This collection of essays and short pieces about PEANUTS was very hit-or-miss. Most of them were too much in the weeds (giving me “weed claustrophobia”?). There was even poetry, FFS, which of course I skipped. I liked the section written as a comic strip.
OK, might as well add my own boring essay. I was reading PEANUTS books when I was just learning to read. Taught me a LOT of vocabulary. They were interesting, plus my big brother loved them, so I wanted to be like him. Sometimes we’d even act out a comic together as a skit. Sometimes I tried to use the punchlines on adults.
Sample thing I did as a cute 4- or 5-year-old:
Me, to neighbor visiting: You wanna know what the trouble with you is?
Neighbor, eagerly, thinking I’m adorable: What? What’s the trouble with me?
Me, perturbed: No, say you don’t want to know.
Neighbor: OK! No, I don’t want to know.
Me: The trouble with you is you don’t want to know what the trouble with you is!!!
(Big laughs)
Snoopy was like my big brother. Self-confident and sarcastic. I’m very partial to the strips where Snoopy still acts like a dog. He was thinking thoughts and being very funny, but he still kept all four paws on the floor, and whatever he was thinking or doing, you could still imagine it really being done by a dog. The Red Baron stuff just lost me, because, did the kids around him still think of him as a dog? How could they, if he was wearing a costume? It’s jumping the shark, and it happened pretty early in the strip’s history.
