4 Comments

1. Like Harvey, I had access to every Peanuts book from the beginning. It is notable how the strip changed, pretty much in the way this author describes well.

   I didn’t know the following back-stories, until I happened across a book entitled “The Gospel According to Peanuts” (Robert L. Short, Bantam edition, 1968 [originally published by Knox, 1964]):

   [Quoting Charles Schulz:] “I grew up an only child, and my mother died the very week I was drafted. This was a tremendous blow in our little family. I was assigned to the 20th Armored Division and eventually became a machine gun squad leader . . . . we took part in the liberation of Dachau and Munich. . . . Before going into the Armed Forcces I met a minister of the Church of God . . . He walked into my father’s barbershop one day in St. Paul, Minnesota . . . It was not long after that that we called upon him to preach my mother’s funeral sermon. After coming back from the Army, I began to attend services at his little church. We had an active group of young people — all of us were in our twenties — and we began studying the Bible together. The more I thought about the matter during these study times, the more I realized that I really loved God. I recognized the fact that he had pulled me through a depression in which I had been torn apart from everything I knew, and that he had enabled me to survive so many experiences.” (p. 70)

   [Charlie Brown] “never does anything mean, but he is weak, vain, and very vulnerable. . . . And aren’t all kids egoists?” Shulz asks. “And brutal? Children are charicatures of adults.” Indeed Mr. Schulz had originally planned to call his strip Li’l Folks, and evidently was quite disappointed with the “terrible insignificance” of the “Peanuts” title, when the strip was renamed by a cartoon syndicate. (p.42)

   Mr. Schulz has said: “. . . naturally I must exercise care in the way I go about expressing things. I have a message that I want to present, but I would rather bend a little to put over a point than to have the whole strip dropped because it is too obvious. As a result . . . all kinds of people in religious work have written to thank me for preaching in my own way through the strips. That is one of the things that keeps me going.”

   We know, from materials written by an about Mr. Schulz, that he is an extremely active “lay-preacher” of the Church of God (headquartered in Anderson, Indiana). (p.20)

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2. Chris Caldwell was on this 15 years ago.

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3. I dunno. By the time I was 11, Snoopy was pretty much the only reason I was still reading them. I always wished some of his more bizarre storylines got more frames.

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4. @3 – Which is exactly the author’s point. Early on, the kids all had distinctive personalities and storylines. Snoopy was just one of many characters. Then he became, essentially, another kid. Then he became the only kid with a personality.

   Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because it was an entertaining personality, but the comic lost a lot of its richness, complexity, and thought-provokingness… and became mere entertainment.

   Once upon a time, it had been something much more.

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