The freakishly-large animals showed up shortly after the mishap at Three Mile Island. For real.

The shift of Lucy from fussbudget to bully was what made the strip as sharp as it was from the 1950s into the 1970s. Schulz reputedly broke from from his real-life Lucy, and the strip got gentler. Along the way, though, the birth of Rerun was part of the defanging of Lucy.

Labels like “conservative” and “liberal” are too limiting, but if you read his later interviews (especially the one with Gary Groth), it’s clear that Schulz became more liberal with age.

The old paperbacks are harder to find, the much later Peanuts Parade editions even harder. But you can get the Fantagraphics reprints these days, which have more strips.

On the topic of whether somebody has to say it, sometimes it’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to fire up the keyboard and remove all doubt.

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

Schulz drew some one-panel strips about teenagers doing religious studies, for a church publication. It didn’t last very long, but I wouldn’t say it failed.