Sunday funnies and storytimes…welcome to this week’s Playhouse Comics Club! (Above is a late-period Peanuts strip by Charles Schulz, featuring Rerun the “underground cartoonist.”)

 

Weekly Funnies Dep’t: At the Sunday Ha Ha website, you can sign up to have silly all-ages comics delivered to your (and/or your child’s) e-mail every Sunday. The most recent edition (number 5, May 24) features cartoons by Jarrett Lerner, Aron Nels Steinke, Jen de Oliveira, Lark Pien, Meggie Ramm, Dave Roman, and Mika Song. (Follow the links in the previous sentence for information about each of Sunday Ha Ha‘s contributors, as well as activities, comics, and more; pictured here is Meggie Ramm’s “The Littlest Dungeon Guard.”) Once you sign up, you can also read all the previous Sunday Ha Has. Here’s a graceful way to start off your week!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wonderful Very Good Thursday Dep’t: A month ago, veteran reporter Susan Stamberg began “Storytime with Zuzu,” a Facebook Live reading of children’s books to her granddaughters and anyone else tuning in. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst is here; Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig is here. “Storytime with Zuzu” happens every Thursday at 4:30pm on NPR’s Facebook page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Höusing Dep’t: News from the website Bored Panda: the international retailer IKEA has paired with an ad agency to create diagrams that teach kids how to build indoor forts and play spaces. The diagrams use IKEA furniture as primary building materials, but they also suggest ways that your children can create cozy spaces and imaginary castles with the cushions, chairs, and sheets already available to them. Looks like stuffed animals are the accessory that turns a tent or fortress into a home…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cartoon-in-Place Dep’t: At Graphic Medicine, the site for comics about health-related issues and concerns, Alice Jaggers has compiled a list of dozens of educational, ethical, and autobiographical pieces on Covid-19, many (but not all!) of which are appropriate for children. Check out Toby Morris’ “Viruses vs. Everyone,” Malaka Gharib’s “Just for Kids: A Comic Exploring the New Coronavirus,” and Gemma Correll’s “Creativity in Captivity.” It can be difficult to explain the pandemic to your youngsters; maybe some of these comics will help.

 

 

 

Blockhead Brigade Dep’t: In first grade, as part of a Christmas gift exchange, I was given The Unsinkable Charlie Brown (1967), a collection of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strips from the mid-1960s. I began reading because of this book and because of Peanuts, and over the decades I’ve met others who as kids fell in love with Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Sally, and the rest of the gang.

The complete run of Peanuts—almost fifty years of strips, from October 1950 to February 2000—is available at GoComics, the website of Andrew McMeel Universal, which also syndicates other comics to newspapers, including Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, The Knight Life, Nancy, and Cul de Sac, to name a few. Here is a list of all the Universal strips; explore what’s available.

Even though Charles Schulz passed away in 2000, Peanuts continues to be reprinted in hundreds of newspapers and is one of the great works of American popular art. Share it with your children, and remind yourself how wonderful it is, as in this Sunday strip from 1999, the finale of Schulz’s running football gag that leaves Lucy outfoxed by both her brother Rerun (so nicknamed because he’s a “Rerun” of Linus, though he’s much more than that) and by Charlie Brown.

This weekly blog post is written and compiled by Craig Fischer. To send along recommendations, ideas, and comments, contact Craig at [email protected] [.]

Playhouse Comics Club, Issue #4 (May 22, 2020)Resources for Talking to Kids About Racism
PHP Code Snippets Powered By : XYZScripts.com