Peanuts, Pogo, and Hobbes: A Newspaper Editor's Journey through the World of Comics GeorgeLockwood. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013.

Abstract

Peanuts, Pogo, and Hobbes: A Newspaper Editor's Journey through the World of Comics Lockwood. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013.Peanuts, Pogo, and Hobbes is a loose and baggy monster of a book, cobbled together mostly from republished and lightly revised essays that seem randomly organized. But the result is nonetheless a joy to savor because the material was selected and arranged by a savvy connoisseur. Lockwood, a child of the Great Depression, never lost his love for the newspaper's daily black-and-white strips and the color Sunday inserts. When he became a newspaper editor of the Milwaukee Journal in the 1960s, one of his jobs was deciding which strips to add and drop. Because of that, he got to meet legendary comics artists like Walt Kelly (who wrote him into a strip by drawing his nickname OF Journal George on the side of Pogo's swamp rowboat), Al Capp, Milton Caniff, Bill Mauldin, Chester Gould, Charles Schultz, Garry Trudeau, and Bill Watterson. This book is his charmingly chatty comic strip memoir (xv).Lockwood has an insider's understanding for how things worked in the business. For instance, artists create their strip but traditionally don't own it. Instead they draw for middlemen syndicates like King Features and Scripps, which hawk each strip to newspapers. Happily, some artists may get involved in marketing by sending sample artwork to entice editors. Lockwood devotes one memorable chapter to his private stash of one-off drawings (some custom-made for him) that promote or introduce classic strips.He revels in gossipy personal details about artists. Take for instance Milton Caniff, who had the first successful comeback in comics history. In 1946 Caniff quit Terry and the Pirates, the syndicate-owned strip that had made him famous. He wanted to control his own work, which he did a year later with his second big-hit strip, Steve Canyon. The keys to his fame were threefold: the best artwork in the business, cliffhanging military plotlines for each episode, and-most of alltantalizingly drawn gorgeous dames. Caniff's pinup pizzazz could stop the breath of adolescent and adult males. Aficionados cherish the likes of Terry's femme fatale Dragon Lady, Steve's sweet Summer Smith (and perhaps the sexiest comics dame ever, scantily clad Miss Lace from the strip Male Call, published exclusively for WWII GIs). Unfortunately Caniff's work was so strongly associated with the armed forces that the Vietnam antiwar backlash killed his popularity. …