Word: comicalities
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...Charlie Brown was something new in comics: a real person, with a real psyche and real problems. The reader knew him, knew his fears, sympathized with his sense of inferiority and alienation. When Charlie Brown first confessed, "I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel," he was speaking for people everywhere in Eisenhower's America, especially for a generation of solemn, precociously cynical college students, who "inhabited a shadow area within the culture," the writer Frank Conroy recalled. They were the last generation to grow up, as Schulz had, without television, and they read Charlie Brown...
...hard to remember now, when Snoopy and Charlie Brown dominate the blimps at golf tournaments instead of the comics in Sunday papers, that once upon a time Schulz's strip was the fault-line of a cultural earthquake. Garry Trudeau, creator of "Doonesbury," who came of age as a comic strip artist under Schulz's influence, thought of it as "the first Beat strip." Edgy, unpredictable, ahead of its time, "Peanuts" "vibrated with '50s alienation," Trudeau recalled. "Everything about it was different...
...Charlie Brown sits down to a radio broadcast whose suave announcer is saying, "And what, in all this world, is more delightful than the gay wonderful laughter of little children?" Charlie Brown stands, sets his jaw, and kicks the radio set clear out of the room. Here was a comic strip hero, who, unlike his predecessors Li'l Abner, Dick Tracy, Joe Palooka or Beetle Bailey, could take the restrained fury of the '50s and translate it into a harbinger of '60s activism...
SCHULZ DID. A SHY, TIMID BOY, a barber's son, born on November 26, 1922, "Sparky" Schulz - nicknamed for the horse in "Barney Google"- had grown up from modest beginnings in St Paul, Minnesota, to realize his earliest dream of creating a newspaper comic strip. The only child of devoted parents, neither of whom had gone further in school than the third grade, Schulz linked the happy unsophistication of his childhood home with the ideal of a dignified, ordinary life that he forever after tried to return to. "There are times," he wrote at 58, "when I would like...
...Melancholy would dog him all his life, as would feelings of worthlessness, panic, high anxiety and frustration. It wouldn't matter that he married twice, raised five children, and became the most widely syndicated and beloved cartoonist of all time, attaining success on a scale no individual comic strip artist had ever known. Success fell off him. He was unable to take refuge in its rewards. With his first wife and five children, he moved in 1958 to a paradise among the redwoods of Northern California, where he briefly found happiness during a decade in which the work...