Why Is Everybody Always Picking On Me?

In the Cartoon Issue of The New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen has written a wonderful essay about growing up with Peanuts, Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Unfortunately, not everyone enjoyed it. And it just seems to me, that whenever anyone starts to criticize Franzen, it invariably ends up being some mean attack on something about him personally (his appearance; that 'Oprah' thing). Why is that? What is it about Franzen that elicits such venom? I really enjoy his writing. And I think he's a nice person. In fact, he kinda has some very 'Charlie Brown' characteristics about him. His self-depricating writing style; his inabiltiy to distance himself from past embarrassments; his need (I think) to be liked. I think if Franzen had ever met Schulz, they would have got along quite well. Franzen understands what 'Peanuts' is all about. It's not a strip that is supposed to always make you slap your knee and laugh out loud; it makes you think, it makes you sad, it makes you say "that's me. I'm Charlie Brown." That's why the strip was (and is) so popular. It's always been hip to like Peanuts; Fantagraphics, bless those folk, just made it easier, that's all. (Oh, and apologies to Fantagraphics, Schulz and Seth for the spoof cover).

People who say "I don't like Peanuts; it's not funny" are really missing the point, and that is their loss. People who don't like Franzen are missing the point, too.

But don't you worry; You're A Good Man, Jonathan Franzen.

Comments

[Z Houle]

Pat: Great spoof on Franzen/Peanuts book covers. Really, really nice. (Still hoping to read The Corrections myself, and, yes, I suppose I'm behind the times.)

I agree somewhat -- while Peanuts was never terribly funny, I also do think it hit its artistic peak something during the '60s or '70s, around the time that Schulz (hope I'm spelling that right) started spoofing Citizen Kane and the ilk and got into making movies. From there, there were a number of times when he was trying to be hip, or contemporary, and it just didn't work. I think it lost something over the years -- which is what all comics are wont to do and perhaps it has something to do with one's age and getting older, I guess. (I mean, does anyone even read Garfield anymore?)

Still, he did some really great stuff.

Babble, babble, babble.

[michele]

Let me agree and disagree with the above comment.

Nodding in Agreement: GREAT, simply wonderful spoof cover.

Nodding the other way: In my opinion the Peanuts gang NEVER "lost something over the years." It always has been and always will be my favourite comic strip EVER!

Finally, more agreement with you Patricia, all written work should be judge on its own merit not on the persoanlity or gossip that surrounds the writer.
I have read much of Franzen and I have nothing but praise for him.

[eliane]

Peanuts for president, and I have never heard of Franzen. Love from Chinatown!

[Cynthia]

Oops -- I'm still reading Garfield, although it has lost some of it's edge. Peanuts, however, remained strong all along. Sometimes you had to work at "getting" it-- but isn't that the point of great comics?

Franzen drives me crazy somedays, and other days he's brilliant. Perhaps I'm (and other critics) freer with my venom than my praise?

[Vlad's Funny Cartoons]

Great cover, Patricia! Your work is beautiful!

"Peanuts" is something special.

[Maddy Mud]

I dug Franzen's blending of the critical essay with the personal. How boring to think the two spheres have no shaded area in the Venn Diagram. And it was interesting to see in print what I've spellbound many a youngster with: the tales of my older siblings having knock/down/dragout fights with their parents in the early 70s. I remember one on the screened-in porch where the dad and son were wrestling and the mother was threatening to call the police. Calling the police in a domestic squabble was something people did out in the trailer parks, not in our nice "allotment." That's what we called our subdivisions. "Allotments." My sister wrote a paper called "The Generation Gap" when she was at college, and I use to try to understand it, and eventually I stole the plastic see-through cover for one of my own papers later on Gatsby. My sis had vicious shouting matches with my dad, made all the sadder when she died at 22 from leukemia. I doubt there's as much strife in the cul de sac culture these days, in fact, I was on a site that skews younger the other day, and so many of the 20-somethings were listing THEIR PARENTS as their heros. Fat chance in the early 70s.

I also liked that he got what was funny about Peanuts: the drawings most of all. The drawings themselves were comedic, like a Buster Keaton pratfall, the shere physicality of a funny drawing. Try doing it yourself sometime without a sophisticated joke, it's really difficult to convey. He mentions Linus' hair, and my favorite was when his head hit a table once, and the hair & head just vibrated through the whole Sunday series of panels. Shultz also did a tremendous, one-panel line drawing near the end of his run, where it's raining, and the sad rain lines threaten to undo the lines of his characters. Hirschfeld may have been able to evoke a person with an economey of line, but no one could nail emotion with fewer and more precise strokes than Schultz.

When your Snoopy Dreams turn to Charlie Brown Reality,

Maddy Mud

[Jonathan Caws-Elwitt]

My wife and I were glancng at this page this morning (brilliant graphic, Patricia!), and we had to smile when we saw the comment about Garfield losing its edge. We thought the only edge Garfield ever had was on the lasagna! (:v>

[rjk]

Great spoof! Perhaps Mr Franzen, a true gentleman, would collaborate with you by emptying his vault of envious hate mail and unfavorable journalism to go with it. You have captured something of the bleak despair that the young Chip experiences at the "Dinner of Revenge" in "The Corrections." ("When will this liver ever disappear?")

[Ruth Germann]

Patricia,

I have to admit that I have seen JF interviewed and found him a bit pompous. However, reading 'The Corrections' made me discard my prejudices about his personality, as it was the most brilliant book I have read in the last five years. You work, as always, continues to be inspiring, intelligent and creative.

Ruth