Word: strips
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most appealing. And Charlie Brown, the principal Peanut, is a likely candidate for most popular kid in the country. With the merest wisp of hair and a perpetually furrowed brow, Charlie gazes blankly on a world that is far too ferocious for him. Each strip is usually a lesson, complete in itself, on the futility of good intentions. "Believe in me," Charlie cries, but no one pays any attention. When he calls to apologize for being late to a party, his host replies, "I didn't even know you weren't here." When he carves a girl...
Lucy's little tousle-haired brother Linus is the strip's intellectual, but he is thrown into a tizzy whenever he loses his security blanket. "Sucking your thumb without a blanket," he confides, "is like eating a cone without ice cream." Linus is Horatio Alger in reverse: "No problem is so big or so complicated that it cannot be run away from." Snoopy, the dog with the floppy ears and foolish smile, is the perfect hedonist. He dances, skates, jumps rope, hunches like a vulture but above all likes to lie flat on his back...
...economizing on words and lines, Schulz produces a lean, spare, dryly witty strip that avoids the archness and sentimentality of most comics that deal with children. With the barely perceptible wriggle of a line, he can convey a pathos and tenderness beyond the reach of most of his colleagues. The dots at either end of Charlie's mouth sum up six years of concentrated worry. So subtle is Schulz's drawing that some of his best panels are wordless -as when the Peanuts are gathered to observe somberly the first snowflake of winter...
Nice Boys Lose. Certainly much of Schulz's own life is in the strip: the harrowing little frustrations, the countless near-misses. "I guess I'm 100% Charlie Brown. Sixty million people read about the dumb things I did when I was little." Born in Minneapolis in 1922, Schulz was dubbed Sparky (after the rambunctious, blanket-draped horse in the strip Barney Google) when he was two days old, and the name stuck. As a boy, Sparky avidly read the comics, sketched illustrations of Sherlock Holmes stories and of his own dog Spike (Snoopy's model...
That was Sparky's last spectacular mishap. In 1950, after many rejections by other syndicates, Li'I Folks was accepted by Manhattan's United Feature Syndicate as a comic strip. Over Sparky's protest, the syndicate renamed it Peanuts. "I wanted to keep Li'I Folks. I wanted a strip with dignity and significance. 'Peanuts' made it sound too insignificant...