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Luke Epplin

@LukeEpplin

28 Mar

All right, my book on baseball goes on sale in two days, so let's do a quick thread on some of my favorite baseball strips in "Peanuts."

I've always been partial to the baseball strips from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, when the pain of losing felt most acute to Charlie Brown, less leavened by sight gags or quick quips.

There were a series of years where Charlie Brown's team, despite being terrible, always had a chance at winning the championship, and of course, Charlie Brown screwed it up. The pain he felt afterward can be almost unbearable.

Read 10 tweets

Luke Epplin

@LukeEpplin

14 Mar

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.

Read 11 tweets

Luke Epplin

@LukeEpplin

4 Jul 19

Surprisingly, given how directly he dealt with other holidays, Charles Schulz did few Fourth of July strips, and no TV specials. Perhaps his own sense of patriotism was the cause. Here's a telling letter he sent in 1970.

Everyone who's seen "A Charlie Brown Christmas" or read the Peanuts strip in depth knows how important religion was to Schulz. But he did *not* care for current trends of equating Christianity with Americanism, which has only gotten worse. Here's an interview snippet.

It's hard to know what he would've made of our current predicament. I imagine we'd have seen perhaps a strip or two like this one from May 2, 1958.

Read 9 tweets

Luke Epplin

@LukeEpplin

12 May 19

Let's do a mini-Mother's Day thread: When Charles Schulz got drafted in WWII, his mother was dying of cancer. He never saw her again. Mother's Day in Peanuts is often a sad occasion, none more so than this autobiographical strip.

2) In the 70s and 80s, it was often Woodstock who was looking for his mother on this day. In keeping with the sadness of this day in Peanuts, he not only never found her, but often ended up heartbroken.

3) A recurring trope was for Woodstock to sit at the top of a hill with a flower in his hands in the hope that his mother would fly by. Much like how the Great Pumpkin never comes, his mother is nowhere to be found.

Read 12 tweets

Luke Epplin

@LukeEpplin

10 Jan 19

There was an entire category of Snoopy on Jeopardy today and none of the contestants knew who Joe Cool was.

FYI: If you're wondering what the best Joe Cool strip was, it's this one.

This one always used to make me laugh as well.

Read 6 tweets

Luke Epplin

@LukeEpplin

27 Nov 18

It's Charles Schulz's birthday, and at the risk of turning my Twitter into nothing but Peanuts' strips, I want to touch briefly on how extraordinary it was at the time for the main character to talk so openly about depression.

Charlie Brown began speaking freely about his depression just a few years into the strip, roughly the late 50s and early 60s. It was a theme that ran particularly strong up until the mid 70s.

The other characters recognize it in him, sometimes trying to offer him advice, and sometimes not exactly knowing how to handle his open anguish.

Read 15 tweets

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