t o n x . o r g

This past weekend, Emily and I visited the Charles M. Schulz museum In Santa Rosa, California.

They had an interesting collection of the Peanuts creator’s personal effects and exhibits of original strips. We watched the 1973 A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving in the auditorium. I am now filled with a hunger for the Fantagraphics Peanuts anthologies. Today Emily points me to this excellent (and lengthy) New Yorker piece by Jonathan Franzan on Schulz’s legacy:

In that unsettled season, as the so-called generation gap was rending the cultural landscape, Charles Schulz’s work was almost uniquely beloved. Fifty-five million Americans had seen “A Charlie Brown Christmas” the previous December, for a Nielsen share of better than fifty per cent. The musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” was in its second sold-out year on Broadway. The astronauts of Apollo X, in their dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing, had christened their orbiter and landing vehicle Charlie Brown and Snoopy Newspapers carrying “Peanuts” reached more than a hundred and fifty million readers, “Peanuts collections were all over the best-seller lists, and if my own friends were any indication there was hardly a kid’s bedroom in America without a “Peanuts” wastebasket or “Peanuts” bedsheets or a “Peanuts” gift book. Schulz, by a luxurious margin was the most famous living artist on the planet…

link…

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