♪ (heroic music) ♪ ♪ ♪ - Hello, and welcome to Comic Culture.

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is writer Mark Evanier.

Mark, welcome to Comic Culture.

- Thank you for having me.

- Mark, you are a writer of many things, from comics to books about comics to TV shows.

And your latest work is a book about one of my favorite all-time newspaper strips, Peanuts.

So how did you get involved in Essential Peanuts?

- People came and asked me to write this book, and I said yes instantly.

It took about a second and a half for me to think.

I didn't ask how much I was going to be paid.

I didn't ask what the deadline was.

I just knew, here's a chance to spend a couple of months of my life reading Peanuts strips, getting paid something for it.

It's a strip I've loved all my life.

I knew Mr.

Schultz a little bit, not as much as-- well, some people do.

But I just thought it would be a fun assignment to do, and it was.

I was right.

- Peanuts is-- it's a strip that basically, it transcended the newspapers.

I mean, it's been films.

It's been classic holiday TV specials.

The music has become part of the holiday season.

So as somebody-- myself, I love Peanuts.

You love Peanuts.

As somebody who is a big fan, you get to read through things.

Are you discovering things that you actually surprised that they got away with?

Or were you looking at something and thinking, maybe it didn't age as well as you'd hoped?

- I was amazed how well it aged.

There was very little topical stuff in it.

There are things in it that Schultz never did again, or he decided to change the characters.

There's a lot of missteps in the first few years.

You can see him figuring out that on the job.

One of the amazing things about doing a newspaper strip is you got to do it every day.

And that's good in that you-- the strip you did yesterday that wasn't very funny is already forgotten and wrapped around a fish somewhere.

But it's bad because you have that pace to do it, and you can't sometimes step back.

I know I talk to a lot of cartoonists about this.

It's maddening that they have to produce every day, or at least on the average of every day.

But it's also fulfilling because they're reaching out to the audience every day, and the audience is with you.

And when they put together the first collection of Peanuts strips, Mr.

Schultz was a little shocked.

He looked back at the strips he drew only a couple of years ago and see how the characters had changed.

And the first Peanuts paperback is very light on stuff from the first year because he had evolved so much in the first year or two of the strip that he didn't want people really looking at the early strips and seeing a different Charlie Brown, a different Snoopy, than what he was now doing.

It's only in the last few years that they have reprinted the entirety of Peanuts or made it available online.

He did not sanction, I don't think, any reprints of the first year while he was alive.

- It's one of those things-- I remember growing up and reading early Peanuts and comparing it to what I would either get at the Scholastic Fair.

One of the ones that I still have at home is Speak Softly and Carry a Beagle, one of those great collections.

And comparing those early strips to what was in the newspaper that week.

And you could see that evolution.

So as somebody who is going back and getting a chance to look at these archives and getting a chance to see that evolution, you said that Schultz was critical of his earlier work, perhaps a little bit more than his more iconic work.

But did you see the moments, perhaps, when he started to figure out, oh, Snoopy should look like this and not like that, and Charlie Brown should always do this instead of that?

- One of the premises of the book-- this was not my idea, but it was a very good idea-- was to do the essential Peanuts.

And a jury of Peanuts experts voted 75 strips, which were reproduced in the book, which were essential in the sense of that the first time Schultz introduced a key character or the first time he introduced a key storyline or some bit, the first time Snoopy typed "It's a Dark and Stormy Night," the first time Charlie Brown had to kick the football, so on.

And in the book, we print these essential strips and discuss what he was establishing there.

And then we print a lot of supplementary strips, which show how he devolved the idea and developed it over the following years and how it changed and such.

And it's really kind of fascinating to me to watch this man's mind at work.

Usually, if you look at a body of work, if you looked over 50 years of most newspaper strips, you'd be looking at a collective work, a bunch of different writers, a bunch of different artists, people who assist.

Schultz did everything on the strip himself, every drop of ink on that strip.

