Brand manager Iconix Brand Group Inc. announced Tuesday that it has acquired the Peanuts brand from E.W. Scripps Co. in partnership with the heirs of Charles Schulz, who created the comic strip featuring Snoopy and his owner, Charlie Brown.
Iconix and the Schulz family will pay about $175 million for the brand, with Iconix controlling an 80% share.
Iconix also owns Joe Boxer, Mossimo, and the rights to use Madonna’s “name and personality.” They estimate that Peanuts brings in “annual retail sales of more than $2 billion world-wide.”
I just exchanged e-mails with Fantagraphics’ Associate Publisher Eric Reynolds, and he says that this deal shouldn’t affect Fantagraphics’ gorgeous chronological reprints of every single Peanuts strip. Which is a good thing, because those Peanuts reprints are in the running for the books I would save first from a burning building.
Am I alone in thinking that ‘Peanuts’ is fucking horrible?
A sad sack, tired, nostalgic trip for sad sack middle aged white dudes.
Maybe Snoopy has some cross over appeal to the under 14 female crowd but fucking Schroeder? And that little Bible quoting boy? What the fuck?
Can you justify anything good about this strip. What exactly do you- Paul- a person I respect, like about this P-nuts? Which also robs valuable real estate from living artists in the comics section. I am listening.
@1, do no confuse Peanuts c.2010 with Peanuts c.1960. It was a fantastic strip in its day.
I still don’t understand why Schultz’s heirs deserve to rake in hundreds of millions long after he died for something they had no hand in. They were already rich from his estate. Peanuts should be in the public domain now.
Ok, Fnarf, what is so good about those 1960’s Peanuts? I do not see it diverging too far from I grew up with (1970s- now).
The first strip was pretty awesome
Schermy “good old charlie brown” – “how I hate him!”
http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/hh89/…
@2 Even if the strips weren’t under copyright law, which they will be for around another 70 years, the characters would still be exploitable commercially through trademark protection. All of which makes Disney’s gorram abuse so much more pernicious, because its unnecessary.
Popeye is under public domain now, and it is still trademarked.
@5, shouldn’t be. Intellectual property should die with the creator.
@6 If you haven’t you should read Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, really good take on intellectual property and its potential to help society, and the evil that results from the current set-up.
This reminds me of the day I discovered a glass doored bookshelf filled with my mother’s old Peanuts paperbacks. I was probably about nine years old, and I read them all.
Peanuts did not have the shock value or LOLs that Bloom County had offered me. Instead, I enjoyed its calm, grounding, and practical humor. You can see part of yourself in ever character, and only the most Zen of us could be like Snoopy. I still want to be like Snoopy.
@1 I do agree that zombie comics should be done away with however
@1 – Go eat a nice big steaming turd. Let me guess – you’re a South Park fan. Fucking imbecile.
10-
I guess that confirms my theory that Peanuts is not in any sense ‘good’ but rather triggers some pre adolescent nostalgia chord (hey- you and Glenn Beck have something in common!).
But seriously I think C. Schultz deserves canonization for for helping Fantagraphics stay afloat. If for nothing else.
Otherwise, Peanuts deserves to be thrown in the same common grave as Hi and Lois, Family Circle and Marmaduke.