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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

I think many people have seen only the commercially exploited peanuts imagery.

In fact the comics - especially the older ones are incredibly clever and funny and insightful and there’s long running threads and connections and strong characters.

Peanuts the tshirt/hat/poster/cup is crass.

Peanuts the comic is genius.

It exactly the same with Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. The commercially exploited imagery is crass and dumb. The comics written by Karl Barks were genius and often really entertaining adventure stories.

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I would think the closest comparison to my eye is the Calvin and Hobbes commercialization? As a child of the 90s, I almost exclusively knew of Calvin stickers pissing on Ford and Chevy logos growing up. The great comic was a pleasant surprise for my teenage self.

Watterson refused to allow Calvin & Hobbes to be commercialized, other than the books. Those crass stickers are unauthorized knock-offs.

Amazing - these were Circle K chain stores selling these stickers. How was this not enforced?!

It's not like stickers are particularly difficult to make, or Watterson had an army of auditors combing every gas station or car meet looking for sticker makers.

They have (as I understand it) challenged and stopped some folks from doing things, but something like the Calvin sticker was pretty ubiquitous. Even then, some later ones were particularly bad Calvins.

I had a vinyl sticker of Spaceman Spiff on the back of my motorcycle helmet. I bought it at a motorcycle race back in the 90s.

I have approximately one meter of snoopy books - collections of the comic strip - dating from the 70s and 80s. Now and again I read a few strips, but at least once every month I wear my snoopy watch, and seeing Snoopy on the dial makes me smile every time.

I've had more comments on the snoopy dial, and my casio terrorist watch, than any high-end piece in my rotation/collection. I struggle to think of other snoopy merchandise which is common-place, outside watches.

(I asked my eight year old son a while back if he knew the names of some characters from Peanuts, while showing him a couple of the cartoon strips, the only one he knew was Snoopy. I was sad to learn he didn't know the name of either Charlie Brown or Woodstock.)

Peanuts is also a product of Jazz-era America (50's & early 60's). Joe Cool is a beatnik, not a hippie or a rocker. So a lot of that context & content gets lost as the decades go by.

Case in point being the name Peanuts itself, which even to me as an elder Millenial was obscure. No one actually said Peanuts, always Charlie Brown.

For the dedicated fan, the complete collection of Peanuts strips is available in several volumes.

https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/the-complete-peanu...

Speak for yourself, i enjoy both. :)

I mean, even originally, Garfield strips had some substance, but Jim Davis really liked money, I think...

Garfield was conceived from the get go as a cash grab devoid of artistic merit.

(And that's fine by me, nobody is forcing anyone to consume Garfield.)

Interesting, you know more about it than I do, I suppose. Do you know of any source for Jim discussing how/why he started Garfield?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield#History is probably a good start.

Wikipedia is a bit coy and trying to be neutral. But even just from there you can see that the author decided to make strips about cats, because Snoopy had already cornered the dog market.