[Servalan]

Peter Blegvad plaudert in einem Interview mit The Believer über seine Mitarbeit an den Peanuts in den 1970er Jahren:

Drawing a Leviathan strip (or doing the Peanuts books in the ’70s), backgrounds often seemed to take a lot of effort and time.
(...)
BLVR: Going backward a bit, just what did you do for the Peanuts empire? Did you do it for peanuts?
PB: Ole Risom, an editor at Random House who was a fellow Dane and a friend of my father’s, gave me the gig. Actually, it was pretty well-paid. Beginning with It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown, I did backgrounds in gouache and pencil for five or six books based on the Peanuts TV specials, from 1976 to 1983 or so.

BLVR: Did that involve any personal contact with Charles Schulz?
PB: No, alas. The books were based on the animations, which he had to approve, though they were much cruder than Schulz’s own work. I assume he must have seen the books, but I never heard what he felt about them. It seemed odd to me that my backgrounds were in a completely different style to the figures, but no one objected. (Early Disney and other animated films often had richly shaded and detailed backgrounds while the characters had to be simple and flat, so maybe those famous precedents enabled me to get away with it.) I was so inexperienced: I learned a lot doing them, but I never thought of them as comics.

BLVR: Have you had a look at David Michaelis’s recent biography of Schulz? It paints him as more tortured and conflicted than his audience might expect.
PB: No, but I assume it’s pretty unanimous Schulz was a driven genius and that what readers respond to in Peanuts is partly the fear-and-trembling-and-the-sickness-unto-death he depicted so winningly decade after decade. It’s no surprise to me that he was no saint. I’d be surprised if it were otherwise. In my experience, the usual image of a cartoonist is that of the tortured artist and occasional bastard. I’m more the tortured bastard and occasional artist.