Let's Read Peanuts (The 50s are over, but the trauma of the cold war will last us a lifetime) – April 1960
There are lots of great strips I just don't have room to comment on. I strongly encourage everybody to read along at the official GoComics page or by purchasing the Fantagraphics hardcover collections.
April 3, 1960
Nice use of shadow and silhouette in this one. I heard that Schulz kept making these because he liked drawing rain and I believe it.
April 4, 1960
“Okay on the count of three we shove him in a locker.”
April 8, 1960
I was going to point out that a while back Charlie Brown was terrified of getting murdered by a librarian because he failed to return a book on time but I think he just remembered all that at the end there.
April 14, 1960
Yeah... I think we all know why she read CB's letter to the class and that was definitely not the conclusion they came to.
April 17, 1960
Lucy/Schroeder update: Still the best part of the strip. I don’t talk about it much because they’re usually just solid jokes that I can’t add much to, but it remains true.
April 25, 1960
She said the thing!
Also I looked it up and was surprised to find out that this comic actually precedes the phrase “Happiness is a warm gun” by a lot, which I’d just always assumed it was parodying for some reason. The phrase was first widely popularized by a Beatles song with the same name but they in turn got the song title idea from a 1968 article in The American Rifleman magazine which was itself parodying the Peanuts book “Happiness is a Warm Puppy”, which was released in 1962.
So yeah, Schulz indirectly inspired a Beatles song.
April 26, 1960
Could be worse. Imagine if he discovered anime.
Also, who???
~googles~
Ah, OK I get it now. Albert Schweitzer was a polymath (sort of an academic jack of all trades) who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for his philosophy of "Reverence for Life”. Schulz probably heard about him through his religious writings.
Skimming his Wikipedia page I’m not sure how to feel about him. He seems both well intentioned but also a bit of a crank. He's a man who took up medicine in his 30s so he could open a hospital in Gabon, Africa because he believed all life was holy, but also the guy who wrote this:
When the indigenous people express their discontent for being dominated by the whites, I tell them that without us they would no longer exist, since they would have killed each other off or would have ended up in the cooking-pot of the Pahouins [also known as the Fang, a leading Gabonese tribe]. They cannot rebut this argument. In general, despite the mischief for which the whites are guilty in their work of colonisation everywhere, they can however assert that they have brought peace to conquered peoples.
(Have they though, Albert? Have they!?!?)
Honestly, I’d need to do a much deeper dive into his life and writings in order to form a decent opinion. I’ve seen it said that his hospital was a dilapidated mess where Albert rejected modern medical approaches and constantly badgered his staff, but also that those criticisms are exaggerated and don't factor in just how much he was working under a shoestring budget and extraordinarily stressful circumstances.
Was he a misunderstood saint? A decent man who happened to absorb the attitudes of the times he lived in? A quack who wrote his own PR? I have no idea, and in the interest of being fair I'll leave that sort of speculation to people who actually know what they're talking about.
I will say though that it absolutely tracks that Schulz was familiar with Schweitzer's work. He seems like exactly the kind academically-minded religious thinker that Schulz would gravitate towards.
Oh, and he wrote music too!
April 30, 1960
That’s $5 if you factor in inflation by the way. Do with that what you will.
