's holding one of Charlie Brown's T shirts. And Patty says, where did you find it? And Lucy says, he left it at our house one day last summer when we were all playing under the sprinkler. Then Violet shows up, and Patty says to Lucy, can you get it over your head? And Lucy says, if he can, I can.

Mark Evanier: And there's a joke right there.

Jimmy: Yes, absolutely.

Mark Evanier: One of the themes of Peanuts. And we have a quote from Schulz in the book on this about the cruelty of children. There's the cruelty.

Harold: Absolutely.

Mark Evanier: Yes.

And then the strip continues with Patty saying to Violet, Lucy's putting on one of Charlie Brown's T shirts. And Lucy, in the next panel, has it on. And she says, look, I'm Charlie Brown. Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. Poor, poor me. And Patty and Violet start giggling at this. And then Lucy continues. She's like, I wish I had a friend. Everybody hates me. Nobody likes likes me. At this point, Patty and Violet are hugging each other and just doubled over in laughter. And then Violet looks off in the distance and sees someone coming. She says, hey, here comes Charlie Brown himself. Oh, boy, just wait till he sees Lucy. And Patty says, this ought to be good. So Charlie Brown walks right up to Lucy, Lucy, who looks so proud of herself wearing Charlie Brown's T shirt. And then Charlie Brown says to her, well, hello there, Charlie Brown, you blockhead. And then he walks on, leaving Lucy behind just to sigh as Patty and Violet literally collapse on the ground laughing. 

Jimmy: I think that is such a risk to do a strip where people are laughing in the strip, because if you're not laughing along with them, it would seem, I think, really forced and awkward. But this is just so funny. And the way he draws them laughing in the background kills me.

Mark Evanier: And the way that in the last panel, Lucy has a Charlie Brown expression on her face.

Liz: Yes.

Mark Evanier: Yeah, that's the thing that it's so perfect there.

Jimmy: so great. And you got to give Charlie Brown credit for coming up with the zinger.

Liz: Yes.

Mark Evanier: Yeah, yeah, It's It's. See, it's. It's. It's not. By this point in the strip's history, we know these characters well enough. They can mock each other and, and, you know, pick on each other and things like that. It's, It's. It's just a funny strip. It's one of the. One of the ones I remember laughing at.

Jimmy: Well, this next one is probably the most discussed strip on our podcast. We just picked our top 10 strips personally last week or the week before, and this made all of our top fives. So, 

August 14, 1960. It's Charlie Brown, Linus and Lucy. And they're out atop, a little hill looking at the clouds. And Lucy says, aren't the clouds beautiful? They look like big balls of cotton. Then in the next panel, we see them all lying on the hill. And Lucy says, I could lie here all day and watch them drift by. And then she continues, if you use your imagination, you could see lots of things in the cloud formations. What do you think you see, Linus? And Linus says, well, those clouds up there look to me like the map of the British Honduras of the Caribbean. At this point, Charlie Brown kind of perks up with attention. And Linus continues, that cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor. And that group of clouds over there gives me the impression of the stoning of Stephen. I can see the apostle Paul standing there to one side. At this point, Charlie Brown is utterly baffled and shocked about the. What his friend is seeing in the clouds. Lucy, of course, is unfazed and says, Uh-huh. That's very good. What do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown? And then Charlie Brown says, well, I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsey, but I changed my mind.

Mark Evanier: Yeah, that's a great.

Jimmy: Yeah, that's gotta be up there in anybody's best of, best of, right?

