Thoughts on A Charlie Brown Christmas

As is the custom, I found myself watching A Charlie Brown Christmas in preparation for the holiday. As is the custom, it made me feel existential about my own career. As is the custom, I found myself rambling about it on my letterboxd.

Whether or not this is particularly interesting to anyone, here it is! It touches upon how I write and think of Blind Alley and my longer work.

As a fan of both animation and as someone who owes a life debt  to Peanuts, there's a captivating quality to watching this. Beyond the bare existential content of the short, there’s this element of what it is that really gets my brain churning. Watching something made so cheaply, quickly (within six months), unconventionally (a jazz score??) and that was written within a day manage to hit a home run is so  strangely inspiring. The whole thing is barely holding together and yet, inarguably, that is where its charm lies.

Much like the comic strip industry that Peanuts was created within, in the modern day the  conditions this film was made under are un-replicateable. The idea that  something could be written within a day and that that something could be  good enough to be called finished within that very day is so foreign to how we’re taught to “craft” stories. That’s not a luxury any creator is  afforded nowadays and I’m also not certain it’s a gift we would all benefit from.  And yet, undeniably, If the writing was more laboured over it  wouldn't feel like the strip! The amount of man-hours that animation requires necessitates a lot of planning from the beginning but I remain skeptical of the modern approach (many cooks/many kitchens).

As I dip my toes into what I hope will be my second graphic novel, I find myself thinking a lot about  how we're allowed to make things, as cartoonists, and how the systems we create stories for shapes what they are and how they’re told. What would the stories I wish to tell look like if I didn’t have an editor helping chisel it down to its sharpest, most functional, form? Does a story even require such clarity? Whether or not the completely personal un-edited story would be better, it would certainly be different; stranger, more personal, with its intentions slightly obfuscated. If I am honest with myself, when I write my comic strip it feels like I am tapping into an old, forgotten, or not entirely quantifiable way of telling a story. To say it feels anti-establishment feels like a bit of a stretch but splitting my time between publishable work for “big” publishers and small work, like a self published comic strip, has made me feel the tension in my lower back. None of it matters  that much - I am grateful I get to tell any story for any audience but I  am skeptical of the thought that a story must be a precise, useful,  diagrammatic, or functional thing.