Peanuts – ICECUBES the comic strip.

Russel Harvey interviews Jud Hurd – Classic Cartoon History

Posted on July 2, 2025 by Leroy Brown

Here’s a really interesting historical interview on the topic of newspaper syndicated comics from an insider’s perspective. From Peanuts to Lil’ Abner, Family Circus and Prince Valiant, this was the golden age of newspaper comics.

Jud Hurd (1913 – September 14, 2005) was a syndicated newspaper cartoonist. His work included Ticker Toons and Health Capsules (United Feature Syndicate) for which he was awarded the National Cartoonist Society Special Features Award in 1978. For 36 years he continuously published and edited the quarterly magazine Cartoonist Profiles. Beginning with its premier issue in the winter of 1969 and ending 36 years later with issue 146 in June 2005. The magazine was a great insider source for professional syndicated cartoonists.

Russel Harvey is the son of Alfred Harvey, the founder of world famous Harvey Comics. With titles like Richie Rich, Dot Polka and Casper the Friendly Ghost, Harvey Comics was a staple of family friendly comics and cartoons for decades. Russel is himself a cartoonist, writer and standup comedian. He is a long time supporter and fan of ICECUBES and has graciously allowed me to post this video.

Read this new post ! ~ (subscribers)

Posted on April 7, 2023 by Leroy Brown

Hello, thanks for being a 'cool' ICECUBES fan. This content can be enjoyed when you become an ICECUBES member. You can subscribe for only $1 a month and get all the great past comic strips and posts.

ICECUBES TV ~ New Podcast 10/27/2016

Posted on October 27, 2016 by Leroy Brown

New ICECUBES podcast about where to get cheap art supplies! 🙂

Charles ‘Sparky’ Schulz & Russel Harvey.

Posted on July 31, 2013 by Leroy Brown

A few years back I had the pleasure of meeting Russel Harvey, scion of Harvey Comics, at MoCCA in New York City.(You can read about our encounter here.) Since then, we have managed to stay in touch digitally and Russel even generously wrote a blurb for the back cover of ICECUBES the book! Russel posted this photo of himself with the great Charles ‘Sparky’ Schulz and I though I would share it with my readers. In particular I wanted to show everyone how incredibly big comics were drawn back then! I draw at about half that size these days. Of course that only applies to those of us who still draw on paper! 😉

Practice with Peanuts.

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Leroy Brown

Just for fun! 🙂

Good practice.

Schulz developed a fast stroke that is hard to replicate without lots of practice. For him over time, drawing Peanuts became like writing shorthand.

Color matters! Peanuts vs. McDonalds.

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Leroy Brown

It used to be that comics had really great colors. Big primary colors printed with halftone dots. A lot of the times the color dots were off register and would bleed outside the lines. That was so cool! In fact my wife and I agree that it made the comic better when the color was off register like that!

Nowadays I’ve noticed that colors are no longer printed that way. In fact colors lay real flat on the page now and seem to look dull in some cases. For instance this Peanuts Sunday cartoon just looks flat and lifeless. The colors are drab and dull. Its quite upsetting actually to see a once great comic strip like Peanuts reduced to looking second rate. Whoever colored this did an awful job. But that’s not the only problem. The colors are extremely flat and are perfectly within the lines, how deadening is that? Sometimes too much technology just kills something great.

I did find something cool though. It seems that McDonalds still uses the old halftone print jobs on their Happy Meal bags! I think they look great by the way and so much more dynamic than that poor Peanuts strip. Good job McDonalds, I hope they keep it up!
I would love to print an ICECUBES comic book this way! 🙂