The Charles M. Schulz Museum will begin a new exhibit (scroll down the page) on February 4 (through May 29) called, “Sugar and Spice: Little Girls in the Funnies.” The subtitle is: “An Exhibition of Peanuts Girls and their Predecessors, Contemporaries, and Successors” and as you might expect shows various girl characters in comic strips through comic history.
Sugar and Spice samples one hundred years of little girls in the comics by exploring the evolution of strips featuring little girls and the influence of Peanuts on modern-day characters. Organized into three general categories?little girl protagonists, sidekicks of leading boy characters, and daughters in comic strip families?this exhibition presents a historically provocative and visually stunning selection of comic art. Guest curator Lucy Shelton Caswell has drawn extensively from the collections of the Cartoon Research Library at The Ohio State University and the Schulz Museum for this exhibition. Comic strips exhibited for comparison include Little Iodine, Blondie, Little Orphan Annie, Nancy, Family Circus, For Better or For Worse, Agnes, and Stone Soup, among others?and, of course, Peanuts.
An exhibition catalogue, available in the Schulz Museum’s Gift Shop, features a scholarly essay by Caswell as well as illustrations of all exhibited pieces. The catalogue also includes brief statements by contemporary women whose lives touched Schulz’s. These women?including Billie Jean King, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Peggy Fleming, and Lynn Johnston?share their memories of the little girl comic strip characters who influenced them.