The Divine Miss Othmar

The biggest compliment I can give to Charles Schulz is to say how much the Peanuts story arc of Linus and Miss Othmar resonated with my family.

My little brother Tony was about the same age as Linus, back in 1959, when these strips ran and when the Peanuts kids were of different ages. That made me nine, old enough to chuckle over the youthful naivete and optimism of both little guys.

But it's not the similarity between the character and the real kid that I find impressive. Rather, it's how our family became so involved in it.

We probably got into it more when the book came out than by following it daily in the paper, but, in any case, the stories in Peanuts seemed to carry more weight than the usual "up on the fridge" gag.

Much has been written about Schulz playing out his own insecurities and frustrations through Charlie Brown, but the other characters were not simply cardboard figures set up to feed him lines.

I've written before -- and here's where I snatch back the compliment -- that Peanuts was more dynamic before the characters all topped out at the same undefined Final Age. 

Lucy and Linus never totally abandoned their sibling rivalry, but after the time shifting had ended and they became the same age, her fussbudgety aggression was pretty much directed at everybody, not simply at her brother.

At this stage, however, while she had nearly reached Final Age, Linus was still young and the Big Sister/Baby Brother dynamic was very present.

The thumb and blanket emphasize her crabby reaction to his bright, childlike view of life.

Linus never outgrew his positive spin on the universe, but check out not only Charlie Brown but even Snoopy: In the third panel, they're a bit puzzled by where this is going, but, in the fourth, they're giving him an eye-roll.

This was roughly the same time that Linus first brought up the Great Pumpkin, and, while it later became a bit more of an obsession, it, too, began as a child's fantasy.

Note, too, that Linus is a little kid whom Charlie Brown likes, but, while this particular strip ran a year or two before the Miss Othmar arc, Linus remained a little kid for quite some time.

There was a sort of savant element to him in those days, not just in his belief in the Great Pumpkin, but in his ability, for instance, to pat birds on the head and to have an almost of Narnia-style relationship with Snoopy.

But Schulz didn't mind making him look silly from time to time. We riffed on this line for years after.

And, in fact, Schulz soon thrust Linus into Charlie Brown's neurotic world memorably, at which point I was no longer seeing my kid brother in him, but identifying with him very directly myself.

I was -- am -- ADD, but of course we didn't know about such things back then, so I was just a kid who screwed up all the time, and I certainly felt the pain as poor Linus continued to space out those damn egg shells because it was the story of my life.

The arc would have been completely different if he had been afraid of getting a bad grade on the project or of being punished.

What made it so memorably three-dimensional was that he didn't want to disappoint Miss Othmar.

But, just as that last line injects humorous bathos into this small child's soap opera ...

... Schulz can't resist yanking the carpet out from under dear little Linus at the end.

Again, this only works with a young Linus: In that first panel, he's like Opey Taylor, exploding with a mix of good and bad news that he has to share. It wouldn't work at all with a more sophisticated Full Age Linus. 

But never fear. Schulz liked little Linus too much to leave him hung up on this latest development.

Note, by the way, that this gag requires Lucy. Logically, of course, he would wrap the present at their home, yes, but he could have run into Charlie Brown as he carried the package off to be mailed.

However, while Charlie Brown would be equally surprised, the key here is Lucy's surprising step out of character in the third-panel, a sweet, emotional moment that adds punch to the punchline.  

(By the way, it's easy to analyze this stuff after the cartoon has been drawn. Schulz may have specifically thought it all out, or his characters may have become so organic a part of the process that it simply happened, but, however it came about, it started with a blank piece of paper.)

And he wrapped it up sweetly, as the kid deserved.

I think maybe the reason I so enjoyed the last year or two of Peanuts was that Rerun was a little kid, someone who hadn't been in the strip for so many years.

 

But meanwhile ...

... in a world where kids weren't all the same age, there were still some older girls in the neighborhood. 

We knew them, too.

Yeah, they lived in every neighborhood.

I don't know why Sparky let all the little kids grow up, but I have a feeling the reason he quit drawing Patty and Violet was because they made his teeth ache.

 

Irrelevant Ear Worm of the Day  

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Boise Ed]

That was all very touching, and I want to thank you for it.

[Jan]

Y'know, we're the same age. I don't mind that Peanuts (I get both "Peanuts Begins" and "Peanuts" in my GoComics email) is still available and in a lot of papers. I had a lot of those little Pocket Books (I think) of Peanuts.
And, I also have and had ADD. (No H) I forgot a lot of things. And was slow as molasses running uphill in January.
Anyway, I enjoyed your choices for today.
Thanks.