Mark Evanier: Yeah, we used one panel for this, for the cover for the book. and this whole strip, verbatim, was used in one of the animated, features. and it's a wonderful strip. And what's interesting about it to me is the pacing of it and such, and the fact that this would have been half the joke if the last panel had been. Well, I was going to say I saw, a duck on a horse, but I changed my mind. Yeah, the mere fact that he makes the characters, the plots, more juvenile, contrasting to Linus coming up with these sophisticated things. One of the points I make in the book, and I think I accidentally made it twice, but it can be said is I really miss, on the Sunday pages, the top tier, you know, because, as you know, these were all written and drawn so they could be done as two tier strips or three tier strips. And one of the disadvantages Peanuts had is it became more popular and more popular. Most newspapers moved into the front page of the Sunday section and the front page of the Sunday section. If it had been in the middle of the Sunday section, they would have run it unscathed. But since, it was part of the top, they had some advertising to put on the page and they were trying to cram another strip in. So, a lot of papers dropped the top tier. And some of these strips lose something by not having those. Yeah, this strip is more wonderful because of what's on the top, which was not read by a lot of the people who read this strip when it first appeared in their newspapers. Say they look like big balls of cotton. Let's lie here and watch them drift by. And now we start right here. And we don't see clouds, in the truncated strip. We only see. Schiltz only draws clouds. If you saw the unscathed strip. So, yeah, this.

Jimmy: I can't imagine having to write in that format where you have these breaks that are dictated for you and you just have to work around it. And not only the breaks are there, but that a whole section could be removed and it still has to work.

Mark Evanier: Yeah. Well, for a long time there, the Hearst newspapers, unfortunately, Schulz was not drawing for King Features had, a more intricate way to have. They can drop out this panel, they can drop out that panel. And you had to write and draw your strip. So certain panels in the middle could be dropped out. Because they wanted to be able to assemble the strip into. All of a sudden, the Minneapolis newspaper says, oh, we want to be able to put the strip in this space. Can you have it drawn so we can fit it into this space? And they have to do some math and figure out a way to drop it out in this case, I would imagine. I asked Schulz, and I don't remember his answer, but I asked him, do you do the second and third tier and then go back and pad it with the first? And I don't remember. I think he said sometimes, but I know a lot of cartoonists. That's what they have to do. They have to draw, write and draw the strip so it works in its most, you know, limited capacity and then pad it. So then that's A self defeating thing because the more superfluous the top tier becomes, the more likely newspapers are to omit it.

Jimmy: Right.

Mark Evanier: So you're kind of working against yourself. This is something that drove Mort Walker nuts. I know because he and I talked about it once because he just. And sometimes what he would do is he would put a joke in the top tier.

Harold: Yeah.

Mark Evanier: Just, just because. So, so that was a problem. So the hoping he was encouraging them to run it because nobody wants to see their work truncated like that. Crop, crop like that. Even, even, even if it doesn't mean anything for money. You, you, you just, you just would like to have the whole strip there.

Jimmy: Sure. Yeah. You put the effort into it.

Mark Evanier: Yeah.

Harold: Well, I have to say, Mark, This is, this is not just another book. This, I mean, having read and kind of grown up with all of these books and they come out at a time, you really pulled together some of the finest callbacks from some of the previous volumes. This celebration is so well rounded and it has new stories we've never heard before. It is really a remarkable, remarkable book and I do hope our, listeners look for it because there are a lot of Peanuts books out there. But this is, you know, that 25th anniversary one is just amazing. That one is the one that really stands out to me. But this one is remarkably well rounded and taking advantage of all the amazing stuff that's come before. And I don't think there's anything that's more comprehensive than this book.

Mark Evanier: Well, thank you. But I also have to make sure that people understand that this book was not a one man effort. And credit goes to Paige Braddock and the Schulz organization and Lex Fajardo. And I don't want to start naming everybody because this wonderful group of people there, you know, they caught mistakes, they gave me information. Charlie Kochman, who edited the book, Chip Kidd who designed it. I mean, the list of acknowledgments ought to be all on the cover for the people who did this. I had a free ride on a lot of this because these other people did so much work. There's people whose lives are built around protecting Peanuts and being the history. And this is a great thing about doing this book. You know, usually when I was writing things, my agent, we came to that moment when we were discussing how much money I would get. I would say I want to write the project for free and be paid by the number of people who give me notes. And getting into the agreeing to do this Peanuts book, I was suddenly putting myself in a position where dozens of people were going to give me notes.

Harold: Yes.

