Comics: Good Grief

(10 of 10)

Otherwise, Schulz leads just the sort of life his readers would suspect. His favorite hobby is golf. He attends the annual Bing Crosby Invitational tournament, aspires some day to play with Sam Snead: "I keep using his name in the strip, hoping that he will write to me. But he never does." Neither he nor Joyce drinks, smokes or swears. Like his creation Charlie Brown, who never uses an expletive stronger than "Good grief!" Schulz insists: "I've never used a cuss word in my life. I don't even like ugly words like stink or fink. Perhaps I'm just ridiculously sensitive." He believes that "comic-strip artists have a responsibility to be uplifting and decent. This is not difficult. My book, Happiness Is a Warm Puppy, is completely innocent; yet in 1963 it outsold every other book, despite the waves of smut sweeping the country."

Fun Without Flagellation. For the perennial critics of the comics, the new strips like Peanuts should come as a welcome relief. Taking the comics, in their own way, as seriously as Europeans, some Americans have castigated the funnies for offering a distorted, often brutalized view of life. In Love & Death, a brilliant indictment of the medium, Folklorist Gershon Legman writes: "Children are not allowed to fantasy themselves as actually revolting against authority—as actually killing their fathers. A literature frankly offering such fantasies would be outlawed overnight. But in the identifications available in the comic strips—in the character of the Katzenjammer Kids, in the kewpie-doll character of Blondie—both father and husband can be thoroughly beaten up, harassed, humiliated and degraded daily. Lulled by these halfway aggressions—that is to say, halfway to murder—the censorship demands only that in the final sequence Hans & Fritz must submit to flagellation for their 'naughtiness,' Blondie to the inferior position of being, after all, merely a wife."

However merited such criticism, it thankfully does not apply to Peanuts and his breed. The newcomers offer shrewd insight and warm affirmation without stooping to violence or escapism. Gingerly, tentatively but hopefully, the comics are beginning to comment on life, confront social issues and satirize some sacred cows. And none of them do this so engagingly—or so successfully—as Charles Schulz's Peanuts.