June 07, 2005

Working for Peanuts

The Boy has gone through phases of being into many authors and fictional characters. Recently we've been through Sandra Boynton, Asterix, The Magic Treehouse and a few other things I can't remember. When he goes through these periods of being really, really into something, he wants to assign characters from the books to each member of the family, he asks me to look for coloring pages on the web and he writes his own knock-off versions of the favorite authors books.

Our house is littered with books in the "style" of beloved authors. We have a "Boynton-style" book called Snakey Achey. Several Asterix comics that would probably make Uderzo shudder and a few Magic Treehouse books too.

The Boy's latest craze is Peanuts. He reads and rereads all the comics he can get his hands on. We're all assigned Peanuts characters -- he chose to be Schroeder, which I find interesting. And now he's making his own "Peanuts" comic books. He told me, with all the seriousness a five year can muster, that he was very sorry to know that Charles Schultz was dead, but he guessed it was up to him now to draw the cartoons.

Those will be some big shoes to fill even if one ignores the very large copyright issues, but I think all this practicing and copying could lead somewhere interesting some day. Maybe he'll get a blog or something.

Comments

That's very sweet of him =] Can't allow the world to go on without Charlie Brown!

Posted by: Lenise at June 8, 2005 10:42 AM

You may want to avoid giving him any books with the old "Calvin and Hobbes" comics reprinted. Though they are very entertaining, if he chooses to be Calvin ... watch out!

Posted by: MarcV at June 8, 2005 11:17 AM

Marc, you never know with The Boy who he will want to be. I would have thought he'd want to be Charlie Brown or Snoopy, but he likes Schroeder. When we read the Ramona Quimby books, he didn't identify with Ramona, but rather with her big sister Beezus. Of course, it was rather obvious even over a year ago that The Girl is Ramona.

Posted by: Jordana at June 8, 2005 11:54 AM