Mark Evanier: And where. I also knew that I would spend the rest of my life with someone coming up to me saying, how could you have left out the best of. I can't believe that you didn't include this one. and I did not make all the selections of what's in here. And a lot of it was Chip Kidd. A lot of it was Lex and Paige and all the other people there at the. At the museum and at the Schulz operation and Jeanne and all these people. There's this wonderful. I think I use the term or support team. And Peanuts was not abandoned when Schulz died.

Harold: No.

Mark Evanier: He had set up a structure to make sure that it was respected. He set up the ground rules for his continuation that there would be no more strips that he didn't do. Which at the time, I think irked some people who maybe thought they could get the job of trying Peanuts. And there were also, you know, that reprints were okay. I think there were the cartoonists, I know there were cartoonists that said, why does he have to keep. He's dead. Why does he have to keep occupying a piece of real estate on the comic strip page? They could buy my strip instead. That I'm still doing.

Harold: Sure, yeah.

Mark Evanier: I like the fact that, that he. Nobody told him how to do the strip. I mean, he took suggestions from people. He admitted certain gags were inspired by his kids or somebody close to him. Lee Mendelson used to brag about the. Once or twice he gave Schulz an idea for a strip, fine. But nothing got in those pages that he didn't put there. And he could have in his later years if he had. When his hand was getting shaky and we all saw how shaky it got in the last couple years, nobody would have faulted him for bringing someone in to ink the strip and do the lettering or something like that. Nobody would have said, oh, he's goofing off now at his age, he's taking it easy. No, nobody would have said that. But, he had done it so long that way that he didn't want to deviate from was such a one man operation. And we think of it as that, even though obviously hundreds of other people do Charlie Brown for the TV specials and other people adopted his work for the merchandise sometimes. And other people did the comic books. This 75th volume comes with a copy of the comic book. So there's Peanuts stories in there that Schulz didn't write or draw. But again, they were done under his supervision. He was very, very fussy about how this was done even before the strip was making him the kind of money that he eventually made off it. The amount of monies he made when the strip was really flourishing after it became a series of TV specials was staggering. And it didn't change the strip one bit. He didn't start putting in characters for merchandising reasons. He didn't start skewing it to please the T shirt companies or anything like that. He kept doing this strip his way all the time. 

And we all have our favorites. We can all mention the strips we love and the parts that didn't interest us. Maybe, oh, I didn't like that storyline. Fine. You can't do that strip that long without having favorites and non favorites among your readership. But everybody who buys this book is going to, you know, come to the point where it's. We get to get to the strips they love and they're going, ah, yeah, I'm glad this is in here. I made them put in one sequence. Some of the strips were picked before I was involved in this book. And there was one sequence in Peanuts I made them put in. I said, you got to put this in for me because it's my favorite sequence in Peanuts. It's the one where Charlie Brown and his team won a baseball game and then had had to forfeit it. And I don't want to say more than that because the whole sequence is in the book and I want people to read it without me spoiling the punchline. But the punchline is one of the most brilliant strips ever. If I could have picked a sequence instead of picking five individual strips, I would have picked that sequence as my favorite, probably. And then again, if you ask me, the next day I might pick something else. I loved it when, when, you know, Sally Brown is yelling at the school building. I mean, I loved it. I loved, I love a lot of the stuff where, where Snoopy, this, the Red Baron stuff was fine, but I loved some of the other characters Snoopy became.

Harold: Yeah.

Mark Evanier: As even more. I love some of the time, some of the simplestly drawn strips where it's just Charlie Brown doing a soliloquy. I love those things. I love the little red haired girl stuff. I love Linus patting birds on the head. She didn't do for that long on the strip, but it's one of those memories I always have of the strip.

Jimmy: Well, that brings us to our last strip that you selected. 