Nobody would have faulted him if he'd hired some people to assist him.

All the great newspapers and cartoonists practically did.

But he wanted it to be all his.

And that made looking at a whole series of Peanuts unique, because you're looking at the work of one man and one mind and seeing how he's changed his mind or how he's gone to other places with ideas.

- The evolution of an artist is a fascinating thing, because it's one thing you start a story, you think it's going to go one place.

It's another thing when you are doing it for a number of years.

And when you are doing something and you find that rhythm-- in your research, did you ever find that Schultz was becoming maybe a little bored with the strip?

I know he went 50 years, and he timed it perfectly.

I think the last strip came out around his passing.

And as we are about 75 years- - The last strip came out the day he died, which is a frightening concept.

But go ahead.

- So were you finding any instances of perhaps he was losing enthusiasm for the strip beyond the fact that it's just time to retire?

- I think at most, he occasionally lost enthusiasm for one storyline or one train of thought.

But one of the nice things about the strip over the years is he kept coming up with something fresh every so often, a new character, a new something that Snoopy-- a new world that Snoopy was imagining himself into, a new level of humiliation for Charlie Brown, a new way for Charlie Brown to not kick the football.

I think one of the things he made a personal challenge of was to take one of these recurring ideas that people wanted to see.

There was a point after which people would have been upset if he hadn't occasionally had put Snoopy on the doghouse going after the Red Baron or occasionally had Charlie try to kick the football or occasionally had Lucy talking to Schroeder about Beethoven.

So it was like a personal challenge.

How do I make it different this time?

How do I make it fresh?

And I think that you'll see that if you look through the book.

I'm not trying to keep talking about the book.

To plug it, I'm trying to say that that's the thesis of the book is, look at how this strip went over 50 years and how it changed and how his life-- we also parallel his life and things that happened in his life that affected the strip.

When Schultz's house burned down, Snoopy's house burned down.

When Schultz had an injury on his leg, Snoopy had an injury on his leg.

There's a lot of those parallels there.

And I just-- you feel close to this guy.

I met him a few-- on a number of occasions.

I got to talk to him at length a few times.

But I always felt like I knew him even before that.

I felt like this guy was a friend of mine.

When I first met him, it was like, oh, yes.

Here's this guy whose work I've been following for years.

As long as I can remember, Peanuts has been a part of my life.

I don't remember a life without Peanuts.

- As somebody who is writing about Peanuts, what is that like for you?

I know you tapped a number of collaborators who would write an essay about a particular character or a particular storyline.

But as somebody who is tasked with going through the archives, with coming up with this idea, these 75 strips that were voted by the jury, what does that comprise for you?

Because that seems like there's going to be research for every single one of those strips.

- Well, there was.

And of course, one of the pitfalls of doing a book like this is that I'm already having people call me up saying, how could you leave out this sequence?

How could you leave out that strip?

That was the best-- and of course, when you first discover Peanuts, that material of that era may have a special fondness for you.

That's Charlie Brown to you, even though he was different before, maybe a little bit different afterwards.

But you look at this, and then when you look-- the research was a lot of this was going back and looking over.

I had the advantage of access to a secret website that the Schultz Estate, the Peanuts organization as it exists now, has, which has all the strips online, cross-indexed.

And I could type in, show me all the times Pigpen appeared.

Show me all the times that Charlie Brown was trying to fly a kite, or whatever it was, and look at all the different times over the years and see how it changed, and how he repeated himself, and how things grew.

You can see him, of course, correcting along the way.

For instance, when he introduced Linus, first Lucy, and then Linus, they were much younger than Charlie Brown, and they couldn't really talk.

And he quickly evolved them into articulate characters with distinctive personalities.

They weren't much used to him to perform a daily strip, where they were just little kids who had no personality.

That was obvious.

And so you can see him also drop out ideas of the figures.

Shermy and Patty were in the first Peanuts strip, and eventually they just became spear carriers in the background, and eventually he'd go years without even mentioning them, to the point where he could introduce a new character called Peppermint Patty, and nobody would say, hey, you already have a Patty in the strip.

