We turn to familiarity for comfort.
For me: Wodehouse, Dick Francis, Asterix. The rhythms of childhood and teenagerdom.
I’ve read a lot of Wodehouse this week.
And of course Peanuts.
The Peanuts re-read I promised myself at the beginning of the year has become part of my weekly routine, and very important it is too. I’ve reached 1957, solidly in the strip’s Middle Early Period. The main cast is settled – early characters Patty, Violet and especially Shermy are no more than occasional visitors now – and Charlie Brown and the gang are becoming themselves, if you see what I mean, not the ‘works in progress’ of the very early years.
1957 is the year of the “what if you don’t like green” strip – Linus cutting through Charlie Brown’s pro-spring propaganda with an incisive question that is all too often ignored.
It’s also the year we get another glimpse of the future Snoopy, when Charlie Brown tries to teach him to walk on his hind legs. Strange to revisit this and see for just how long Snoopy was a ‘normal’ dog. Seven years in, even though he is still walking on all fours, his character has already developed far from the ball-fetcher of 1950. Early Snoopy was quirky; by now he is becoming charismatic and strange in the most magnificent way.
1957 was also the year Schulz seemed to recognise the possibilities of developing storylines over a series of strips. He’d first dipped his toe into this pool with Lucy’s improbable performance in an adult golf tournament – told over four Sundays in 1954 – but the natural place for such series was the dailies. There he could develop a storyline, with repetition or variations on a theme, over five or six days – sometimes longer.
The longest of these this year is the one in which Lucy forces Linus to do without his security blanket for two whole weeks. It’s a series that lives in my head. I wonder why.
While those series became part of the fabric of Peanuts, sometimes it’s just a single episode from them that sticks. This one is a particular favourite.
I’m sure I could spin this out for another paragraph or two with some gubbins about the strip’s deeper significance, but really I just like the idea of a small boy saying ‘hi’ to a star.