Friday Night Fights: You Blockhead!

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And now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for:

 

 

 

 

 

Good Grief, Bahlactus!
What am I supposed to do for the next two weeks?

 

The all-out slugfest pictured above can be found in Fantagraphics’ wonderful Complete Peanuts 1965-1966. And seriously, considering that it’s also got Lucy vs. Snoopy in the Brawl For It All, I think it’s safe to say that it’s the fightinest volume of Peanuts on the stands.

24 thoughts on “Friday Night Fights: You Blockhead!”

  4. Sure, I remember that one. Then Lucy wails and screams about how Charlie Brown hit a defenseless girl, right? The Lucy/Snoopy fight had more action, though. And by “action”, I mean “kisses on the nose”.

    Man, I knew I’d read a lot of Peanuts collections in my youth, but I appear to have just about memorized them. Scary.

  7. I love that strip, haven’t seen it in years. Charlie Brown letting the ho’s know that the pimp hand is swift, lol.

  8. You think Peanuts…sucks?

    You know I’m not the one to throw the term “bad opinion” around a lot, but in this case…

  9. I never knew this existed!

    Good to see Charlie Brown, the metaphor of the down trodden common man actually sticking up for himself.

    Stitch that bee-yotch!

  11. To be fair, I used to be pretty down on Peanuts myself. Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, the only stuff I ever saw from the strip was on its downward arc leading towards the end, and I really only had affection for the Christmas Special.

    That said, after reading through the Fantagraphics reprints, I’ve learned that the early stuff was absolutely golden. It’s dated, of course, but it surpasses that problem with some really excellent gags that defined that three-panel format, and it’s just a joy to read.

    So what I’m trying to say here is this: You’re wrong, but it’s understandable why you would be.

  12. While on the subject of Fight comics, how come there’s no love for Asterix? Just because the French are a bunch of surrender monkeys doesn’t mean they can’t make some good fight comics.

    Asterix has everything you want in a fight: In place of Nazis, you have the Roman Legion having their ass kicked by a midget with a facial hair, alongside a with his huge oaf of a friend, Obelix. And in almost every issue, anytime Asterix goes to another part of the globe, he always kicks pirates’ asses so often, it become a running joke for them to sink their own ship if they ever meet the little guy again.

    Here are some websites to refresh your memory, Chris & Bach:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix
    http://gb.asterix.com/

  13. Wow, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard a bad word about Peanuts on the Internet.

    I agree with Sims, though; as a kid reading the funnies, I never cared much of Peanuts, and the animated specials all suck hard (even the Christmas Special, great music aside), but the strip is great.

    The first few volumes of the Fanta collections really blew my mind, on account of how different they are. Snoopy, Charlie Brown and all those other characters Schulz eventually refined into the forms we’re familiar with now seriously looked completely different in that first volume.

    And, c’mon, Peanuts is the SECOND WORST strip in the world? Worse than Cathy? Or Garfield? Or Marvin? Or Funky Cancerbean? Or, well, anything else on the comics page these days? Even the ones that used to be good are just…God, I can barely slog through a funnies page these days…

  14. Peanuts actually gets bashed a lot over at “Comics Should Be Good”‘s column about 365 great things to love about comics.

    I’ve even read some remarks over at Comics Curmudgeon.

    However, like Chris points out, many people ONLY got to read the strip during it’s 20+ year slow downward spiral, when SALLY and WOODSTOCK were, by then, long-known characters.

    As a reader (and owner of some of those old hand-size paperbacks, and 6″x6” books) I have to say, the early stuff was every kind of fantastic!

    Even as a kid in the 70’s it wasn’t bad.
    By that time it was treading much of the same water as it had earlier, but in a more polished way, always trying (yet not always successfully) to toss in some topicality.

    But, if ALL you had to go on was the stuff from the mid 1980’s to his passing, I can definitely understand the negative comments.

    ~P~
    P-TOR

  15. I’d actually like to defend Schulz’s strips from about 1994-95 until he died; Rerun Van Pelt emerged as the innocent little kid who loved to play with Snoopy and who looked up to Charlie Brown, and it changed all kinds of dynamics. Charlie Brown started *winning* near the end of the strip’s run, Schulz started experimenting with single-panel strips and captions…I’m not really looking forward to the Peanuts collections through the ’80s either, but I am looking forward to everything from the “Joe Agate” saga on.

  16. “Peanuts actually gets bashed a lot over at “Comics Should Be Good”’s column about 365 great things to love about comics.”

    Uh, if by “bashed a lot” you mean I said I didn’t like it one time and then wrote a column on it anyway to please my faithful readers…

  18. Perhaps, I should quantify my statement for Bill Reed.

    “Bashed a lot” not necessarily BY the column authors moreso as by the COMMENTS.

    Maybe, as one who reads the text pieces as well as the comments and logs them all into a collective “experience”, I did not intend to make it seem as though the one is the same as the other.

    But it was a specific site that I recalled reading negative comments, such as they were, about Peanuts.

    ~P~
    P-TOR

  19. Well of course Peanuts sucks…the characters never said “fuck” once in 50 years, and they’re never shown playing or commenting on videogames. You can’t expect folks on the internet to get behind something so impossibly *lame*.

    Interesting real fact about Peanuts…Lucy was based on his first wife. Needless to say they didn’t have the happiest marriage.

  21. Wow, so much criticism for the second greatest comic ever made (after Pogo). Even as a kid, I knew Peanuts was genius. I think his final stuff is utter brilliance, full of senile weirdness.

    I can’t believe that someone (Chris) who appreciates the insanity of Archie comics or those silver age writers named Bob (who wrote some stuff so insane it really is just stupid) would think that ’80s Peanuts wasn’t utterly awesome.

    In short: Peanuts rules, tha haterz are fools. And you can’t argue with that. That’s logic.

  22. As a reader (and owner of some of those old hand-size paperbacks, and 6″x6″ books) I have to say, the early stuff was every kind of fantastic!

    Man, I remember those books. The library in my hometown in Mississippi was little more than a badly organized dumping ground for 30-year-old books and not really a high priority for the townsfolk. Yeah, big shock, I know, but it did have a truckload of old Peanuts collections someone donated back during the Civil War, I mean stuff right from the beginning of the strip. Beautiful stuff, even though some pencil-wielding wit who got the books before me apparently decided that not only did characters like Shermy need a bit of toughing up in the language department, but also that Peppermint Patty needed a huge talliwhacker drawn on her.

  23. I grew up in the 60s, and while an avid reader early on, those Peanuts 6″x6″ books were my absolute favorite book of choice.

    I’m certain my use of the word “sarcasm” at age 5 (and understanding of what it meant) is due to those books.

    Thank you, Charles Shultz, wherever you are.

  24. I’d say Peanuts’ ‘Golden Age’ was probably from the mid-’50s to the mid-’70s. Things started slipping when Sally began talking to her school and her school started thinking back. Still, that’s twenty years of near perfection.

    I agree with the comment that in the mid-’90s Peanuts ‘suddenly’ got good again.

    And I admit the ’80s was not the strip’s shining moment. But that’s okay, the ’80s weren’t my shining moment, either.