I don’t understand why people think children aren’t capable of complex emotions, like regret or nostalgia or aesthetic pleasure or ennui or bittersweet pining. I see kids struggle to describe very subtle emotional states all the time. I loved Peanuts as a child for this reason — Charlie Brown and his friends seemed to be going through much more comprehensible stories than anything else, full of sighing and staring up at the stars in puzzlement. I used to collect all the paperbacks and my parents bought me Peanuts Jubilee when I was seven, a fairly serious memoir by Schulz which I devoured. I remember after reading one strip, asking my mum what “sarcastic” meant, and never quite being the same thereafter. I probably learned to read via Charlie Brown. It definitely taught me to absorb some of middle-America’s culture, maybe even before I’d fully absorbed my own. I have a miniature print of Linus and Snoopy bought from my friend Cait that’s sat in every homesick home I’ve lived in America.
They say that a recent Schulz biography has made him out to be a bitter, hard-to-love man. It seems unlikely, except in the way that quiet, unemotional men are sometimes be misunderstood and misplaced by their families. After the book was published, his children and wives came to his defence, rather undermining the biographers’ claim.
This quote from an interview with him (taken from the links of a lively metafilter posting) more closely represents the gentle but implacable humanism I got from his work:
“There was one strip where Charlie Brown and Franklin had been playing on the beach, and Franklin said, “Well, it’s been nice being with you, come on over to my house some time.” Again, they didn’t like that. Another editor protested once when Franklin was sitting in the same row of school desks with Peppermint Patty, and said, “We have enough trouble here in the South without you showing the kids together in school.” But I never paid any attention to those things, and I remember telling Larry at the time about Franklin—he wanted me to change it, and we talked about it for a long while on the phone, and I finally sighed and said, “Well, Larry, let’s put it this way: Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How’s that?” So that’s the way that ended.”
There’s some fair commentary about how Schulz didn’t seem to know what to do with Franklin much of the time, and his later role as the comic page’s Token Black, but but his compact introduction to the strip — swimming at a beach with Charlie Brown, the mention of his father was in Vietnam (Charles says “My dad’s a barber. He was in a war too, but I don’t know which one.”), has a pretty light touch, given that this was published on July 31st, 1968, just a few weeks after King and Kennedy’s assassinations, and at the height of Peanuts’ popularity.
Edge of the West tells the rest of the story. I’m glad I had Peanuts to teach me how to live with disappointment and failure, as well as, more subtle, teach me of how the world was, all too slowly, improving.
December 1st, 2008 at 1:26 am
Yep, I had “Peanuts Jubilee” and a ton of collections as well. (I particularly loved the story of Schulz’s life leading up to Peanuts, and the sketches, things like that.) To this day I still can’t even begin to describe why I was into it, but now that you describe the mixture of emotional complexity and American culture, that covers a hell of a lot of it for me. Oh, and Woodstock.
December 1st, 2008 at 5:47 am
I think Schulz’ response to the accusation (well, maybe that’s too strong a word) that Franklin is merely a token is actually the better quote in that collection of bits – that he didn’t want to draw about things he didn’t know. It’s a tough line, I guess; not including a Franklin-type character means he doesn’t get to make his quiet social statement, but including Franklin with no defining features other than his race makes him a Token Black.
December 1st, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Well, Franklin did have a defining feature: he was the straight guy kid who saw how crazy all Charlie Brown’s neighbourhood was, and was a little freaked by it. It’s not much of one, but a lot of the secondary Peanuts cartoons survived on not much more. I don’t think any of the new characters after ’68 really got much look-in, the Linus/Charlie Brown/Lucy/Snoopy quadrumvirate was hard to break into. I think Franklin, Rerun, and the others got their bids, but really only Peppermint Patty and Marcie managed to establish themselves.
Huh, now I come to look at Wikipedia, apparently in the later years, Rerun took over the entire comic! Man, that must have pissed off everybody!
December 9th, 2008 at 11:22 am
hear hear. peanuts was and remains the roxor.