And I’m sure we all wish we had a pet as cool as Snoopy.

I know, I know, I just figured this was my chance to be the one hassling Bill for once, so I took it.

the world would be a less funy place if Charles Schulz had never done Peanuts–not just because that strip wouldn’t exist–but others wouldn’t exist as we have known them.

Awesome.

Automatic Kafka #4 rocked as well.
It showed what really happened to the kids a few years on.

Aw, Bill, you caved!

Nope, he didn’t. In fact, I think he handled the whole thing brilliantly – we’re the ones who asked for this entry, so let us take on the burden of proof. And we have. Closure on both sides.

In Peanuts, religion wasn’t a stick to bap readers on the head. Other writers would place the emphasis on the speaker rather than the message: “_JOB_ said this”, while Schulz would put the emphasis the other way ’round, “Job said _THIS_”. It also balanced things out that it was Linus providing the wisdom 9 out of 10 times, since he would be just as likely to quote Voltaire or Jefferson with the same weight as scripture… Or even channeling the author’s thoughts:

LINUS: I don’t like to face problems head on. I think the best way to solve problems is to avoid them. This is a distinct philosophy of mine.. No problem is so big or complicated that it can’t be run away from!
– Peanuts, Feb. 27, 1963

Amen, brother.

For me, two things stand out about Peanuts. I hear a lot about the “culture war” against Christians that the “liberal media” has supposedly been perpetrating for decades. To hear some people tell it, identifying yourself as a Christian invariably means being ostracized and blacklisted, while Christian values are relentlessly attacked by secular humanists.

Some people take this argument pretty seriously. But when you look at Peanuts strips like the Job argument on the baseball mound, you can see that it doesn’t really hold water. Schulz was a Christian and did this sort of thing for fifty years(!) and was never criticized for doing it. On the contrary, he was possibly the most beloved artist of the last fifty years. Whenever the Jerry Falwells and the John Hagees of the world get me down, Schulz is the one I go running back to. This was evangelism done properly: intelligent, friendly and so subtle you miss it if you’re not paying attention.

The other point is the ongoing war that newspapers have actually been waging on the comics page itself. As everyone here probably knows, comics have been repeatedly made smaller over the years by newspapers determined to cut costs. I think it has reached the point where a lot of papers would eliminate the comics altogether if they thought they could get away with it. Peanuts is one of the reasons they can’t get away with it.

If you consider how few papers (relatively speaking) have dropped the strip since Schulz passed away and it went into reruns, you can see how reluctant editors are to get rid of it. As you’ve noticed yourself, dismissing Peanuts tends to provoke a lot of outrage, and can you imagine what would happen if all the major papers cut it (along with the rest of the funnies) at the same time? No, Peanuts will stay on the comics pages for a good while yet, and the comics pages will stay along with it. To me, that is one great reason to love Peanuts.

On a more personal note, Schulz has been part of my life since I bought a copy of “Here Comes Charlie Brown” at a school book sale when I was five or six. I still have the book, and I believe it is the only book I could have bought at the time that I could pick up and enjoy just as much nearly thirty years later.

I didn’t see anyone else mention it, so I’m giving a link to an article Mark Evanier wrote shortly after Shulz passed away.

http://www.povonline.com/cols/COL280.htm

Early Peanuts my eye! The strip was arguably brilliant through the early 80s.

I’d tend to agree…then again, it’s that decade’s strips and onward that fall within my lifetime, so are the ones I’m most familiar with.

Although he never really lost his uncanny grip on human nature, by the early 70′s I do think Schulz had started to wear the deep profundity a bit thin (after two decades straight, it’s kinda hard to blame him). Sheer intelligence and inventiveness kept him going throughout that decade at least.

Come the eighties, steam was more clearly lacking, and the 90′s – with their focus on generically-adorable Rerun – are best quietly ignored.

Still, though, the strip kept its integrity right up to the end. It was always, always, the product of one man and one man alone. How many other comics can you say that about?

As far as I’m concerned, I read Peanuts for the philosophy, insight, intellect and pathos, and then for the humor.

I’ve often said there’s a little bit of Charlie Brown in everyone (at least, there should be).

Granted, I’m not old enough to have been reading comic strips in their so-called golden ages, tho I’ve been exposed to them with time. Peanuts was the first comic strip I ever really liked, among the claptrap on the page in the 1970′s. Actually, the only strip I’m aware of that started in the 1970′s that is still considered good is Doonesbury. (Okay, I checked, and For Better or For Worse started in 1979, but that strip’s good days are way way behind it.)

Among the wide variety of strips I currently read, four are in permanent reruns: Popeye, Liberty Meadows, Calvin & Hobbes, and Peanuts. Of those, if I happen to miss a few days, I don’t check the days I missed of C&H and LM because they’re too familiar, too new. Popeye I’m kinda forced to because it’s serialized (even tho the serials tend to be long and often dull). peanuts is always a pleasure to re-read even when it was re-running strips I had just read in a Complete volume.

There’s been a lot of “Complete” collected editions of comic strips lately. Tho I own several of those, the only one that really deserves it is Peanuts.

My opinion is that the early strips are far better than the later strips. The moments seem so much truer in the early strips. They act like children, not like the annoying fake children in Grown-Up Jeffy’s Family Circus or modern Dennis the Menace. There’s bits of adulthood, too, but the characters seem so much more real to me than they do in the later strips, in which they seem more like ciphers designed to deliver setups and punchlines.

If you want some good strips, I recommend Gasoline Alley, Alley Oop, Thimble Theatre, Doonesbury, and Bloom County. Oh, and maybe even B.C. (pre-J.C.).

And, yes, Pig-Pen was the best.

As firmly established in the Holt, Rinehart & Winston book, “Snoopy and It Was A Dark And Stormy Night” (published in 1971), this is Snoopy’s novel…in all its glory:

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night
by Snoopy

Part I

It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed.
Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!
While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

Part II

A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day.
At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in Room 213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly.
Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates? The intern frowned.
“Stampede!” the foreman shouted, and forty thousand
head of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. The two men rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves. A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An uppercut to the jaw. The fight was over. And so the ranch was saved.
The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the
coffee shop. He had learned about medicine, but more
importantly, he had learned something about life.

THE END

(At which point, Linus asked, “But what about the
king?” He got clonked on the head for his impertinence.)