Child's Garden of Reverses

In a decade that has seen much of the fun leak out of the funnies, a Popsicleset Punchinello named Good Ol' Charlie Brown has endeared himself to millions of newspaper readers with a quietly wistful brand of humor that is both fresh and worldlywise. Supported by an all-moppet cast and a flop-eared dog named Snoopy, Charlie Brown is the moonfaced, star-crossed hero of the fast-rising Peanuts strip. Less than eight years old. the seven-days-a-week strip is carried by 355 U.S. dailies and some 40 foreign papers, and has overflowed into such profitable sidelines as a series of children's comic books and four $1-a-copy collections for grownups that have sold 570,000 copies.

A passion for Peanuts unites such varied readers as Poet Carl Sandburg, General Motors' President Harlow Curtice, and a dozen Navymen at the South Pole who crowd around a bulletin board each day for their Peanuts ration. The sparely drawn strip is included as a comment on mid-century mores in a historical textbook published by George Washington University. Peanuts earned its paterfamilias, Minnesota-born Artist Charles Monroe Schulz, the Cartoonists' Society's annual Reuben Award. Last week the editors of Yale's humorous monthly Record twined ivy in young (35) Charles Schulz's laurels by naming him Humorist of the Year.

Human Soil Bank. The appeal of Peanuts lies in its sophisticated melding of wry wisdom and sly oneupmanship. Unlike such funny-page small fry as Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace or Jimmy Ratio's Little Iodine, its characters are disingenuous and uncute. Charlie, whose peanut-bald head is surmounted by a single dispirited curl, is a junior-grade Walter Mitty, whose highflying dreams of popularity crash in endless ignominies. Charlie's characteristic lament: "Good grief!" The chief scorpion in his child's garden of reverses is a promising young termagant named Lucy, who, with apprentice-shrews Violet and Patty, sharpens her talons on Charlie's ego. "Good Ol' Charlie Brown," purrs Violet as Charlie passes. "Nobody hates him, everybody likes him . . . What a wishy-washy character!"

Lucy, in turn, is heartlessly rebuffed by Schroeder, a kindergarten longhair who dotes only on Beethoven and practices interminably on a toy piano. Sighs she: "I'll probably never get married." Other Peanuts regulars: thumb-sucking Linus, who battles grimly for the security of a tattered blanket; a mud-caked urchin called Pig-Pen ("A human soil bank," sniffs Violet); and Snoopy, a pooch of many talents, few of which are appreciated by his peers.