Comics: Good Grief

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Furrowed Brow. Of all the newcomers, Peanuts, which arrived on the comics page 15 years ago, is by far the most appealing. And Charlie Brown, the principal Peanut, is a likely candidate for most popular kid in the country. With the merest wisp of hair and a perpetually furrowed brow, Charlie gazes blankly on a world that is far too ferocious for him. Each strip is usually a lesson, complete in itself, on the futility of good intentions. "Believe in me," Charlie cries, but no one pays any attention. When he calls to apologize for being late to a party, his host replies, "I didn't even know you weren't here." When he carves a girl's initials on a small tree, the tree collapses. When a little girl he admires approaches him in the playground, he gets so nervous he ties his peanut-butter sandwich in knots. When he wins a bowling trophy—a rare triumph—his name turns out to be spelled wrong. "How can we lose when we're so sincere?" he cries after losing his umpteenth baseball game. "Charlie," says Milt Caniff, creator of the adventure strip Steve Canyon, "is everybody's Walter Mitty."

Charlie's chief tormentor, Lucy van Pelt, is a tiny, black-haired termagant, a caricature of the modern aggressive female. "Here's a perfect parody of what American life is supposed to be," says Pogo's creator Walt Kelly: "The ineffectual male and the domineering female." "Blockhead!" Lucy shouts at Charlie, and the insult throws him into a somersault. When she has outwitted him, she purrs: "I admire your boundless faith in human nature." Bellows this girl who aspires to go to military school: "I don't want any downs—I just want ups and ups and ups."

Lucy's little tousle-haired brother Linus is the strip's intellectual, but he is thrown into a tizzy whenever he loses his security blanket. "Sucking your thumb without a blanket," he confides, "is like eating a cone without ice cream." Linus is Horatio Alger in reverse: "No problem is so big or so complicated that it cannot be run away from." Snoopy, the dog with the floppy ears and foolish smile, is the perfect hedonist. He dances, skates, jumps rope, hunches like a vulture but above all likes to lie flat on his back on the top of his doghouse awaiting supper —which sometimes includes a dish of sherbet on the side. Snoopy is no great shakes at chasing rabbits ("I don't even know what a rabbit smells like"), but he never fails to sniff out ice cream cones and candy. "Snoopy is not a real dog," says Schulz. "He is an image of what people would like a dog to be."