- I remember a Mad Magazine parody where it was about Peanuts, and Shermy goes back to the old neighborhood, and I think Charlie Brown has a toupee.

It was, again, I guess showing the impact of Peanuts.

- Yeah, Schultz was a fan of Mad Magazine.

In fact, he worked Alfred E. Newman into one strip that's in the book.

It's rare that you see in a visual medium, there's plenty of prose books that are like this, but it's rare that you see in a visual medium a body of work by one man where you're not looking at the work of the team, you're not looking at his collaborators, where the guy who made the photostats, mailed the strips out, things like that, or whatever helped him in that kind of stuff.

It's all him, even the lettering.

That's why you feel close to this person.

It's like a great standup comedian who's kind of, he's out there by himself, it's all coming out of him.

You can identify with him.

It's the same way with Schultz.

He was one guy in the newspaper, and the strip above his or below his was probably a team effort.

Maybe it was being done by the third or fourth or 12th artists who did it.

I mean, there's strips that were around as long as Peanuts or longer that were the work of 20 people over the years, 30 people over the years.

Mort Walker's strips, he had several of Beetle Bailey and IMOs.

They were always team efforts, or at least after the first year, after they were successful enough for Walker could afford to hire other people to help him.

It was always a team effort.

And he came up with lots of wonderful gags.

It's a wonderful body of work, but it's a different body of work because I don't think you feel as close to Mort Walker if you read a whole run of Beetle Bailey as you do looking at Schultz.

There's not that many cartoonists who made such an impact on their readers.

- Now, I wanna switch gears a little bit because you are, in addition to writing about Charles Schultz and Peanuts, you also wrote and worked with Jack Kirby, wrote about Jack Kirby.

So as somebody who is doing this sort of biography of these great creators, how did your style change from your earlier work to what you're doing now?

- I got paid a little better for it as it went along.

I have been fortunate.

I have met an awful lot of the people who created the work that I loved as a child.

Jack Kirby was one.

I worked for Hanna-Barbera.

I got to work with Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.

I was friends with a lot of the guys who made the Warner Brothers cartoons.

I worked a little with Jay Ward on some projects.

I have been very fortunate in bonding with my childhood favorites or the things I loved that forced me, really almost forced me in my career as a writer.

And Jack Kirby was a brilliant, brilliant man at what he did.

Schultz was a brilliant... We have, in the book, by the way, we have one collaboration between Jack Kirby and Charles Schultz and Russell Myers.

It was a centerfold in a San Diego convention program book.

The three of them each did part of the same drawing.

I've gotten to meet a lot of geniuses, people who were worried about that title.

We meet tons of genius.

This is everybody's genius at something.

But we met, I got to meet people I consider geniuses and they were unique individuals.

They were not quite like anybody else you met and they were all pretty much very, very hard workers.

That was a constant, where the people who worked very, very hard and produced the work they wanted to produce.

Things did not get into their work by accident or because somebody else stuck it in.

Jack Kirby, pure Jack Kirby work was pure Jack Kirby work.

And just as Schultz's work was pure Schultz.

And some of the other people I had the fortune to work with.

- Now, one of the people that you had the good fortune to work with is Sergio Aragonese on a strip that is... - Oh yeah, him.

- Going back, gosh, a little bit more than 40 years at this point, "Groo the Wanderer."

So how does this relationship work?

Because I know that Sergio is known as being, I guess, the fastest cartoonist in all the land because he can just come up with a million ideas overnight and give you all those pages.

So when you're working on the book, is this something where he's just handing you a bunch of brilliant illustrations and you are adding the text to it?

- No, no, Sergio is my best friend in the male category.

And I've known him for more than 40 years.

We talk almost every day.

I say we never had a fight.

The only arguments we've ever had is why we've never had a fight.

No, it's because of this or because of this.

