This story originally appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on February 17, 2000.
A few weeks back, the legendary cartoonist Charles Schulz announced his retirement, marking the end of his half-century-old daily strip “Peanuts.” Schulz reluctantly laid down his pen (never once did he employ an assistant), with the intention of saving all his energy for a battle with cancer, which he lost last week.
Time ran a touching essay on Schulz and his “Peanuts” gang, while Newsweek devoted a full spread. Newspapers and the Internet played up the news as if it were a catastrophe for humanity (which, of course, it was).
I never really enjoyed “Peanuts” when I was a kid. Nothing much seemed to be going on and the gags tended to repeat themselves. Besides, I never quite understood why the strip was called “Peanuts” in the first place.
I also found Snoopy’s smug serenity immensely irritating and I looked forward to that day when the beagle would just vanish. On ungodly caffeine-deprived hours of the morning when my sanity rested on the funny pages, I preferred the uncomplicated slapstick humor of “Garfield” and “Hagar the Horrible.”
Still, every once in a while, I’d peruse a “Peanuts” strip and catch myself smiling those wide silly grins of genuine amusement, particularly when Lucy dispensed her five cents’ worth of useless “psychiatric” advice. True, I was no die-hard fan, but even then I knew that magic permeated Schulz’s quirky panels.
The profundity of the escapades of Charlie Brown and his motley crew dawned upon me much later, when I realized that the cynicism that came with adulthood was kept at bay by sobriety, not adrenaline. The yuk-yuks we craved for in daily comic strips were not there for mere amusement. They ensured that we survived the daily grind.
And “Peanuts,” while not always reassuring, brought out those pent-up sighs whenever we needed them the most.
“Pulling sense and meaning from the chaos that surrounds us is a full-time job and we humans need all the help we can get,” comics critic Kim Thompson (yes, there’s such a thing as a “comics critic”) wrote in assessing Schulz’s legacy. “Artists don’t actually alter the universe-but they reorganize, clarify, highlight, explain, bring it into focus for the rest of us.”
Those sentiments accurately described what “Peanuts” did for us. Schulz magnified our existence by simplifying our experiences into their essentials, giving us images that captured in lucid lines the rich texture of an otherwise complicated reality.
What depiction of stubborn, even ludicrous, faith is more moving than Linus (clutching his reliable blanket) waiting alone in his pumpkin patch for the Great Pumpkin? What image of the tenacity and persistence of unrequited love is more vivid than Lucy’s infatuation with the musically absorbed Schroeder? There is no better illustration of unbridled optimism in the face of inevitable failure than Charlie Brown’s bouts with his kite. And Snoopy’s epic “dogfights” with the Red Baron triumphed where Quixote failed, depicting the victory of both imagination and delusion over mundane reality.
Indelible images representing indelible truths, “Peanuts” definitely was not just a comic strip. It was a run-in with daily catharsis.
The irony, as I see it, was that there was no sense of immediacy in perceiving how affected we all were. We always learned something from Peppermint Patty’s bossy arrogance and Marcie’s sense of loyalty, from Sally’s endless whining about her “Sweet Baboo,” and from Woodstock’s unnerving calm. Yet the effect was buried unnoticed in our hurried glances and quick smiles as we skimmed through the morning papers before setting out for the day.
Perhaps it was perverse of us to take delight in Charlie Brown’s routine failures (the kite, the football kick, the “red-haired girl”), but in doing so we got a chance to laugh at our own insecurities and hang-ups. That “round headed kid,” as his thankless dog Snoopy called him, made us all feel that it was okay not to be perfect.
For all his under-achievements, Charlie Brown was never a loser in my book. He was wise enough to know that even when things don’t work out the way we expect them to, it does not mean we’re failures: we just got the tough breaks. We can always try again.
Two years before Schulz decided to retire, when Charlie Brown hit a homer for his baseball team, it merited a spot on CNN. A friend of mine asked me why the network bothered to report such a triviality.
It was simple really, I told him. When Charlie Brown finally hit that elusive homer, he hit it for all of us who never did.
With “Peanuts” gone, it’s our turn to say, “Good grief!”
