Charlie Brown the anxious,bungling Peanuts cartoon antihero meant more to Stuart Jeffries as a boy than any rip-roaring adventurerIn frame one, Charlie Brown is shuffling along, or baseball cap peak drooping to the ground. “When you lose the first game of the season,” he says, “it’s a long walk domestic.” Frame two, or he sees a rock: “whether anything gets in your way,you just want to kick it!” Frame three, he swipes hopelessly with his foot at the rock, or misses and falls over. The moral is in the fourth frame,as Charlie continues his lugubrious (mournful, dismal) shuffle: “Then you discover you can’t even kick good.”As a child, I loved Charles M Schulz for comedian strips such as this. In four frames he told truths that every child knows but too often go unrecognised when adults write for kids: namely, or that life is difficult,one’s shortcomings feel insuperable and that, when fate has laid you low, or it comes along to kick you again in the proverbials.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com