> Indeed, they are virtual corporate logos. I haven't thought of anything
> other than MetLife on seeing Snoopy in years.
Which doesn't take away from the fact that Peanuts was one of the greatest comic strips of all time. Schulz was actually a brilliant artist, and created one of the most radical aesthetic documents of the mid-Sixties; he got real corporate in the Seventies, of course, but there was a solid core to his work, a resistance to the existential anomie of suburbanization and consumerism, which you don't find in lesser strips.
Wasn't that other great cartoonist, George Herriman, of "Krazy Kat" fame, subsidized by Hearst or something? Merchandising may be what artists have nowadays instead of the sort of aristocratic patrons who paid Beethoven's way.
-- Dennis