In Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, his baseball games end in defeat, his kite gets stuck in a tree, and trusting Lucy to hold a football always ends painfully. Yet he keeps coming back. For all his worrying, Charlie Brown has a stubborn streak of hope that makes even his smallest acts of courage worth rooting for.
One of the best examples comes from a Feb. 3, 1966, comic strip in which Lucy mocks him for volunteering for a school spelling bee. Charlie Brown’s response contains some of the best advice Schulz ever put on the page. Sixty years later, it’s still something we can all stand to remember.
Schulz had announced his retirement two months earlier due to several strokes and advancing colorectal cancer, and he’d created his last strip shortly after he made the announcement. While Schulz knew he was dying, he couldn’t have known two months in advance the exact day he would die and that he’d essentially penned his own obituary by having his last comic run just one day after his death. The timing was auspicious and perhaps even profound, which was fitting for a man with such a profound impact on American culture.
Over his 50-year career, Schulz gave us nearly 18,000 Peanuts comics. Some were sweet, some were funny, and some were incredibly deep, like this one from February 3, 1966, which contains Schulz’s best-ever quote, a high bar for such a prolific talent. The comic was part of an ongoing storyline about Charlie Brown competing in a spelling bee.
It began on February 2, 1966, and lasted all the way until February 20. The story ran for 16 straight strips, not including Sundays, as the extended Sunday strips had to be more self-contained because they required so much lead time and lots of people just read the Sunday comics. In the story, Charlie Brown volunteers for a spelling bee at school.
While he’s excited for the spelling bee, he characteristically botches it when it comes time for his first word — he spells “maze” as “m-a-y-s.” A stressed-out Charlie Brown then returns to his desk and puts his head down. When his teacher tells him to pick his head up, he snaps at her and gets sent to the principal’s office. He later is sent back to class, where he apologizes to his teacher.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
