Peanuts

Peanuts has played an interesting role in my life, not a particularly large one, it was mostly confined to coffee side tables for light reading and I think a lot of it went over my head. I think at that age, I was looking more for the cheap gag than really trying to understand what it was the comic was really trying to say. I find myself fascinated with just a little research about how much darker some of the content seems. Lucy and Schroeder, for example - her pestering while he sits at the piano consumed by his work draws from his own relationship with his first wife and their damaged relationship. I thought it interesting that Steve Martino, director of the new movie from Blue Sky said that from what he’d heard that Snoopy was the character that Schulz always wanted to be and Charlie Brown was the person that he really was.. Suddenly, Charlie takes on a whole different meaning. From an awkward cartoon boy to an adult who isn’t happy with himself, wishing he were the confident and funny snoopy. Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, said that it was a ‘model of artistic depth and integrity that left a deep impression’ on him. To me, this is what makes Peanuts such an impressive comic, that it is drawn from something so genuine and has someone’s entire being poured into it. Left on the page under a thinly veiled guise for the mass market to see if only it looked hard enough. That must be quite intense, to tap into and then to share your deepest insecurities and thoughts and feelings with such a wide audience. Anyway, I think it is no wonder that Peanuts is such a popular and loved comic, the simplicity lends itself to the internal thought provoking nature of the comic without distracting from it and is a wonderfully charming to look at it. Added to this, the themes it deals with hits something real and I think that any comic that does this well has the potential to do well. I also think it is the hardest part to do right. Neil Gaiman said something in his commencement speech to the University of the Arts in 2012 that really struck a note with me and that is the following. -  ‘The moment you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself - that is the moment you might be starting to get it right’.