By Steve Sailer
08/19/2023
スヌーピーが本当にビーグル犬であるという否定できない証拠 pic.twitter.com/kokkzkFGmN
— 激かわ動物 (@Gekikawa_Dbts) August 17, 2023
Similarly, I’d always been puzzled by how Charles Schulz’s Snoopy didn’t seem to look much like beagles I’d seen.
By the way, when I was a kid a relative always gave me for Christmas the latest annual Peanuts anthology. Around 1971 or 1972, when my critical instincts were blossoming, I went back through the last half dozen anthologies and decided that Schulz had peaked in 1968.
I believe it had to do with Schulz unleashing Snoopy as a fantasy WWI biplane fighter pilot in the late 1960s. This quickly proved so immensely popular that Snoopy became a hugely valuable advertising commodity, which then took up much of Schulz’s time, with perhaps a deleterious impact on his comic strip. Or, then again, maybe Schulz was just past his peak age-wise?
In contrast, the successors of Schulz (b. 1922) as the genius cartoonists of the Baby Boom, Bill Watterson (b. 1958) of Calvin and Hobbes and Gary Larson (b. 1950) of The Far Side, both abruptly retired in 1995.
Both occasionally resurface with new projects (Watterson has a coauthored book coming out in the fall), but seldom try to top their peaks.
But, wow, they were good when churning out a daily comic. Watterson strikes me as competing with Spielberg as the Great American Artist of the last quarter of the 20th century.
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