Peanuts is still terrific

This isn't one of the best of the Peanuts cartoons but it got me thinking today that even though this particular strip was first published in 1962, it is still funny. And the last line is still relevant. We'll always have a "foreign situation". And even with more people wearing contact lenses today instead of glasses, children as young as Linus still wear glasses if they need them and are still being taunted by their friends about it. I think we'll be reading and enjoying Peanuts for a long, long time.

My family has been buying the books with all of the Peanuts comic strips in them. They are organized as two years of daily and Sunday strips in each volume (except that the first volume has three years' worth of comics because the first year was short). We have five of them so far and they are wonderful. They not only bring back memories of reading them with my parents and friends as they come out but they are still funny. There is also a page at www.comics.com for Peanuts where you can see the strip that is published each day in the paper. That's where I got the example in this article.

Of course, since Charles Schulz died in 2000, we are no longer getting new strips. We're seeing comics that were first published in the 1960's. The stories themselves have lost nothing through the years. Like the Peanuts characters, humans continue to be misunderstood and to misunderstand. We continue to be bossy, bossed around, too noisy and too quiet. To some of us, getting our meals on time is the most important thing in the world and to others it's getting the attention of a girl with red hair. Mr Schulz left us with some wonderful characters and I'm kind of glad he didn't want anyone else to continue the strip. I think it could never be the same. New artists should make their own, new characters and stories instead of trying to force themselves think like Charles Schulz. I'm glad to be left with the warm memories of the wonderful world of Charlie Brown and his friends.