Comics: Good Grief

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The little, tousle-haired boy has built a magnificent sand castle, complete with turrets and battlements. Then the rains come. Standing amid the washed-out ruins of his "house upon the sand," the youngster seems to be groping for a half-forgotten truth from Sunday school. "There's a lesson to be learned here somewhere," he says wanly. "But I don't know what it is."

A black-haired moppet draws a picture of a heart on a fence and explains to the little boy: "One side is filled with hate and the other side is filled with love. These are the two forces constantly at war with each other." The boy clutches his chest: "I think I know just what you mean. I can feel them fighting."

From behind a lemonade stand labeled "Psychiatric Care," the same little girl listens to a little blonde girl's troubles: "My problem is I'm afraid of kindergarten. 1 don't even know why! I try to reason it out, but I can't." Responds the junior psychiatrist: "You're no different from anybody else. Five cents, please."

Religion, psychiatry, education—indeed all the complexities of the modern world—seem more amusing than menacing when they are seen through the clear, uncompromising eyes of the comic-strip kids from Peanuts. The wry and wistful characters created by Cartoonist Charles M. Schulz have all but come to life for readers in the U.S. and abroad as they demonstrate daily and Sunday an engaging wisdom beyond their years, a simplistic yet somehow impressive understanding of the assorted problems that perplex their elders.

Comics have espoused many causes; the strips have been crammed with all kinds of propaganda. But Peanuts is the leader of a refreshing new breed that takes an unprecedented interest in the basics of life. Love, hate, togetherness, solitude, the alienation in an age of anxiety—such topics are so deftly explored by Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts crew that readers who would not sit still for a sermon readily devour the sermon-like cartoons. Some 60 million people follow the strip in 700 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada and 71 abroad. Peanuts is translated into a dozen languages, from Danish (in which the title becomes Little Radishes) to Spanish to Japanese. Schulz's theology has even merited a solemn book, The Gospel According to Peanuts, in which Divinity Student Robert Short has found the strip filled with profound Christian understanding (TIME, Jan. 1).