Charles M. Brown
In addition to lurking Latvian genes and a startling capacity for brooding and worry, another thing I’ve apparently passed onto my son is a ridiculous love of comic books.
I recognise that look in his eye each time he gets his hands on a new one, already half-gone, yearning to get lost in the action for those few short panels of time.
And I’m sure if he knew Gumby, he’d envy his ability to walk into books as much as I did, but I’m thinking now that my son is 13 – an age where they’re forever poised to be mortified by their parents’ behaviour – it might be unwise to seek commiseration on this point. Gumby, mother? Gumby? Do you hear what you’re saying? To me? In public? And, no, I won’t ‘just sing the theme song’ with you.
A few weeks ago, I bought him a beautiful new collection of Peanuts that covers the years 1955 to 1958, then promptly stole it for myself.
Most of the comic books that enthralled me when I was little – the superheroes, Beano, Archie, Casper, Richie Rich… – now leave me cold (I think that’s a good thing), but Peanuts, it turns out, is forever.
From the foreword to Vol. I by Matt Groening:
I got to meet Charles Schulz just once, in May 1998 […] I told Schulz of my all-time favorite Peanuts strip, which I hadn’t seen in some forty years, but which remained a permanent part of my feverish brain.
The strip shows Lucy methodically making a series of tiny snowmen, then stomping on them, as Charlie Brown looks on.
Lucy explains matter-of-factly: “I’m torn between the desire to create and the desire to destroy.”
“Thank you for that strip,” I said. “In one sentence, you summed up my life.”
Schulz smiled politely.
Do you hear me?
He smiled politely!
I made Charles Schulz smile politely!
I just now realize that I’m more like Charlie Brown than I’ve ever admitted to myself.
Smart and insightful, never treacle sweet, it’s genuinely heart-breaking and funny. It has layers! A woosh of nostalgia, and thoroughly captivating, the only thing that’s changed since decades ago is an inexplicable sympathy for Lucy this time ‘round (I see flaws where once I only saw bully).
Patty and Violet, on the other hand, still piss me off.
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- My favorite Charlie brown strip is also a Lucy one: In the first panel Lucy and Linus are watching TV and eating chocolate; in the second, Linus starts to wrap what’s left of his chocolate bar, announcing that he is saving it for tomorrow… at which point Lucy says “What if the end of the world arrives tonight and there is no tomorro?”. In the last panel both Linus and Lucy are munching like crazy.
But I actually much prefer Mafalda to Charlie Brown.
— Riccardo Schiaffino Mar 28, 1:24am # - My favorite line is from Linus: “Even my cold cereal doth taste of wormwood.”
— sjc Mar 28, 4:56am # - One of the Peanuts books I had as a kid contained a strip that burned itself into my memory. Linus and Chuck are walking along, dressed for the cold. Snoopy sees a small frozen puddle, does some figure skating on it, promptly falls. Linus says, “One patch of ice doth not a winter make.”
Thirty years after reading it, “One patch of ice doth not a winter make” is still lodged in my head. I’ll probably be laying on my deathbead thinking “One patch of ice doth not a winter make,” “One patch of ice doth not…”
— barnes Mar 28, 4:12pm # - One of my favourites has Lucy peering at an open book, first propped up on a footstool, then on the ground. She peers and peers, her nose almost touching the page.
Then she’s up, walking across the room, book clutched in one hand, fuming, “I give up… there’s no use trying.” Charlie Brown appears, and she explains, “No matter how hard I try, I can’t read between the lines.”
— gail Mar 28, 4:41pm # - Nothing to do with Peanuts, but I’m pleasantly surprised to find out you’re part Latvian. I’ve read your blog off and on for a while now, and as an aspiring Latvian-to-English translator (though I’m not Latvian; I just lived there and fell in love with the language), it’s fun to discover this serendipitous connection on one of the sites I read for inspiration.
— zan Mar 29, 4:53pm # - And happiness really is a warm puppy (or two or three)
— wizmo Mar 30, 8:52am # - Peanuts may be forever, but the comic collection that I lust for the most is that fabulous 3-volume edition of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (“the heaviest and most expensive book ever to hit the New York Times best-seller list”). I’ve resisted so far, but I’m starting to cave…
— michael Mar 30, 6:02pm # - Being raised in a household of spiritually-charged art-loving reluctant atheists during the sixties, I recognise that Peanuts resonates for me as a secular image/text which instructed and implicated me in questions of ethics, morality, desire, suffering and good ol’ reliable existential angst.
“Man is born to struggle as the sparks fly upward”, Linus quotes from Job as Charlie Brown considers suicide atop his baseball mound.
Now, y’see…: that’s deep. I’ve never been the same.
— moj Mar 31, 9:15pm # - Hmmm. Or was it “suffer”, not “struggle”? Sigh.
— moj Mar 31, 9:17pm # - As a young aspiring cartoonist I once sent a drawing to Mad Magazine. I drew a character whose very frizzy hair dissolved into a mass of flies. The caption read, “Is it or isn’t it? Only his hairbrush knows for sure” after the then-famous Prell shampoo byline.
Mad sent back a wonderful rejection letter. The letterhead had the big Mad logo printed in red at the top, and Alfred E. Newman’s face was embossed across the page. The concluding remark, burned in my brain to this day, was, “Cartooning is a slight exaggeration of the norm, one step beyond reality. You are way out of step.” I am very proud of that!
By the way, years later, while watching my son take a tennis lesson, I met someone from Mad Magazine who knew the man who wrote that letter.
— Stuart Vail Apr 1, 5:17pm # - Oh, I’m so impressed. If you have to get rejected, be sure that it’s by the best.
So much of Mad magazine is still deeply emblazoned on my brain, as is the blind passion of my reactions when going through it, so enthralled by parts and wildly put off by others (something about Spy vs. Spy gave me terrible creeps)—always awed by their cheek and cleverness and figuring if there was something I didn’t get or like, it was only because I wasn’t yet cool.
— gail Apr 1, 6:18pm # - Probably the funniest thing I ever saw in Mad, and it made me literally fall off the bed in laughter, was a sequence in which a man, standing at the end of a pier with his little dog, wanted to teach the dog to fetch. He threw the stick off the pier and pointed. The poor dog cowered in fear. The man grew angrier and pointed more dramatically toward the stick. The dog hunched and tried to withdraw even more. It was probably the expression on the dog’s face matched with what happened next that did it for me: the man then punted the poor beast off the pier.
Was my appreciation of this savagery related to twisting Barbie’s head off?
— Stuart Vail Apr 1, 9:18pm #
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