Peanuts
It was announced that Charles Schultz is ending an era. The creator of the Peanuts cartoon strip is putting down the comic’s pen, because of illness. Schultz has been one of the most prolific, prolific what? A cartoonist? A journalist? A social commentator? Entertainer? All of the above. His work is published in more than 75 countries.
Schultz has all been a chronicler of the American character, through the many characters he has created in his strip over the past half-century. Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Snoopy, Woodstock the Bird are ubiquitous in newspapers, on television, children’s toys and books, and on blimps.
Ostensibly, Schultz’s characters were children; they all went to school. But they always seemed like adults to me. To the degree that when I first saw a Charlie Brown program on television, I was jolted to hear children’s voices instead of grown-ups’. They seemed to think like adults; why didn’t they sound like them?
Schultz didn’t stray far from his main themes. Though he was producing all of those strips a week for five decades; he never thought he needed to have Schroeder do drugs or the Little Red-Haired Girl get pregnant. He was right.
Schultz wasn’t a strident political voice by any means, but he certainly did make his points. One of his few targets seemed to be public television; not the idea, but the system. I remember two strips featuring Linus watching television, and the copy said that PBS was busy collecting money from the viewers, and then wasting it. Dunno the reason, but he’s right.
Charlie Brown may be best remembered as the manager of the baseball team that can’t win. Or the ever-hopeful football kicker; Lucy the holder who pulls the ball away every time.
A favorite strip featured Linus asking Charlie Brown what he did when he got the urge to jump up and run around and kick a ball. And the response from Charlie Brown was, I lie down and wait for the feeling to go away.
Pigpen was an interesting character. He walked along in a perpetual cloud of dust. I would never suggest that the artist shares my interpretation, but I’ve often wondered if Pigpen weren’t some Zen-like character who rather than carrying dust cloud was actually just walking in it, as in, following his fate.
Peanuts, Red China, and I were all conceived in 1949 so I can’t claim to be a lifetime reader. I can say that every time I picked up a newspaper and got to the comics page, I would always look for Peanuts, and always find it. Except when the paper put Schultz’s cartoon on the editorial page, where it probably said more than most of the commentary.
Thank you, Mr. Schultz, for your contribution.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.
[Home]
SetonnoteS