They Touched Hips

Drama, ripped from the pages of the Peanuts comic strip, January 1976.

The Browns' elementary school collapses. Sally is convinced it was a suicide because she has a habit of speaking to school buildings and they speak back and she knew it was depressed.

They end up attending the same school as Marcie and Peppermint Patty, and Chuck has to share a desk with the latter.

Here she is, alarmed their hips are touching.

I haven't finished reading the year's worth of comics, but this appears to be a storyline he dropped rather quickly.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Ope. He did go back to it, briefly, in September:

Dark Humorist: Charles Schulz?

This might be the darkest Peanuts comic strip I've ever seen.

There may be doubters, but this was published April 29, 1969, and appears in my Peanuts by the Decade book.

I know he didn't shy away from serious themes -- Charlie Brown's incessant depression, Lucy's many manias, Linus' foibles, Peppermint Patty's single parent family. But this is pretty dark for a compact daily strip, rather than a theme throughout his work.

 

Who is the "Loser" in Peanuts? Might Not Be Who You Think.

A few Christmases ago, I got several pounds of Peanuts comic strips in three bound volumes. Finally managed to work my way through the set covering the 1960s, and I learned something startling:

Linus -- grounded, studious, intelligent Linus -- may be just as bad a student as Charlie Brown.

In reading the dailies (before the strip ended in 2000; I am old) and in reading the much smaller collections I gathered over the years, I always assumed that Charlie Brown was the more lackluster student, particularly when it came to not finishing book reports until 3 am the night before they're due. (The strip below is from 1965.)

But the 1960s Peanuts are rife with such comics as above (I'm not sure when this is from, but I suspect it's later than the 1960s) Linus shows some habits of procrastination that I thought were much more Charlie Brown-ish.

Maybe this is Schulz just populating his strip with characters of ordinary mein (except for the Beethoven prodigy Schroeder). But even Schroeder has his faults.

But ask anyone to identify the "loser" in Peanuts and it's Charlie Brown, all the time, hands down.

Maybe it's a message to look past the stereotypes and see people for what they are. Or something.

Leave Schulz Out of It

 

I culled this from Facebook earlier this week, just to talk about it.

I've loved Peanuts since I was a very young child. I saw myself in Charlie Brown, sometimes in Linus. But everywhere I looked, I saw a creation that understood some of the anxieties children faced, even if I didn't know I was facing anxieties at all.

So it kinda makes me mad, seeing stuff like this.

Linus never said this. Don't put words in his mouth. Leave Charles Schulz out of whatever it is you're talking about.

Because this isn't the comics page. This is using a beloved (by some) comic strip character in propaganda. And we all know how I feel about using things as propaganda.

With My Own Eyes

Arthur C. Clarke, in his novel “Imperial Earth,” describes a type of people he calls a “tapeworm”.

Tapeworms, his principal character Duncan Makenzie points out, are typically Earth-dwellers who believe their lives are so important or significant they record themselves, both audio and visual, saying and doing every little bitty thing that happens to them. Day and night. He credits this to narcissism and the ubiquity of portable recording devices.

Sounds familiar, right? Never mind that Clarke’s novel was published in the mid-1970s, when such ubiquity wasn’t.

That brings me to the point of this post: The eclipse.

I’m dead certain there will be millions of photos and videos of the event, published everywhere, probably to the point sites like YouTube and Facebook will break down the day of.

So I want to watch the eclipse unrecorded. Using only the eclipse glasses I bought.

Because I’ve got lots of pictures and video of the places I’ve visited. And I never look at it.

Like Linus, I wish to gaze upon this Great Pumpkin with my own eyes.