Monthly Archives: April 2011

Statement of Purpose

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(adapted from The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron with Mark Bryan; Media Marketing: How to Get Your Name and Story in Print and on the Air by Peter G. Miller; and from the graduate admissions and promotional materials of writing programs at Brown University, Stanford University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Houston, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Michigan, and Washington University in St. Louis)

To write is to bring representation and the suggestion of scientific method to the marketing of enlightened self-promotion. It is to be intimately connected to a high-tech ecosystem which overflows organically into a newer, better Graduate Record Examination. That is why, as a writer, I am a talented person. I reparent the artist-child who yearns to be a recognized authority; I pay too much in order to wear weird self-empowering clothing; I think of the universe as a vast electrical sea and of myself quoted in a national magazine. When I — a peripatetic Jungian — go to your cultural mecca to explore the beautiful irreverent shorthand of a profound, profane corporate brochure, the snowflake pattern of my soul will emerge, and, spiritually unblocking, I will become a controversial activist for ethnic and gender collages.

My life has always included strong internal directives. Well-packaged ideas, I call them. Although not always filled with sex and violence, they combine the comfortable nondenominational noncourse educational experiences of Poet Laureate Robert Hass with the sensuous television consciousness of solvent self-affirmer Sharon Olds, and accompany these attempts at conceptual and discursive emotional incest with literary modeling by Kafka, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Pound, and Stevens. I tell this story not to drop names, but for reasons of ego and commerce. I want to work seriously with a unique community of writers, scholars, and critics in a program which, while current, is not overly specific.

As a kid my dad thought my art was an “unruly multisubjective activity.” That made me feel I was a multidimensional management consultant in pursuit of lush plants, plump pillows, experimental nonlinear interactive space: in other words, of one wonderfully nurturing self-loving something. As I have grown deeper, I have continued to rediscover that my creativity requires a sense of flow and stability different from other’s humility. I believe that the rituals of power and authority which traverse your writing package will fully open to me this sense of abundance — will allow me to perfect my craft and to immerse myself luxuriously in a rewarding publishing and teaching career. In return, I am certain I can contribute to your collective intellectual process by helping your institution maintain its competitive synchronicity.
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Note: We’ve been talking about artist statements and the evils thereof in comments here. In that vein, I thought I’d reprint the Statement of Purpose I wrote on my MFA applications way back in 2000 or so. I applied to grad school for three years. Writing the statement of purpose the first year almost made me hang myself. So I tried something else the following years. The result was the same (I didn’t get in) but the risk of self-destruction was appreciably lessened. Plus, the Chicago Review printed it, which was nice. I think that this is its online debut, though.

Virtual Gay Panic

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For the past few weeks I’ve been playing Dragon Age 2, a “sword n’ sorcery” role-playing game (RPG) produced by Bioware. The game has earned mixed reviews: many critics raved about the decade-spanning story or the improvements made to the combat mechanics of its predecessor. Others complained about the repetitive nature of the quests, the many glitches, and the painful lack of variety in environments. Speaking of which, I must have visited the exact same cavern about 30 times. And I visited the exact same sewer passage about 40 times. And half the game is spent wandering around just one city (it got really fucking tedious is what I’m saying). But for more than a few people, the biggest flaw in Dragon Age 2 isn’t the repetitiveness or the bugs. It’s that the game is kinda gay.

I’ll provide some background: Bioware RPGs almost always include a romantic sub-plot, where the player’s avatar (referred to as the Player Character, or PC) has the option to romance one of his/her traveling companions. In most RPGs, the romantic options are exclusively straight. If the PC is male, he can only romance female companions. If the PC is female … you get the idea. But Bioware has the habit of including at least one gay romantic option, and Dragon Age: Origins included gay options for both men and women. Though it’s important to note that there were also exclusively straight companions who could be wooed only by PC’s of the opposite gender. So there was a little something for everyone (well, not exactly everyone, but certainly a larger demographic than just straight men).

