The Inherited-From.....

Now that Lynn Johnston is down to her last two new-ruins, I'd like to return to my roots for a while and talk about some things about her strip that still bother me. The first of these is her leaning far too much on her friendship with Charles Schulz; quite frankly, the only real influences I see is the muppet-mouthed yell that characters make when confronted with frustration and the fact that the Mike of the Earliest Years looked like Linus's evil twin. As howtheduck has noticed, the new-run Sundays that have appeared of late could be collapsed into four panels without losing any meaning; it seems odd that someone who was supposedly so influenced by Schulz didn't pick up on his ability to create a Sunday strip that needed every panel to tell its story. I can edit panels out of a new-ruin and have it make sense; if I tried that with the adventures of Charlie Brown and the gang, I'd alter the meaning of the thing.

As by way of example, let's contrast this example of a kid saying the darnedest thing with something that I photoshopped together; you will notice that it tells the same story in much less time. (You'll also notice that editing out the SNIFFA-SNORFA-SNUFFA-SNOOFFFA that originally cluttered the page doesn't subtract any meaning either.) An interesting thing happens when you try doing that with 'Peanuts': you change the meaning of the strip to one extent or another.