Cleveland Centennial: Peanuts

Monday, June 20, 2011

Peanuts

This is really dark.

(Click on to enlarge.)
The comic strip Peanuts (October 2, 1950 - February 13, 2000) is the best comic strip ever made, and there are few who would disagree with that statement whose opinions really matter. Created by Charles M. Schulz and drawn by him and only him every single day for fifty years (I'm look at you, Jim Davis) Peanuts did for the comic strip was improvisation did for comedy, arriving at roughly the same time and redefining their genre for the second half of the 20th century.

I have discovered that my own appreciation of Peanuts follows the same path as many others, loving it as a child (I had Peanuts bedsheets, among a million other related materials) with many collections of strips on my bookshelves which I could recite by heart, as well as a love of the animated cartoons, which began to suck when Vince Guaraldi died.

What does the music have to do with it, you ask? Good grief.

As I became an adolescent I found cartoons about kids to be silly, and moved onto Doonesbury, returning to Peanuts as an adult when I finally realized that arch, ironic, sometimes bleak humor Doonesbury could never have existed without Schulz making it possible. Because I got the strip on one level as a child, relating to it but not knowing why I related to it, and then really being destroyed by it as an adult.

Speaking of which, have you seen 3eanuts yet?

Charles Schulz's Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters' expense. With the last panel omitted, despair pervades all. - 3eanuts

Very clever, great fun, and the reason it is funny is because its basic argument is true. Unlike parodist online cartoon experiments like Dysfunctional Family Circus or Garfield Minus Garfield, 3eanuts doesn't change the artists' work or even his original intention. It just exposes how the humor works, and how brilliant Schulz really was.