jim henson

PLEASE NOTE: In accordance with a cease and desist message received from About Comics, current copyright holder for the images from Charles M. Schulz's 'Two-by-Fours' book, the color scans from a vintage copy of that book have been removed from this blog until further notice.

Thank you.

About Comics would also like you to know that their book 'Schulz's Youth' collects cartoons from both the 'Young Pillars' series and images from 'Two-by-Fours'.

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This little book of child psychology for churchgoing folk was a collaboration between beloved cartoonist
Charles M. Schulz and writer Kenneth F. Hall.

It first appeared in the
mid-1960s, right around the same time Schulz was finishing up his run on 'Young Pillars', a comic strip with similar gently religious overtones, focused on teenagers.

Schulz' 'Peanuts' gang were certainly already hugely popular at the time, though it would still be a couple of years or so before they'd take over the planet and all its media.

If the lanky, elongated teens in 'Young Pillars' looked sort of like older versions of Charlie Brown and his friends, the 'Two-By-Fours' kids look sort of like kids who were their same age but who lived across town or went to a different school.

- A bit of text from the book's back cover ▲ and preface ▼ defining the concept...

"When a Two-by-Four is a piece of lumber, you can stack it on a neat pile or cut it to just the right length and nail it to a wall.

"But, the kind of Two-by-Four we discuss here (children living in their second, third, and fourth years) you can never quite nail down so permanently or stack up so neatly.

"In fact, these youngsters do not themselves have a clear picture of just who they are, and they do a lot of groping to try to discover the answer."



Fun to see Schulz working in a single-panel format, as opposed to his customary strip motif.

The vivid colors are reminiscent of those in his book Happiness is a Warm Puppy, and bring back memories of greeting cards and calendars of the era, or 'gift' books printed around the same time by Price/Stern/Sloan and other such publishers.

(click on any image to enlarge it in a new window)







(click on any image to enlarge it in a new window)