Comic Strip Review: Peanuts 2000 by Charles M. Schulz
Peanuts was a long-running newspaper comic strip (1950-2000) created by cartoonist Charles M. Schulz (1922-2000). This volume is a collection of the strips during its final year.
At the time it was introduced, Peanuts was an innovative strip, starring children but meant for a “family” audience. Lovable loser Charlie Brown, crabby Lucy van Pelt, her philosophical brother Linus, and imaginative beagle Snoopy used sarcastic humor, topical references and surprisingly deep thought to create a small but vivid world for parents and children alike to visit, chuckle at and grow to love.
Over the years, the cast expanded to include Charlie Brown’s little sister Sally, filth magnet Pigpen, musician Schroeder, lunk-headed tomboy Peppermint Patty and her somewhat smarter friend Marcie, relatively normal black kid Franklin, and Lucy and Linus’ new sibling “Rerun.” Other characters faded, and some were never actually seen, like Charlie Brown’s barber father or “the little red-haired girl” that Charlie had a crush on.
By the 1960s, Peanuts had become one of the most popular comic strips in the world, and the merchandise sold well. The comic strip has been adapted for stage and screen, with the Christmas special being one of the most beloved repeats on television every year. And so it continued for decades.
But by 1999, Mr. Schulz was getting old and his health was failing. He’d always done the work of the strip himself rather than having assistants, and decided that rather than pass it on as a “legacy strip” as so many others had been, he would end Peanuts on his own terms.
And thus this volume. It’s not much different than the work he’d been doing before this in the 1990s, still the same good quality. Rerun had become more of a focus character, interested in getting free stuff and not wanting to go to school (though he does have a nice classmate–don’t think she was named.) Snoopy’s brothers make appearances, mostly desert-dwelling Spike.
There’s no plot advancement or closure, though we do get one final twist on the “kick the football” gag. The final Sunday strip is a farewell message from Schulz, who had passed away a few days before it ran. The end of an era indeed.
It doesn’t have any extras, as the strips stand well enough on their own.
It’s been a couple of decades now, and children have grown to adulthood with no new Peanuts strips. But there’s reruns, and collections, and the animation, so I hope that Charlie Brown and Snoopy and the rest will stay relevant to your families, as they were to mine, for many years to come.