Dragon Age 2 upped the ante by doubling the number of same-sex romantic possibilities, and in the process eliminated the exclusively straight romantic option. There are four companions, two male and two female, that a PC of either gender can woo (as a side note, your PC always has the last name of Hawke). So is this a universe filled with bisexuals? Possibly, but only one of the companions (the pirate wench, Isabela) makes comments that clearly establish her bisexuality. The other characters do not discuss their sexuality without reference to Hawke, which means that the player effectively determines their sexual orientation when he/she selects a gender for their PC. As an example, the male companion named Anders only expresses homoerotic desire if Hawke is male, but he shows no interest in men if Hawke is female.

A few fans have referred to this feature as “subjective sexuality,” meaning the sexual orientation of supporting characters is not fixed, but dependent on the player’s choices. This goes beyond the simple empowerment fantasy of most adventure games, and actually brings gaming closer to fan fiction (or slash-fic, in this case). Like a fan-fic author, the player is crafting the story and the romance to their liking, but unlike fan-fic, the in-game romances are actually “canon.” As an approaching to virtual romance, subjective sexuality is quite inclusive.

Perhaps a little too inclusive for some people’s tastes. But I’ll let Captain Cornhole at the Bioware Social Network speak for himself in a thread titled “Straight romances got screwed, no pun intended.”

“No seriously for those of us who like straight romaces [sic] we all got screwed over big time. Before I go any further let me clarify this is not a condemnation of homosexuality or bisexuality by any means.

Now sure your Hawke is female you can romance Anders or what have you, but it isn’t a truely straight romance. Every romance option is bi, and it’s just not the same knowing Anders or Fenris will flirt with male Hawke just as much.

Bottomline it is disgusting and I’m a tad upset there is not a single straight person in the game, and frankly there isn’t anyone that I want to romance because of it. It’s a shame really.”

Even more outraged was the commenter named Bastal, who posted a Unibomber-quality manifesto in the thread titled “Bioware Neglected Their Main Demographic: The Straight Male Gamer.” You can probably guess the gist of his complaint. These comments were not isolated incidents, and they attracted the attention of the gaming press, and eventually elicited several responses from Bioware staff.

David Gaider, one of the Lead Writers of the Dragon Age franchise, responded to the Cornhole’s comment (with far more politeness than was deserved):

“… [I]f the concern is you might accidentally be exposed to an unwelcome sexual advance– oh well. One would hope you’d deal with it in the same mature manner you’d do so in real life …

Fenris and Merrill [two other potential love interests] don’t initiate a romance with any gender, and really their sexuality is the most subjective since they don’t discuss it. Regardless, why someone would be concerned about what other people might do in their playthroughs is difficult to say. If the idea that a character might be having hypothetical sex with someone of the same gender in an alternate dimension bothers you, then by all means don’t continue with their romance. That’s why they’re optional.”

It’s tempting to just dismiss this fanboy whining as homophobia and be done with it. But there’s another facet to these types of complaints besides the usual “gays are icky,” and Gaider’s response doesn’t quite address it. This facet is not about a fear of queerness in itself, but a fear that there is nothing else. It’s a discomfort that was inadvertently expressed by one of my friends (they shall remain nameless) who also played Dragon Age 2. Like the commenters at the Bioware Network, he was unhappy that the  male traveling companions (and several other male supporting characters) flirted with him. I responded by noting that he didn’t have to flirt back, but it wasn’t so much the flirting that bothered him but the absence of relationships with men where flirting didn’t occur. He wanted un-erotic relationships with other men, in other words, straight male friendships. At that moment, part of me agreed with him. While I don’t presume to speak for all straight men, there’s something comfortable about my friendships with other straight men, when sex (at least on a conscious level) is out of the question. What my friend wanted, and what I suspect many other straight male gamers also want, is the virtual version of these “safe” friendships.

