Saturday, November 26, 2022

The Greatest of All Comic Strips...Charles M. Schulz@100

#CharlesMSchulz100



Bryan Appleyard, The Spectator, January 2019:
"....Lucy is a cynic, a sadist, a huckster, a realist. Nevertheless, she would be right but for the fact that nothing is ever of ‘immeasurable value’ to Charlie Brown. He is too battered by life to be an idealist but he clings to hope, to the possibility that there is justice somewhere in the cosmos. He finds none but he is a good man, though only eight years old.

That, in a nutshell, is what Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts is all about — the persistence of hope in the face of hopelessness. The strip ran in newspapers and on television from 1950 to 13 February 2000, the day after Schulz died.
It was — and remains — the greatest of all comic strips. Exquisitely drawn, beautifully written, timelessly true, it tenderly distils the absurdity and pain of the human condition. It is about children but it evades easy sentimentality by making the characters struggle with and suffer about childish things that are obviously adult things in disguise. You couldn’t pat Charlie Brown on the head and tell him not to worry, because he had already glimpsed the truth that, for good men like him, life is worry...."


Artist: Harry Bliss