What Cheer? Good Cheer!

It would have been the 82nd birthday of Charles Schulz today, so treat yourself to the second volume of The Complete Peanuts, covering 1953 and 1954. And if you don't have the first volume yet, splurge on this lovely boxed set; the slipcover, like the books themselves, was designed by indie comic artist Seth. Meanwhile, perhaps in recognition of the anniversary, or maybe it's just because this is when the cartoon issue came around, Jonathan Franzen pays tribute to Peanuts in this week's New Yorker:

I would have swapped the entire Post-Dispatch for a daily dose of Schulz. Only Peanuts, the strip we didn't get, dealt with stuff that really mattered. I didn't for a minute believe that the children in Peanuts were really children--they were so much more emphatic and cartoonishly real than anybody in my own neighborhood--but I nevertheless took their stories to be dispatches from a universe of childhood that was somehow more substantial and convincing than my own. Instead of playing kickball and foursquare, the way my friends and I did, the kids in Peanuts had real baseball teams, real football equipment, real fistfights. Their interactions with Snoopy were far richer than the chasings and bitings that constituted my own relationships with neighborhood dogs. Minor but incredible disasters, often involving new vocabulary words, befell them daily. Lucy was "blackballed from the Bluebirds." She knocked Charlie Brown’s croquet ball so far that he had to call the other players from a phone booth. She gave Charlie Brown a signed document in which she swore not to pull the football away when he tried to kick it, but the "peculiar thing about this document," as she observed in the final frame, was that "it was never notarized." When Lucy smashed the bust of Beethoven on Schroeder's toy piano, it struck me as odd and funny that Schroeder had a closet full of identical replacement busts, but I accepted it as humanly possible, because Schulz had drawn it.