Why I Love Peanuts

Joe Queenan, for the Guardian, discusses his love for Charles Schultz's famous strip.

From the piece...

You didn't have to like all the characters in Peanuts to enjoy the strip. I never quite got Marcie or Franklin, mid-60s additions who seemed to serve an ancillary function. Woodstock, the lovable little bird who became Snoopy's protege, annoyed me. Linus's Beethoven fixation I found tiring. But Lucy, Chuck, Peppermint Patty and Snoopy were fine.

From the very beginning, Peanuts had an elegiac quality. It made Americans pine for an earlier, more innocent time that had never actually existed. In this sense, Peanuts occupied a place in the American consciousness that was a bit like that occupied by Sir Walter Scott's novels in Victorian times, evoking a time and place where life was simpler and easier to understand, and therefore entirely illusory. Though Schulz would sometimes make satirical allusions to events of the day, the adult world never really intruded. Physically, he did not allow adults to enter the strip. Nor did he allow senseless cruelty. Pratfalls, yes, but not cruelty. The world of Peanuts was hermetically sealed, in the way that children at play have always wanted their cosmos hermetically sealed.

Peanuts did not look like the comic strips that had preceded it. Many of these were incredibly busy and complicated, and sometimes grotesque. They were stylish and beautiful, but inaccessible; the artist did not invite his audience in. Peanuts, by contrast was deceptively simple in design and very accommodating to the viewer. There was usually not much more than the characters' expressions, perhaps a doghouse or a playing field. This graphic approach didn't change much over the years; it was not broke, so there was no reason to fix it.


And, since Halloween is just around the corner, a clip from the classic TV special, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown":