Jonathan Franzen on Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts,” the only comic strip that dealt with stuff that really mattered, he writes. Schulz was born on this day in 1922.
any other good strips. Indeed, I would have swapped the entirefor a daily dose of Schulz. Only “Peanuts,” the strip we didn’t get, dealt with stuff that really mattered. I didn’t for a minute believe that the children in “Peanuts” were really children—they were so much more emphatic and cartoonishlythan anybody in my own neighborhood—but I nevertheless took their stories to be dispatches from a universe of childhood that was somehow more substantial and convincing than my own.
Or Chapter 2, verses 6-12, of what I knew about fiction: Linus is annoying Lucy, wheedling and pleading with her to read him a story. To shut him up, she grabs a book, randomly opens it, and says, “A man was born, he lived and he died. The End!” She tosses the book aside, and Linus picks it up reverently. “What a fascinating account,” he says. “It almost makes you wish you had known the fellow.”
I’d never been sent down before. I was interested to learn that the principal, Mr. Barnett, had a Webster’s International Unabridged in his office. Toczko, who barely outweighed the dictionary, used two hands to open it and to roll back the pages to the “L” words. I stood at his shoulder and saw where his tiny, trembling index finger was pointing:. Mr.
We laugh at dachshunds for humping our legs, but our own species is even more self-centered in its imaginings. There’s no object so Other that it can’t be anthropomorphized and shanghaied into conversation with us. Some objects are more amenable than others, however. The trouble with Mr. Bear was that he was more realistically bearlike than the other animals. He had a distinct, stern, feral persona; unlike our faceless washcloths, he was assertively Other.
Schulz “didn’t bother” going to art school, either—it would only have discouraged him, he said, to be around people who could draw better than he could. You could see a lack of confidence here. You could also see a kid who knew how to protect himself. In another archetypal “Peanuts” strip, Violet and Patty are abusing Charlie Brown in vicious stereo: “As he trudges away with his eyes on the ground, Violet remarks, “It’s a strange thing about Charlie Brown. You almost never see him laugh.”
My mother called him “oversensitive.” She meant that it was easy to hurt his feelings, but the sensitivity was physical as well. When he was young, a doctor gave him a pinprick test that showed him to be allergic to “almost everything,” including wheat, milk, and tomatoes. A different doctor, whose office was at the top of five long flights of stairs, greeted him with a blood-pressure test and immediately declared him unfit to fight the Nazis.
Charles Schulz was the best comic-strip artist who ever lived. When “Peanuts” débuted, in October, 1950 , the funny pages were full of musty holdovers from the thirties and forties. Even with the strip’s strongest precursors, George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” and Elzie Segar’s “Popeye,” you were aware of the severe constraints under which newspaper comics operated.
Schulz never stopped trying to be funny. Around 1970, though, he began to drift away from aggressive humor and into melancholy reverie. There came tedious meanderings in Snoopyland with the unhilarious bird Woodstock and the unamusing beagle Spike. Certain leaden devices, such as Marcie’s insistence on calling Peppermint Patty “sir,” were heavily recycled. By the late eighties, the strip had grown so quiet that younger friends of mine seemed baffled by my fandom.
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