Charlie Brown's Shirt and Dagwood's Pajamas

 

CHARLIE BROWN'S SHIRT AND DAGWOOD'S PAJAMAS
Mon. Aug.  28th, 2023

 

This is a short essay on my favorite men's shirt in a comic strip, and my favorite men's pajamas in a comic strip.  Let's start with the pajamas, because yesterday's comics brought them to my attention.

Part One

Yesterday Sunday Aug. 27th, my favorite comic strip was Blondie, because Dagwood was wearing white pajamas with red doughnuts on them.  At least, the doughnuts looked red to me.  Searching on the web, I decided that the doughnuts on his pajamas are usually orange.

This picture of Dagwood's pajamas is copied from the "Editor’s Dispatch: Overlooked Valentines" by Countess Tea (Feb. 10th, 2014) on the Comics Kingdom website

(https://comicskingdom.com/trending/blog/2014/02/10/editor-s-dispatch-overlooked-valentines), viewed Aug. 28th, 2023:

 

These are the most stylish men's pajamas I have ever seen.  Dagwood works for a businessman, but we know he sings Italian (Neapolitan) songs in the bathtub.  The artistic tendencies in Dagwood's personality are undeniable.

(To wander away from the topic, Daisy the dog looks like she is trying to imitate Pluto, the dog of a different cartoonist.  Daisy, you can run rings around Pluto.)

Speaking of the doughnuts on Dagwood's pajamas, I think the cartoonist gets to leave instructions or requests for the person who adds the colors to a comic strip.  The current cartoonists for Blondie are Dean Young and John Marshall (the strip was founded by Dean's father Chic Young in 1930).  I would assume that Young and Marshall have creative control over the colors of Dagwood's pajamas; although the color scheme could have been inherit­ed from Young's father.

Part Two

Every reader of the Sunday comics, which are in color, knows that in Charles Schulz's strip Peanuts, Charlie Brown has two shirts in his wardrobe, a red short-sleeved shirt with a black zigzag stripe across the belly, and a yellow short-sleeved shirt with a black zigzag stripe across the belly.

Well, but the truth is more complicated, as explained at https://collectpeanuts.com/2016/03/21/what-color-is-charlie-browns-shirt/  

("What Color is Charlie Brown’s Shirt? – Collecting 101"; March 21st, 2016).  This web page (which seems to be anonymous) says "The classic black zig-zag has been set against red, orange, green, blue and yellow. [But] Red and yellow seem to be the most prominent shirt color through the years."

So we'll focus on the red and yellow.  Here again are two snippings from the WorldWide Web showing Charles Schulz's hero in his coolest attire.

 

What we have here is the go-to shirt of a world-class philosopher and do-gooder who seems to have flunked Life 101 more often than any of the rest of us.  Of course, philoso­phers choose their shirts very carefully, and this one's a winner.

(Although he is a philosopher, we do not mean to imply that Charlie Brown is the resident intellectual in Peanuts.  That would be Linus.)

That's all!  This concludes our essay on What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing in the comic strips.  (We used to call them the funny papers in my family, but that name, sadly, has slipped out of use.)

Frank Newton