I have been very fortunate in that twice last month I was able to attend major exhibitions about the work of Charles M. Schulz, one in London and one in California.

The Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, Cailfornia, ia obviously Snoopy Central.



The permanent exhibition consists only of a number of artworks inspired by the Peanuts characters, and recreation of Schulz’s writing desk, and the wall of the nursery that he painted for his children.


Three galleries have rotating displays of Peanuts or Schulz material. At the moment two of them look at different aspects of Snoopy (and the other dogs in Schulz’s life), and the third at Charlie Brown’s sister Sally. The displays include hundreds of original strips as Schulz drew them.



I went with a fannish group, and we started with lunch at the Warm Puppy Cafe which actually is part of the ice rink that Schulz also owned.



Here James Bacon, Chair of next year’s Worldcon, takes advice from Esther McCallum-Stewart, the Chair of the bid for a UK Worldcon in 2024.



James is actually a train driver by profession.



Another in our group was writer David Gerrold, here with me in the Warm Puppy cafe and also at the start of our docent-led tour of the museum (the docent on the right; in between is a photo of Schulz taken by the actor Roddy MacDowell).



And there is also a split-level shop with more exhibits on the upper floor and a stained glass window.



I should say also that it was one of those days when the northern California sun and rain interacted to produce some spectacular rainbows.



If you are a Peanuts fan for whom London is more convenient than Santa Rosa, I very strongly recommend the exhibition Good Grief, Charlie Brown! currently on at Somerset House (until early March). I went there earlier in November, and didn’t take a lot of pictures, though you can get a good sense of it from this blog post by Jean Schulz, Charles M. Schulz’s widow, and also this detailed review. Here is a nice promotional video:



Dare I say it, it’s actually a much more interesting exhibition than the current displays in Santa Rosa. The exhibits go a lot deeper into the story of Schulz’s life and how his experiences played out into the strips (Snoopy’s war stories owe a certain amount to his creator’s WW2 career; there was a real Charlie Brown and a real little red-haired girl).

I devoured the strips as a very young reader; I am not a particular fan of the various TV movies. But I had not appreciated how politically attuned they were. The story of Franklin’s introduction has been well covered; the relationship between Peppermint Patty and Marcie is impossible to read now without speculating that there is a deliberate lesbian subtext. Billie-Jean King was not only a fan but a friend.


Some of the accompanying contemporary art in London is striking; in particular, Mel Brimfield’s “Mel Brimfield Is Nuts” repays close examination (click to embiggen):



Coming back to the strips as an adult, some of them have eerie resonances:


And some remain eternally relevant.



In summary, I found the London exhibition very thought-provoking, while the Santa Rosa museum is just plain fun.

Yesterday I went to the Asterix in Britain exhibition at the London Jewish Museum. Actually it's much more an exhibition about the life and work of René Goscinny, who created Asterix and also Lucky Luke and the scheming grand vizier Iznogoud. Goscinny was born in 1926, the son of Jewish parants who had moved to Paris from Poland; when he was two they moved to Buenos Aires, where he grew up. He comes across as a very humorous individual - in the many photographs, he is either clearly thinking of something funny to say, or has just said it. He always identified as French, but with a special place in his heart for Argentina, which he refers to as le mien - "mine" - in one of the TV interviews in the exhibition.

Goscinny spent most of the late 1940s in New York, so he must have spoken and written English well. Here is the CV he used to try and get drawing jobs in 1948 (I've checked, and the Brooklyn address where he was living is now a vacant yard):

While there he struck up a friendship and creative partnership with Will Elder, Harvey Kurtzman and Larry Siegel, the future creators of Mad Magazine, who wrote him into one of their Playboy strips (about American tourists in Paris) as a manic curly-haired waiter:

But in 1951 he went back to France and from 1959, together with Albert Uderzo, he wrote Asterix. At the same time he was an activist in and for comics, trying to raise the game of the Franco-Belgian culture to be more relevant to contemporary political issues. It's interesting that a lot of his work was for the Belgian Spirou and Tintin magazines, most notably the creation of Lucky Luke with Morris, who was a Belgian artist.

A couple of peculiar coincidences - he married his wife Gilberte on 26 April 1967, which oddly enough was the day I was born. He died suddenly aged 51, which is the age I am now. (I have outlived him - he did not make it to three months after his birthday, I am almost five months after mine.)

We are all familiar with the Anthea Bell translations of Asterix, but there were a couple of earlier not-really-authorised versions as well - one for Valiant in 1964 had Asterix and Obelix as Little Fred and Big Ed, and another for Ranger (later Look and Learn) moved the action to Ancient Britain rather than Gaul and rechristened Asterix as Beric the Bold.

And of course you can dress up as your favourite characters. I went with K and J, here wearing the appropriate helmets.

You can get a bit of a sense of the exhibition here from these two promotional videos featuring Charlie Adlard, creator of The Walking Dead and UK Comics Laureate:

The exhibition only runs for another two weeks, until 2 October, so get a move on if you want to see it. It is in the Jewish Museum of London, which itself has a rather fascinating permanent display about London's Jewish history and about Jewish culture. I would certainly never have gone there if it had not been for René Goscinny, but I am glad that I did.

You've got a couple more weeks to catch the Pink Floyd exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Their Mortal Remains, before it finishes on 15 October. I went yesterday with S, who took much better pictures than I did, so I am using hers as well as mine. (This is one of hers.)


First off, I'd never actually been to the V&A before in all my years of visiting London. It is pretty extraordinary and would clearly well repay another visit. The Pink Floyd exhibition is very popular - I missed the window for buying tickets online, and turning up at opening time on Saturday morning at 10 am, the earliest available slot was 1215, and it was really crowded inside. Weekdays are probably easier. It was a nice day so we were able to enjoy both elevenses beforehand and lunch afterwards in the V&A courtyard.


The exhibition itself is total audio immersion (as you would hope and expect) with different corners of different rooms featuring interviews with the band members and those who knew them. The first display was a map of Cambridge which evoked nostalgia for me and S (we served a term togerther on CUSU together long ago), marking out important places for the band (though of course they actually met and started playing together in London). The Syd Barrett material was rather moving, and suspended above the first exhibition room was purportedly the original Bike.


I had not known that Pink Floyd did some incidental music for late 1960s films, and also performed a piece for the BBC coverage of the first moon landing (this video isn't in the exhibition, I dug it out later):



A lot of the exhibition is about the cover art, and here S got some very good pictures:


There is a great interview with the stuntman who is on fire on the front cover of "Wish You Were Here":


I completely failed to get a decent selfie of us in front of the Monosee picture from the inside cover:


The whole thing ends with a rather lovely video presentation pairing Pink Floyd's fist single, Arnold Lane, with footage from the Live 8 reunion 38 years later.

Anyway, strongly recommended - but hurry!