And people think of Sergio because English is not his native language and because so much of his work has been in pantomime cartoons, they think of him as inarticulate.

He's not, he's a brilliant man.

And there's a lot of stuff in "Groo the Wanderer" that people think, oh yeah, that's Mark there 'cause it's a verbal gag and that's Sergio there 'cause it's a visual gag.

And sometimes it's the opposite, exactly the opposite of that.

We just kind of go back and forth as two guys kind of creating the book together.

He created "Groo the Wanderer" and then asked me to join him.

We put his name over the title because it's his book and I'm kind of the add on.

And for years we kept my credit ambiguous, what I did.

We made a joke out of it because I didn't want, I felt if people, if I said, if it's ever said writer in any format of my name, people would never turn loose of the idea.

Oh yeah, Mark writes "Groo."

No, no, it's Mark and Sergio together, right?

And so we do a lot of the, well, we've been doing it on the phone since COVID started to happen.

We used to have Sergio would come into my house here and he'd sit over the other side of this room and we'd talk ideas out.

And essentially the underlying premise of the comic was for us to make each other laugh.

If other people did, that was a bonus, but we just wanted to have, I felt very good if Sergio laughed at something, he would very good if I laughed at something and it worked very well.

And we've been doing it over and over again.

I'm working on an issue right now.

And we just, I feel when people collaborate, they've got to invent the way that works the best for them.

I have done lots of comics with lots of different people and I work different methods with different people because different people I work with have different skill sets and different strengths.

For a, there was a time there when I was doing a comic book called "The DNAgents" with a great artist named Will Mineo.

Simultaneously, I was doing a book for DC called "Black Hawk" with a great artist named Dan Spiegel.

Some of the things I was doing Groo and I had a couple of other things.

And each of those artists had one, they were very talented and they were good friends.

It was friends collaborating.

'Cause I've collaborated with strangers in comics too and it's not as much fun.

But we would invent a way to do what, take what I did best or least worst and put it with what they did best.

- So I'm thinking of "Groo" and the cast of characters and the journey that the publication has taken going from different publishers to publisher to publisher to continue on all these years.

So the team has stayed together.

You, Sergio and Stan have stayed together working on this book.

So what part of the business side creeps into the creative where you are saying, okay, well, we're not at Epic anymore.

Now we need to move across the street to Dark Horse or some other publisher to continue the book going on.

- The business part of this is the only non-fun part of the project.

We were at Epic, we did 120 issues in 120 months without a fill in.

I mean, most people have never done that.

And people working in comics for years who never did 120 issues of anything consistently.

We just enjoyed doing the book and we left.

There were reasons each time, maybe not good ones.

We just felt, man, maybe it's time to do something else, go somewhere else.

A couple of times we put the company out of business which helped get us to the next company.

Kind of the unspoken joke here is Groo in the comics goes from town to town and leaves them all burning and destroyed or he gets on ships and they sink.

And for a while then we were going to publishers and they would sink and we'd go to the next one just like Groo did.

We've been with Dark Horse now for quite some time and they're in good shape.

So I think the curse is over.

- You mentioned that everywhere Groo goes, misery follows.

And I'm just wondering his catchphrase, have I erred?

I'm hoping I get that correct.

- Did I err?

Did I err?

Who came up with that?

- You just erred.

- I did.

- Yeah, I came up with did I err?

Yeah, I think.

Yes, I'm pretty sure I did.

Actually half the time if you ask Sergio or me whose idea was that, we'll say, mine, no, it was his, no, it was his.

And we don't agree but I remember that we established early on that Groo didn't do long speeches, didn't use contractions.

We just kind of had to get a voice for the character which we developed over the first few issues.

And did I err, just caught on.

What happened, a lot of this comic was driven by the letter pages.

We are one of the few, I came up through comic book letter pages in the '60s.

My involvement with comic books was to buy them, read them and get a letter printed in.

And that's kind of got me into the business.

