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Rhymes With Orange Newsletter #3 Hey friends, This episode of my charming-yet-infrequent newsletter is about my recent visit with the one and only Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts. It all started when Sparky (that's the name Charles Schulz prefers to be called) offered my cartooning buddy Paige Braddock a job in Santa Rosa, CA to oversee the licensing for Snoopy and company. (They get something like 30,000 requests a month to put the characters on hats, toothbrushes, you name it.) Paige herself is also a cartoonist, and you can see her web-published strip Jane's World at pb9.com I was taking a vacation back to my old stomping grounds in San Francisco and Paige invited me and my sweetie up to Santa Rosa for dinner. The following day, she brought us to the office, and there was Sparky signing copies of his new collection comemerating 50 years of Peanuts. (Can you believe it? Fifty years? I can't imagine doing anything for fifty years except breathing.) "Want a book?" he said, and pushed over a signed copy. We chatted for a while, and it came out that the phrase "security blanket" was an invention of Charles Schulz, like "The Great Pumpkin." At 77, he still draws the strip everyday, and he's a truly humble person. He reminds me of a mix between Charlie Brown and Linus, with the athletic prowess of Peppermint Patty. (He plays ice hockey on an over-70 master league.) Speaking of hockey, we had lunch with Sparky and Paige at the cafe at the ice rink on the grounds. It's open to the community and there are lessons and leagues for children and adults. I was telling him of my foray in high school into women's ice hockey (I played defense my senior year and was put there because there were only a handful of us that could skate backwards.) I told him how I loved Zambonis and got a kick whenever they made an appearance in his strip. When the actual Zamboni came to clear the ice, he called the driver over and let me get on it. Then I drove the Zamboni!! Sparky Schulz's Zamboni!! As most of you can imagine, it was quite a high. Above the gift shop near the rink, there's a exhibit of some original work. It's really different to be surrounded by one person's strip than to see it thrown together with everyone else's on the comics page. It's easier to enter their world. I think that's why I enjoy reading comic strip collections--I enjoy the immersion. On a different note, here's what's new with Rhymes With Orange. We're going to be adding an e-postcard option to the strips posted on the web. That means if you like a strip and want a friend to see it, you click on the postcard icon and give your friend's e mail address. S/he will get a message telling them to go to an address on the web where they can see it. We don't have the technology yet to send them right to your pal's address, but I think this will be a cool addition. There are still warehouses full of The Rhymes With Orange collection sitting in the middle of America somewhere. There can't be another collection until they sell, so think about it for your Hannukah or Christmas list. (AND, if you are going to buy them through the web, please do it through the RWO site because I get a kickback of a few quarters and this will help me defray the cost of running the site.) Like everyone, I'm hoping to get more traffic to the site. This is because if I can show my bosses that a lot of folks visit it, they can show the crabby ol' newspaper editors, and then they'll buy the strip. (Newspapers pay me to run the strip, I pay out of pocket to run it on the web. These, so far, are the dismal economics of the internet.) So here's my idea to get more folks there. People have the ability on their e-mail accounts to add "signatures" that go on the bottom of every e-mail they send. Some people have their job titles and addresses on the bottom, others have philosophical quotes. (Whenever you get e-mail from me, you see the "http://www.rhymeswithorange.com/" at the end.) If you're up to it, I would love it if you put as part of your signature: "For a quick laugh, check out the comic strip Rhymes With Orange at http://www.rhymeswithorange.com/" I don't know if any of you are THAT devoted, but it would be very cool. This is how the e-mail service "hotmail" got to be one of the largest. They used this same marketing technique and put something like "get free e-mail with hotmail" as the signature on everyone's account. So this is all the news for now. My dog wants to go for a walk. I hope you all are enjoying the fall and are eeking out the last of the daylight hours before the dreaded daylight savings. Best, Oh, there is one more thing. They did this article on me in the Boston Globe which I think I'll post on the site. It's a nice article, but the writer got some facts mixed up and had my mom and dad living in separate towns, instead of under one roof. Dad was kind of psyched--he can't wait for the ladies to start calling and asking him out on dates. Mom was less amused, though she did get one note from an old friend asking her if she'd like to go out "for coffee" with him.
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