This article, the second time reading it, is definitely an opinion. All things change, and Peanuts was handled by Charles Shulz for some fifty years. He found what he liked to do and went with it.

Reading this article again. I need to reiterate, what a bunch of nonsense. He developed Snoopy to be a different character than a dog version of Charlie Brown. So what? And your “Hallmark” examples are some Fox News level of trolling. Shultz had to make a strip a day, some jokes will fall flat. You can find just as…

I think this article is overstating its case. First of all, it’s hard to expect someone to do a strip for so long without changing it. I know some would prefer him to have quit after 20 years, but I’m glad to have the whole run.

With that said, yes, the late 50s and 60s were the peak and the strip’s most consistent…

I fundamentally disagree with the thesis of this article because it takes the very narrow view of only counting latter-day “Snoopy-focused” strips, which were NOT overwhelming in number. All other strips maintained the same defeatist mentality about the weird harshness of childhood.

This is a very well-written and thoughtful essay that I happen to completely disagree with. :-)

Snoopy is, for me, the heart and soul of the optimistic side of Peanuts, and a necessary counterbalance to the despair and self-pity of Charlie Brown, the rampant hostility of Lucy, and the useless philosophizing of Linus.…

“The strip actually grows, you find as the years go on that their personalities change a little bit, and their attitudes towards one another have changed”.
- Charles Schulz

I would argue that rather than being vapid and cutesy, Snoopy sequences such as his “Joe Cool” fantasies are very subtle digs at the superficiality of the “me generation” and its ilk. Schulz had a childhood not unlike Charlie Brown’s so it’s quite likely that as a boy he sat on the sidelines and bitterly regarded…

That was a really long article that really comes down to the fact that you don’t understand sense of humor is subjective.

I don’t think I could disagree any more strongly if I wanted to. The weird thing is, I see this argument a lot: the more the strip focused on Snoopy, the “cutesier” and more trivial it got. But... that’s not Snoopy. At all. Snoopy is, IMO, the most biting example of Charles Schulz’s satire in the entire strip. He…

Wow, I’m going to have to disagree strongly, this criticism misses much that would serve as insight into this work.

I always thought the humanized Snoopy was to show a character who was a better at being a happy and self-fulfilling person than all the actual-human characters.

Aw, this one’s kinda funny tho.

It sounds like you’e making the classic critic’s mistake of thinking that dark art is better art. Art, especially of the comic variety, doesn’t have to have social or philosophical commentary as its primary goal. I think that ave all, comics should be funny, or at least delightful. I’ve never thought Peanut was all…