Thursday Peanuts Turns 100!

To mark my 100th Thursday Peanuts post, I thought I'd take a minute to talk about why I love the strip, and why Charles Schulz is such an inspirational figure to me.

Charles Schulz (1922-2000) epitomises to me, dogged determination and self-belief. From childhood he new what he wanted to do, and worked very hard to achieve that. And then once he achieved it, he carried it through for the rest of his life, through peaks and troughs. All of the joys and pains of life, he gently filtered into this platform of self-expression that he'd set up for himself.

He drew a comic strip every day, for nearly 50 years. 17,897 strips in all.

His strips were not just gags, and his characters just the voice of those gags. They were multi-faceted characters, each with individual character strengths and flaws. The more you read Peanuts, the more they become like old friends.

In an interesting article about Schulz, by Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson, entitled 'The Grief That Made Peanuts Good', he says,

"The wonder of "Peanuts" is that it worked on so many levels simultaneously. Children could enjoy the silly drawings and the delightful fantasy of Snoopy, while adults could see the bleak undercurrent of cruelty, loneliness and failure, or the perpetual theme of unrequited love, or the strip's stark visual beauty."

Anyway, here it is-- Thursday Peanuts 100: