We are dismissive of anything labeled “kid stuff.” If a book or a movie is marketed toward “young audiences,” we tend automatically to assume it's mediocre at best. And some media / art forms – animation, comics – are automatically consigned to the “kid stuff” bin.
But everything in the bin doesn't necessarily belong there. The author / artist may well have had children in mind, but that doesn't mean that the art is childish.
Charles Schulz – well, hats off, gentlemen, a genius. I grew up with “Peanuts,” and I still get a thrill from the sharpness of the dialogue and the simplicity of the drawings. There's also the bizarre juxtaposition of everyday reality – school, baseball, lunch, holidays – with the distinctly surreal atmosphere created by a dog who pretends he's a World War I flying ace, and whose best friend is a bird who communicates in long strings of punctuation marks.
For a long time, I assumed Schulz was a devout Protestant Christian. Somebody (usually Linus) is always quoting the King James Bible; whole parables get acted out sometimes. And there was Schulz's public image: an amateur hockey player in a funny sweater, whimsical, modest, a family man.
Then I read David Michaelis's bio of Schulz.
It turns out that Sparky Schulz was not quite like that. He drifted away from his church after a while; he had extramarital affairs, and he actually used the strip to communicate with his girlfriends. Remember all the times Snoopy fell in love? Schulz was dropping codewords and sweet nothings into the dialogue, messages to the women in his life.
The one stable point in the strip, I think, is the bittersweet note of resignation. Charlie Brown is resigned to being a loser. Peppermint Patty is resigned to being a failure in school. Snoopy, much though he struggles against it, is resigned to being a dog. Linus is resigned to being a little brother.
You don't always get what you want, and sometimes you just have to live with what you're given.
Kid stuff indeed.
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