(++++) ANIMALIA PAST AND PRESENT

“Peanuts” Collection No. 15—Snoopy: Cannonball! By Charles Schulz. Andrews McMeel. $11.99. 

Phoebe and Her Unicorn 16: Unicornado. By Dana Simpson. Andrews McMeel. $11.99.

     “Funny animal comics” have a long and noble history – well, maybe not exactly noble, but certainly long. There are many that are entirely or almost entirely populated by animals, such as George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, the Carl Barks duck series for Disney, some Warner Brothers sequences (such as those featuring Porky Pig), and the original (early) Hanna-Barbera Tom and Jerry offerings. Plenty of others intermingle animal and human characters on an equal or near-equal footing – and that type has continued to flourish to the present day. Sometimes even the cartoon characters themselves are aware of the longevity of the form in which they appear: at one point in the latest Peanuts collection, Snoopy comments that “Mickey Mouse has been wearing yellow shoes for fifty years.” Snoopy is the titular character in the latest collection, but is no more (or less) prominent than are other denizens of the Peanuts world – he is simply one important element keeping Peanuts fresh, funny and offbeat more than 20 years after Charles Schulz’ death. Readers young and old can still have plenty of fun with the strips in Snoopy: Cannonball! They can also discover, if they are so inclined, what made Peanuts so different from other funny-animal comics (and, for that matter, other funny-little-kid comics). For example, Schulz enjoyed tossing obscure facts into strips and building small adventures around them, as when Charlie Brown tells Snoopy, for no particular reason, “In Southwest Cameroon there are frogs that weigh ten pounds,” and when Schroeder says how great it is that his grandfather has just had his 58^th birthday, because that means “he outlived Beethoven.” Schulz also pulled literary references of all sorts into Peanuts and made them his own, as when Linus walks along with a book, reading the words “Pigeons on the grass alas,” leading Snoopy and his brother Needles to begin dancing: “Dogs on the ground abound!” (And Schulz never feels he has to reveal the sources of his quotations, including the famous “pigeons” line by Gertrude Stein.) Schulz has his characters, human and animal alike, deal at times with big questions, but in delightfully skewed ways: at one point, Charlie Brown tells sister Sally, “That’s the secret to life: replace one worry with another,” while elsewhere, he wonders whether the good or bad things last longer in life, and Linus knowingly tells him, “Good things last eight seconds. Bad things last three weeks.” It is content of this sort that keeps Peanuts enjoyable, and enjoyably different from anything else in the comic-strip medium. Schulz even anticipates some concerns expressed by people in the real world today, as when he has Charlie Brown say, “Years are like candy bars. We’re paying more, but they’re getting shorter.” All that is missing is the word “shrinkflation.” To be sure, some Peanuts strips will be obscure to readers today, including one saying “moonstones come from Ceylon” (now Sri Lanka); one mentioning cementing the hands of a watch together; one talking about a Veterans Day visit with Bill Mauldin; one commenting that “relatives are like mail-order catalogs – they come out of nowhere”; and a couple discussing hunting for polar bears (no actual bears are harmed, but the topic itself would be completely off-limits in a contemporary strip). Nevertheless, the special nature of Peanuts as a funny-animal-plus-amusing-kids comic strip comes through completely clearly in Snoopy: Cannonball!

     The mixture of people and animals includes various additional creatures that fit neither category in Dana Simpson’s Phoebe and Her Unicorn strips, whose art is much more typical of modern cartooning (minimal-to-absent backgrounds, for example) and whose supporting cast is much more prosaic than primary characters Phoebe Howell and Marigold Heavenly Nostrils: the various other denizens of Phoebe’s world, human and magical, exist only as sidelights to the Phoebe-Marigold relationship and as ways to illuminate aspects of it. All of this works just fine, since Simpson manages to take the foundational theme of “unlikely friendship” and push and pull it in multiple directions. It is basically content taffy, including the sweetness. In the latest collection, Unicornado, there are a couple of “social magic disputes,” as Marigold puts it. One involves Marigold being “blocked” by a tree gnome after a disagreement – this being not a social-media block but a magical block that prevents Marigold from approaching the gnome’s home. The other, which is much more extended, has Phoebe and Marigold trying to repair the broken friendship between Phoebe’s frenemy, Dakota, and the Goblin Queen – an attempt that leads to Phoebe’s temporary transformation into a goblin so she can speak the otherwise-impossible-to-learn single-word goblin language. One of the funniest elements of that sequence involves Phoebe’s goblinesque tail, which remains after the rest of the transformation spell has worn off and which she quite enjoys possessing. Other stories in the book have Phoebe meeting a tiny ghost that turns out to be a tree sprite in disguise; Phoebe’s first-ever school dance, to which she invites friend Max – but they both skip the dance because they prefer to play the video game “Hippos of Death” together; and speaking of video games, Phoebe’s defeat of her father at “Super Punch Destroy Fight 2” – her dad seems to be a kind of hippie slacker with high tolerance for magical creatures and their effects (he is delighted when a hair-braiding spell misfires, causing his beard to braid tightly). Some of the silliest sequences are the most enjoyable, such as the one in which Marigold’s presence turns Phoebe’s environment into a “magical sylvan glen” in which there are creatures from a riddle-asking sphinx to a unicorn with a head and tail but no body (because of “an accident with a reality-warping spell”). Phoebe and Her Unicorn is not the sort of timeless classic that Peanuts became decades ago, but it is a pleasant contemporary take on the whole notion of humans, animals and various other beings having fun and small adventures together, and passing along their enjoyment to the everyday, non-magical world where readers live.