October 16, 1983. and last Sunday, and we see Charlie Brown outside and he Says, looking off panel, he says, she's got to be kidding. She must think I'm really dumb. And then, of course, we see Lucy sitting there with the football. And she says, here we go, Charlie Brown. I'll hold the ball and you come running up and kick it. And Charlie Brown says, what you really mean is you'll pull the ball away and I'll land on my back and kill myself. Well, I have news for you. Never again. Forget it. And Lucy looks very upset by this. And Charlie Brown walks away as Lucy yells after him, wait. And Charlie Brown says, I said forget it. And then he turns to call back to her as he's walking away and says, I'm just glad you're the only person in the world who thinks I'm dumb enough to fall for that trick again. And then in the last panel, we see Snoopy, Woodstock, Sally, Peppermint Patty and Marcie all holding footballs for Charlie Brown.

Michael: That's a bit of a stretch there.

Mark Evanier: I'll tell you what's wonderful about this gag for me. I'm fascinated by the timing of the punch lines always. And if you look at this as a double punchline, here you look, and your first impression when you look at that last panel is, wow, everybody's out there thinking Charlie's dumb enough to follow that trick again. And then you go a little closer and Woodstock, I mean, if it's bad enough that Snoopy with a smug look on his face like, yeah, you'll fall for this, you jerk. It says Snoopy, his own dog. The dog he feeds is doing it to him. And then you look over and your eye goes to Woodstock, who has a Woodstock sized football. Where did Woodstock get a tiny football? We don't know, but he's got one and he's sitting there ready to play this trick on Charlie Brown. I just think this is such a funny gag. It is just so damn funny and silly. and Charlie Brown's expression is just perfect. This is Schulz. You know, we talked, just a minute ago about how he always wanted to do everything himself. The expression on Charlie Brown's face is something that Schulz could have drawn in pencil and someone else could have inked, but he had the control, the final say of the way it came off his pen or brush. I think he was using a pen on these things and a, way it just came off that way, and he got the expression exactly right. And if you look at Schulz originals, I've seen very few corrections on them. I've seen very few cases where he drew Charlie Brown's face and he decided to change the expression, whited something out. maybe he used an electric eraser occasionally. I don't know. But I think you almost always got it right the first time. And the first time was not in the penciling. It was in the inking. That's when it became final. And I think he sometimes looked at the finished expression and laughed at it, because he said, yes, that captures it perfectly. And it's the fact that those characters are all kneeling there with smug expressions on their faces holding a football. And they were all. They were all waiting there for him. They expected him to, you know, fall flat on his back and kill himself again. And here's. And also, I don't know what number this was in the Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown thing, but, you know, it was the fact that. What year was this? This is 83, I think.

Jimmy: 83.

Mark Evanier: Yeah. Okay, so this is what the. If he only did one a year, this is like the 28th time he did it. And he's got a different twist on the gag.

Jimmy: Yeah, he's.

Mark Evanier: He's. He's not repeating the old gag. This is based on the assumption that, you know the gag already. Yes, yes, yes. You know, it's. You know, and. And this is a. Here's a good example where the top tier is kind of superfluous.

Jimmy: Yeah.

Mark Evanier: And he may have written this, the top, bottom two tiers, and then written the top. And he gives. But even then, he gives Lucy the first line. She starts it. That makes the, You know, Charlie Brown didn't say it. Didn't initiate this. He didn't say, hey, I want to try the kicking the football again. No. By this point in the history of the strip, he knows not to do it.

Jimmy: Right.

Mark Evanier: You know, he's not that dumb. And, what's neat is, you know, look how simple the tree, the backgrounds. There's one tree in the top panel. There's a little shrub in the next to last panel, but there's not much background there. And, you know, Schulz was one of the only cartoonists who drew grass as a side view.

Jimmy: That's true.

Mark Evanier: You know, so, it's there, and it's a wonderful strip.

Jimmy: Well, Mark, thank you so much for coming on the show, and I think your book is wonderful. I hope. I know all of our readers will be interested in it, and I hope they go out and buy it. we've been fans of where can.

Mark Evanier: Where.

Liz: Where's a good place for them to buy the Essential Peanuts

Mark Evanier: Any place you want. I get the same money wherever you buy it.

Jimmy: wherever fine books are sold.

Liz: Where can they follow your blog?

