Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Without Flagellation. For the perennial critics of the comics, the new strips like Peanuts should come as a welcome relief. Taking the comics, in their own way, as seriously as Europeans, some Americans have castigated the funnies for offering a distorted, often brutalized view of life. In Love & Death, a brilliant indictment of the medium, Folklorist Gershon Legman writes: "Children are not allowed to fantasy themselves as actually revolting against authority-as actually killing their fathers. A literature frankly offering such fantasies would be outlawed overnight. But in the identifications available in the comic strips-in the character...
Religion, psychiatry, education-indeed all the complexities of the modern world-seem more amusing than menacing when they are seen through the clear, uncompromising eyes of the comic-strip kids from Peanuts. The wry and wistful characters created by Cartoonist Charles M. Schulz have all but come to life for readers in the U.S. and abroad as they demonstrate daily and Sunday an engaging wisdom beyond their years, a simplistic yet somehow impressive understanding of the assorted problems that perplex their elders...
...Like his creation Charlie Brown, who never uses an expletive stronger than "Good grief!" Schulz insists: "I've never used a cuss word in my life. I don't even like ugly words like stink or fink. Perhaps I'm just ridiculously sensitive." He believes that "comic-strip artists have a responsibility to be uplifting and decent. This is not difficult. My book, Happiness Is a Warm Puppy, is completely innocent; yet in 1963 it outsold every other book, despite the waves of smut sweeping the country...
Thanks largely to these new strips, the whole comics industry-300 syndicated strips and panels in 1,700 newspapers-is pulling itself out of the doldrums. In the 1950s the comics lost both readers and advertisers to television. Now that TV's appeal has begun to tarnish, the comics are on the upswing. Advertising revenue for the Sunday comics supplements reached an estimated 6,000,000 in 1964, double what it was the year before. While adventure strips may be hard-put to compete with TV shoot-'em-ups, there is nothing on television that packs quite...
After the war, Sparky returned to live in St. Paul with his widowed father. He also joined the nondenominational Church of God: "I was a lonesome young man, and the church gave me a place to go." In 1946 he finally landed a job lettering a comic magazine; later that same year, he went to teach at a Minneapolis art school. There he finally overcame his shyness long enough to ask Joyce Halverson, an instructor's pretty, blue-eyed sister, for a date. As Charlie Brown's luck would have it, Joyce slipped on a candy wrapper while...