I have a confession to make

I've been avoiding this topic for some time as it seems to be pretty controversial, but I can't keep it in any longer and so I must out myself and use this space to talk about it.

I can't stand Peanuts.

Note the capital letter, I refer of course to Charles M. Schulz's long running comic strip that for some damn reason is held up as the epitome of perfection for comic writers, it doesn't seem to matter what format they write in, anything from fellow syndicated cartoonists, to animators, to web comic and graphic novel writers, it appears anytime you ask them what their largest influence or inspirations are, this piece of bland, unfunny, crap shows up on the list.

I have never laughed at a Peanuts comic, Garfield, freaking Garfield, gets a smile out of me now and again, but not Peanuts.

I will try to write some real arguments here too, Peanuts has been around forever, if by forever you mean since the 1950's, which is a damned long time I will admit, and early strips were pretty groundbreaking for their day and brought stuff like African American characters into comics for the first time, which is to be respected, but I spent a while reading up on a lot of the older comics too, and the key thing is this: they were funny for their day, it is no longer their day, and we actually have real humor now unlike the fake stuff they had to make do with in the fifties.

There are three major themes that an average Peanuts comic can fall into:

1. Charlie Brown is shitty at something and fails, everyone mocks him.
2. Snoopy lives in a fantasy world
3. Lucy is the worst person to ever live.

There is of course, crossover between the three, sometimes Lucy is the person who makes Charlie Brown fail, sometimes it is Snoopy living in his dream world that does so. But after fifty years(the comic has been in reruns since 2000) These "stories" have all been told and retold dozens, hundreds, even thousands of times.

It usually comes off to me as mean spirited, if I wanted to watch a dorky kid get bullied, I'd work in a high school, it doesn't matter how clever the writing is(it usually isn't) if you are using it to just make fun of someone who doesn't deserve it. It celebrates picking on the weak guy, rare are the scenes where Lucy gets a comeuppance, usually the "joke" is that Charlie Brown is terrible, he is terrible and I hate him, but watching bad things happen to blameless people is not my idea of a good time.

And yet, cartoonists of all varieties don't stop masturbating over this strip, I hear shit about "simple lines used effectively" but when your premise is as simple minded as the average Peanuts strip, you don't exactly need to make a production out of the art, and Schulz certainly didn't even try, why should he? It was a daily strip and he needed to get it done fast. I realize that I am not an artist, but I suspect given a small amount of practice I could get in the ballpark of the art style here, and that is saying something.

Personally my theory is no one actually likes Peanuts, they just say they do, Peanuts is the Sonic Youth of comic strips, seemingly influential because everyone says they are, but no one actually wants to listen to them because damn they are actually pretty dull. Don't lie, you haven't listened to Sonic Youth since the 90s, if that, and then only because you heard that Kurt Cobain thought they were hot shit. Then you out an album on and lost interest after two and a half tracks.

I will say this, Peanuts is not as bad as some other comics that mysteriously keep showing up in the papers year after year, I would rather read a hundred instances of Charlie Brown getting punked by a tree than even one Family Circus of any type. And Ziggy may actually be the least funny thing I have ever read, or seen, in any medium including real life. But I don't think "not as bad as this other thing" is really a sterling endorsement, I think that the current generation of comic readers maybe deserve to have something that is actually funny or interesting to read, let's stop punishing them by forcing bland nostalgia fodder on them for once, there has to be someone out there who writes funny stuff that could go in the papers.