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Blog Entry: Very Late Tribute to the Late Charles Schulz This is a single entry from my blog. You can also view the main blog page, which has additional links and options, including my contact information, links to my home page/other sites, etc

Blog Entry: Very Late Tribute to the Late Charles Schulz

2005 September 18, 12:56 AM

Back in November 1997, Robert Cook (http://olywa.net/cook/) and I wondered how Charles Schulz would end the Peanuts series when he was ready to retire. We ultimately speculated (incorrectly) that Schulz probably had a large staff of cartoonists working for him, and that the strip would long outlive him. Despite this, we drew up (well, I suggested and Robert drew) our thoughts on what the last few Peanuts strips might look like, calling our version "Cracked Nuts". I originally meant to post these in January 1998, but never got around to it (don't ask me why-- this blog is a great excuse to dredge up all the material I've wanted to post, but never did). When Charles Schulz retired (14 December 1999) and subsequently died (12 February 2000, the night before his last comic strip ran-- thus, his comic strip did outlive him -- by 1 day), my desire to post these strips (with some minor changes) was rekindled. I came up with several clever ways of releasing them-- watermarking, auto-releasing one per day, using HTTP_REFERER to avoid "improper" linking, etc. These ways were so clever that they would require a fair amount of time to program, so I never actually got around to posting the strips. If I had, they could've become the first tribute strips posted after Schulz's death (since they'd already been written and drawn 2 years ago), and we could've ridden some of the hoopla surrounding Schulz's death. In a way, I'm glad we didn't do this, but I became so despondent over not posting these strips "at the right time", I kept delaying putting them up at all ("if I didn't post them in February 2000, what's the point of posting them now?"). For what it's worth, here they are now. Caveats: 1) a lot of the jokes in these strips have already been used in other tributes-- we wrote most of them back in late 1997/early 1998, so the jokes are "original", even if they don't appear to be. 2) this isn't a "tribute" in the traditional sense-- it's rather crass (sort of in the style of Blackadder, where major characters [sometimes all of them] die in the last episode of each season) and somewhat satirical-- definitely NOT the sort of thing Schulz would've drawn. 3) most of these strips were written in late 1997/early 1998, but some were written (or edited or re-written) in late 1999/early 2000: