Original Peanuts Art — On a Middle School Wall?!?

My daughter is a competitive dancer. Last month, that activity took us up to Greenwich, CT and a dance competition held in a middle school’s auditorium over the course of a weekend.

Parents moved in and out of the auditorium to see their kids dance, taking breaks in the relative quiet of the front lobby.

It didn’t take me long before I saw something that I never expected:

There on the wall, mounted just outside the boy’s bathroom, was a framed piece of original comic strip art.

It’s a Peanuts daily strip from 1996. It’s even signed by Charles Schulz.

I inspected it closer. Because I’m a lettering nerd, I zoomed in hard on that first.

I love that trademark shaky line from Schulz’s later career. It’s oddly organic and soothing in its own way.

Also of interest is that he erased whatever pencil work he might have done in setting up the final lettering. I looked very very closely at this strip and could only find the faintest hint of a pencil mark. He either erased everything beautifully to present a pristine strip, or he was just so good after 40 years of practice that he didn’t do much pencil work first, even with the lettering. Or he lightboxed it, I suppose.

The panel border has that shakiness, too, but most of it is on the outside of the border. I’m guessing it’s straighter on the inside because that’s where he was holding the ruler up to keep the line straight. There’s still some waviness there, but not the same regular shake.

Check out his work with the Zipatone here. Schulz did not use Photoshop. This is hand-cut tone added to the strip just to make Charlie Brown’s seat — is that a bean bag chair? — look gray. Schulz includes a couple stress lines across the middle of it, and then he cuts the tone carefully around it.

I have to admit that I stared at that original art a lot over the course of the weekend. I hope I didn’t embarrass my daughter too much. heh.

Not Just Peanuts

Across the way, a Sunday Beetle Bailey page hung on the wall:

Pardon the glare, but it wasn’t really possible to get a good picture without the overhead lights reflecting on any of the glass. There are cutouts above and below the art which are empty. I wonder what used to be in there? A dedication to the school? A little extra title art or something? I don’t know.

It’s signed, but not by Mort Walker and not to the school where I was standing:

I had to look it up, but that’s Jerry Dumas’ signature. He worked with Walker as a gag writer and illustrator on both Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois. (There’s an Eastern Middle School in Greenwich. Maybe that was a Jr. High School in the 1960s?)

That’s when it dawned on me — Mort Walker spent time in Greenwich, CT. He started the Museum of Comics Art there in the mid-1970s. He was a local.

A number of comic strip artists lived up in Connecticut, probably because it was so close to New York City where all the publishers and syndicates were. That included Dik Browne, Al Capp, Alex Raymond, Chester Gould, John Cullen Murphy, Walt Kelly, Ernie Bushmiller, and Chic Young. (The Comics Journal has a piece on the Alex Raymond circle of cartoonists in Connecticut.)

Dumas, I learned, moved to Greenwich in 1956 to assist Walker. This strip on the wall was dated 1968.

But, wait! There’s one more comic on another wall.

Joe Palooka!

“Joe Palooka” ran from 1930 to 1984. These three strips are not sequential. One has a 1970 date on it. Another says 1973. The top strip doesn’t have any date on it. They’re signed by series creator Ham Fischer and Tony DiPreta. Wikipedia says Fischer stopped working on the strip by 1956, so that’s likely the legacy credit. DiPreta probably did all the artwork. Morris Weiss is listed as the writer at the time in Wikipedia.

DiPreta used Zipatone in the strip, too, for the boxer’s skin color in the first strip. Here’s a closeup:

It’s always fun to see how a sheet of black dots would wind up looking like gray tone in the newspaper by the time the art is shrunk down and put in newsprint.

(Also, get a load of that sound effect!)

Was this supposed to be Howard Cosell?

Unlike the Schulz piece above, you can see plenty of pencil work in these strips.

By this strip in 1973, DiPreta was signing the work solo, too.

Comics: I Just Can’t Get Away From Them

That was a weird oasis of comics art in a most unexpected place. I’m pretty sure that at this point, I can’t avoid them. No matter where I go, I’ll always find something.

This, though, was a super pleasant surprise: A real life “Peanuts” original!

I’ll be back to European comics next, I promise…