There was a segue which is not worth discussing here of how I went from writing letters to comics to writing to comics.

But we get letters and I read them all and Sergio reads many of them as he, when it's convened for him to.

And suddenly you see, we have very funny readers.

They write in funny stuff and you see them picking up the catchphrases and asking about this.

And so, if you were in a comedy club and you say something over and over, you hear the audience laugh and you say it more or you use that, Rodney Dangerfield learned that the audience laugh and said, "I don't get no respect."

So he used it and found variations on it.

Well, we would put something in the comic and all of a sudden a lot of readers are the equivalent of laughing at it by writing into us and making jokes of it.

So we decide, well, let's do that again or let's find a way to repeat that.

And it's interesting, we started, we had this running gag about eating Cheese Dip.

And for a long time he was eating Cheese Dip and seeing Cheese Dip.

And suddenly readers started sending us Cheese Dip.

We would literally, at that point, the mail went to the Marvel Comics office in New York.

And then when they had a big pile of it, they stick it in an envelope and send it to me out here in Los Angeles.

And they kept calling me up and making, will you tell the readers to stop sending Cheese Dip in?

We have Cheese Dip in the mail.

So being as stupid as you can be, as Groo at times, the next running gag we had was about mulch.

We'd be about mulching.

We kept making jokes about mulching and people started mailing bags of fertilizer.

We couldn't make a joke about Krugerrands or something like that.

We started doing a joke about mulch and the mailroom at Marvel called us and said, please stop, we've got fertilizer.

Suddenly people are sending us.

But it was funny, so we kept doing.

- When you have a character that connects with the audience that way, I mean, it's gotta be more rewarding in a way than the paycheck.

The paychecks are nice, but knowing that the audience responds to what you're doing and for years will follow you and your work, I think back to a few years back, you were at Heroes Con in Charlotte, our favorite convention at Comic Culture.

And I remember we were doing a panel in one room and you were doing a panel with Sergio and Stan in another room.

And we had a very small but dedicated audience and you had a large and raucous audience.

And I know that because we would hear them laughing.

So when you get to meet the fans, it's gotta be rewarding because you kind of work in a bubble.

You're working with Sergio in your studios, various studios.

You don't get to see the fans, you get to read the letters.

So what's it like going to a convention?

- Well, I've been going to comic conventions since 1970, most of my life.

And I'll tell you, I used to go to conventions.

The main reason I used to go to conventions, which has disappeared, was I wanted to meet the people who made the comics that I grew up and to spend time with writers and artists.

And there's nobody else.

There's nobody who wrote a comic, drew a comic book alive that I read when I was, before age of 16 or 17 that I haven't met.

There's very few of them alive, but I met the ones I could.

But then I became aware that people were coming to the conventions to meet Sergio or me on the same basis that we were wanting, I wanted to meet, you know, Kurt Schaffmerger or Kurt Swan or Al Williams or anybody who did comics I loved at an earlier age.

So it's nice to have that connection with the readers.

And it's nice to hear what they set to say and to find out that, I don't know how true this is for other people, but I found Groo readers to be enormously funny, clever people.

I would hope other people have that experience when they do a lot of superhero comics or such, but I just really liked the fans I met, the people and some of them became good friends and I stayed in touch with them.

I go to conventions now to do that.

I go to conventions to do panels.

At San Diego's convention last year, I did 19 panels in four days and I loved it.

I had a great time doing it.

And I don't go to other conventions because they don't ask me to do 19 panels.

So I just enjoy the dialogue, the interaction and talking to people and answering questions and, you know, having those people live in the room with me.

- Well, Mark, they're telling us that we are just about out of time.

If the folks watching at home wanted to find out more about you and your work, is there a place on the web they can look?

- They can go to www.newsfromme.com N-E-W-S-F-R-O-M-M-E, my initials.

- Well, Mark, I wanna thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to talk with me today.

It has been a fun half hour.

- Thank you, anytime.

- I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching Comic Culture.

We will see you again soon.

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