I cut out a Peanuts strip some 15 years ago or more and still carry it with me, because it spoke to me very deeply.

Rerun is explaining to his teacher the drawing or story he has written:

"It's about a kid in kindergarten," he says, "and how the stress is slowly destroying him."

When he realizes that this truth isn't what people want to hear he says, "I have another one here about some purple bunnies."

Thanks.

(in a Jerry Seinfeldesque voice) ... just what was the deal with Peppermint Patty?

I am puzzled by all the readers who are themselves puzzled or saddened to learn Schulz was a depressive:*stop the presses*! From the very first strip: some kids saying "Good 'Ol Charlie Brown - How I hate him!" you know you are not in traditional comic territory. The strip wore its frequently broken heart on its sleeve - no gags here. It's innovation was in it's minimal form and the existential concerns of a group of semi-adult children.

Schulz was a genius, so what if he wasn't a saint? For a more sympathetic appreciation, read Garrison Keillor's introduction to the first volume of The Complete Peanuts". I dare you not to sniffle.

I appreciate this as a review full of care and affection for the book's topic. But I always find curious negative evaluations of an author's style that aren't supported by the passages a reviewer quotes. Inept clumsinesss isn't really demonstrated by the description of John Bailey as "a habitual, Irish curmudgeon." One can certainly be an Irish curmudgeon, and since it is conceivable that one might be a curmudgeon either by nature or by habit, "a habitual Irish curmudgeon" is certainly possible. It may not be elegant, and the comma is a problem, but it's hardly awful.

I was born in 1955, so I was a child when PEANUTS first began its ascent to national and then international popularity, and I was an avid fan of the strip. Later, as I grew older, I maintained my habit of reading the comic strips, and PEANUTS was one I continued to read, even as fewer and fewer strips continued to be published that merited even the few seconds it might take to read them. However, I noticed a change in the strip, I guess THE change referenced in this article...the strip seemed less focused, more diffuse, with new ancillary characters brought in that never really worked, (Woodstock and Snoopy's cousin Spike, for example, although I did like Marcie, Peppermint Pattie's friend), and, more to its detriment, the strip was only sporadically amusing, rarely outright funny, and never compelling, as it had been in its 60s heyday.

In the very last years of the strip, I thought it was often incoherent, or at least inscrutable; perhaps Schulz was expressing something that was meaningful (and comprehensible) only to him. But I noticed a more troubling change: Charlie Brown, who had always elicited our sympathy as the abused underdog, the lovelorn sad sack, seemed himself to have become hardened, unconcerned with and indifferent to the trials of his fellow PEANUTS denizens. This, more than anything, really damaged the strip for me, and I couldn't figure it out. However, after reading this article--and after reading it I want to read the book which is its subject--I realize that Schulz, the detached, self-absorbed, sometimes mean depressive was simply no longer sweetening Charlie Brown's character, but was (perhaps inadvertently) simply allowing his own personality to be reflected unalloyed in his primary character. In the end, we were no longer viewing Schulz through the scrim of Charlie Brown, but were witness to Charles Schulz naked on the page.

So what that Charles Schulz was human just like everyone else? He had crushes while he was married. And an affair. And his stories of his life didn't add up to other people's versions. When do they ever add up for anyone? And the pain that he suffered as a child showed itself in his art. Wow. No more or less than any other artist. Big deal. Sorry, knowing these things about him doesn't change the simple "wisdom" of Peanuts for me.

And a personal aside. My mother told me that she worked with Charles Schulz in Madison, Wisconsin right after WWII (or just before it ended). He was a window dresser in a department store where she also worked. Though she didn't know him well, she said he was a very nice to everyone there. And apparently he was already scribbling his cartoons at that point.

being given slightly used "Peanuts" anthologies when I was a grade schooler in the early 60s. We got a hell of a lot out of those, a palatable, laugh our loud existentialism for a badly fractured world. But it seems to me Schultz simply turned conservative after about 1970, no poignancy, no sting, nothing that could possibly discomfort the comfortable.

In the same way, Johnny Hart in B.C. went from being a great progressive to an outrageous conservative of the dunderheaded Christian stripe.

We need work on the funny pages that creates a position for the reader to stand apart from the order of things-- because that is where millions of us stand.

I hate it-- really, really hate it-- when some publication decides to "expose" someone we all love as actually being (god forbid) human. I'm sorry, who the hell cares whether Charles Schulz was depressive, grouchy, had affairs, snorted cocaine, or kicked puppies for fun. He was FUNNY. That's what matters. End of story.

...and I too am capable of being depressed, resentful, a jerk, etc.

I guess I hope no one ever writes a biography of me, so that people will remember me (if at all) for my work rather than for my foibles. Not that any of my work is likely to become as well known as "Peanuts".

I have a "Peanuts" strip stuck on my wall which has Linus telling Charlie Brown about his nighttime fears and anxieties. I've been there too, my scraggly-haired little brother.

"Misguided?" How dare you!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ih03es8jkf0

Believe Linus.