Thread by @LukeEpplin

It's been a year since the pandemic started, so let's do a "Peanuts" thread on the character who most fully embodies this strange time: Spike.

Spike is Snoopy's rail-thin brother who lives along among the cacti in Needles, California, a town that Charles Schulz spent some unhappy time as a child.

Loneliness is a persistent theme in "Peanuts," but Spike suffers from a different type of it: the literal version, of being marooned by yourself, alone with your thoughts, talking to inanimate objects Castaway-style.

As a result, the strips with Spike, which came late in the "Peanuts" run, are perfect for the pandemic. Even Spike's sense of time has become scrambled by isolation and loneliness.

There's tremendous melancholy in the Spike strips, a low-key lament of a life in limbo, perhaps not even fully lived.

There are many strips where Spike writes to his relatives, trying to put his best face forward, but even those can't mask his utter loneliness.

As elsewhere in "Peanuts," some of the saddest strips are when Spike pines for his mother, which I've always interpreted as autobiographical with Schulz.

In the last decade of the strip, Spike is sometimes shown in the infantry, but even then, he's nearly always alone, separate from the troops, in conversation with himself or writing to family members. The sadness is almost suffocating.

This strip was published on October 5, 1999, about four months before Charles Schulz passed away. It dispenses with humor altogether and becomes almost unbearable in its melancholy.

Anyway, the strips with Spike are my favorite of the last two decades of "Peanuts." He provided a new vehicle for Schulz to explore an old topic. This is the best one, in my opinion, a sort of Samuel Beckett play in miniature (from September 18, 1994).

An addendum to this thread: In his final two decades, Schulz often foregrounded two minor characters: Spike and Rerun. The Rerun strips always struck me as an exploration of early childhood, while Spike was a reflection of the loss and isolation that sometimes accompanies old age