Mark Evanier: Well, My blog is news from me m.com n e w-s f R-O-M-M e.com. i've been doing it since the Paleolithic era, since we used to blog on rocks. every day I get up and I write something silly on it. I write stories from my past. I write observations. I sometimes get into politics. If you want to steer clear of politics, steer clear of my blog. I just write whatever's on my mind that day, and it's all mine. I do it all myself. It's like Schulz. I won't let anybody else touch it. I get all these offers from people who want to write articles for my blog, and I won't let them because it's mine.

Jimmy: That is fantastic, Mark. Thank you so much.

Mark Evanier: All right. Thank you for asking me. Anytime.

Liz: Awesome.

Harold: Ah.

Mark Evanier: All right.

Jimmy: We'd love to have you back and do an, all Dick Van Dyke and Laurel and Hardy episode.

Michael: No, I want a Vince Colletta episode.

Mark Evanier: Oh, no comment. Thank you.

Jimmy: Oh, well, that was awesome. It was so great. I mean, we, could have talked to Mark for about a week. He kept bringing up other things that we. It was uncanny. All the things we touched on that are other. Our other interests.

Harold: Yeah, Mark. Mark was a fan. An early, early fandom, and all of the things he loved pretty much he got to work on. and that's. It's a fascinating career to look at. Look at his Wikipedia page or just see all the different things he's touched. And as he said, he was always an advocate from a fan's perspective for the things he was working on.

Liz: Yeah.

Jimmy: Yep. Absolutely. he is wrong, though. his comics in the 80s were great, and things were better then, so.

Michael: Yeah, well, no, of course. Absolutely amazing life. unfortunately, there's, like, almost too much you kind of want to tell. You know, we all have stories, but.

Liz: Let'S do a podcast about Mark Evanier.

Michael: We could do a podcast about him talking about, like, anything.

Liz: Yeah.

Mark Evanier: Yeah.

Michael: I mean, I had a few comments I could have said, but I went like, yeah, somebody who's, like, gets phone calls from Dick Van Dyke, doesn't want to. Doesn't want to hear from me.

Mark Evanier: Yeah, but you.

Liz: You did hang out in the same bookstore.

Mark Evanier: Well, yeah, but.

Liz: And at about the same time.

Michael: Well, I could have easily been involved in fandom in the. In the 60s, but I never heard of it in the 60s. I was like the birth of comic fandom. I was there. I was a fanatic. I would have joined all those clubs and been part of that scene. I just never encountered anyone who knew about that.

Harold: Even though you were in those stores where they were mad, you do that, do that for people who were into it.

Michael: If anyone would have said, hey, we've got a, you know, a Marvel club, I would have joined instantly.

Liz: But you also had your own friends that, you were your own fan club.

Michael: But we didn't know about this stuff. So, yeah, I would have been part of the fandom  scene, fanzine scene, probably, maybe even done some drawings, but.

Jimmy: Oh, well.

Liz: Oh, well, let's go back in time… So, Harold, where are you going to be?

Harold: So, the weekend of Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Saturday and Sunday, I will be at the Christmas crafts at Turning Stone in Verona, New York, which I believe is a casino, but they've got a little three day Christmas event. I will be there selling, selling my wares. So if anyone's in upstate New York and wants to come by, I'd love to say hi.

Jimmy: All right, well, this was another fun week. We'll be back next time where we're, continuing our season of understanding Snoopy. So until then, for Michael, Harold and Liz. This is Jimmy saying, be a good cheer.

Mark Evanier: Yes, yes, be you.

Michael: Be a good cheer.

VO: Unpacking Peanuts is copyright Jimmy Gownley, Michael Cohen, Harold Buchholz and Liz Sumner. Produced and edited by Liz Sumner. Music by Michael Cohen. Additional voiceover by Aziza Shukralla Clark. For more from the show, follow Unpack Peanuts on Instagram and threads. 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.

Mark Evanier: The Greatest of All Time. That was not my title. I wanted to call it, “It's another damn book about you, Charlie Brown.”