But this safety relies upon the rejection of a romantic possibility. There are endless opportunities for romance or non-romance in the real world, and my decisions have no effect on the options of the vast majority of humankind. But the virtual world of Dragon Age is finite. There are only so many characters and only so many romantic possibilities. When I start insisting that certain sexual identities become fixed so that those friendships feel safer for me, what I’m also saying is that a romantic option for a gay man (or for a woman who enjoys the fantasy of being a gay man) cannot exist. And in the balance of who’s gaining or losing, I’d say that losing the easygoing quality to a friendship with a nonexistent person is a very, very small price to pay so that someone else can have the same freedom that I possess when creating their ideal fantasy.

Or it might be possible, in theory, to create their ideal fantasy if less of the game took place in that one goddamn cavern … I’ll stop harping on that now.

Robert Binks and His Art ( part 3 )

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We continue our look at the work of Robert Binks with this sequence illustrating “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” The pictures appeared on a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. television program “around 1964,” Mr. Binks tells me. As you might guess from the complexity of the storefronts in the next picture, the pictures didn’t make up an animation sequence. Instead the camera moved along the drawings.

 

 

“Dan McGrew” is one of the best-known poems in the world. It was written by Robert W. Service (1874-1958), who was born an Englishman but settled in Canada at age 21. He began writing poems about frontier life after the bank he worked for stationed him at a branch in the Yukon. Service wrote “Dan McGrew” when he was about 30, a few years before his poetry made him internationally known.

I think the illustrations we see here are splendid, a wonderful combination of lively visual rhythms, skillfully off-center compositions, and affectionately grotesque treatment of  an ancient melodrama. Mr. Binks told me by email that he drew them with felt pen markers:

I had a technique of applying the felt ink on one side and then applying the ink on the other side and pulling the color  through for an interesting effect.

This is one method — and sometimes I would just work on the one side.

… The characters in the Dan McGrew story were bond paper cutouts, spray glued and applied  onto  22 inch by 28 inch colored backgrounds.

I’ll note that all the illustrations in this post are © CBC/Bob Binks, and that the sequence illustrates highlights of the poem; the full text is here. If you want to see more of Mr. Binks’s work, look here for scans of his illustrations for the Ogden Nash collection The Old Dog Barks Backwards and here for the previous two posts in the present series.

And now … the action begins in “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”

 

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;

 

Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.

 

When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.

 

He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.

 

His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze,
Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze.
The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,

 

Then on a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarce could hear;
But you felt that your life had been looted clean of all that it once held dear;
That someone had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a devil’s lie;

 

And “Boys,” says he, “you don’t know me, and none of you care a damn;
But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I’ll bet my poke they’re true,
That one of you is a hound of hell … and that one is Dan McGrew.”

 

Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew,
While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that’s known as Lou.

Caroline Small: Theory Is Not About Art

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The theory in art thread has once again ballooned to unacceptable lengths, so I’m going to post Caro’s last comment here in an effort to start again from zero. Also it’s a really interesting comment:

Theory is not about art – it’s about language (Derrida’s primordial writing). Theory is always reading. CLOSE reading. Closer than anybody has ever read before (which is why everybody thinks it’s not reading at all.) You have a tendency to see my desire for a challenge to Theory as an opposition between language and not-language, whereas what I’m hoping for is something that is less oppositional and more nuanced. Language through a different, visual frame. A different way of conceptualizing language, that is less “linguistic”, but still recognizably semiotic. What happens when you make the questions too much about something other than that slippery semiotic frame is you move out of epistemology and into ontology.

You commented that’s exactly what the visual image does — but that’s not Theory. Theory axiomatically denies that there is any ontology that is not always already epistemology first. You can make the dialectic move to elide those binaries — but you can also make the dialectic move to synthesize the binary of visual and verbal rather than collapsing it.

So I don’t want an alternate Theory, informed by Theory, of how art works. I want to know whether a rigorous stipulation of the epistemology of art would change the way Theory conceptualizes the epistem-ontology of language. It probably won’t be a strict semiotics, because of the openness of the visual sign — but it can be a strict epistemology. And art tends to think of itself and be thought of as ontological.

I’m thinking of Sean’s point about his “visual reading protocols” and how different they are from prose reading. So what is the linguistics of visual reading? That’s still a very linguistic question — but one that really explodes the reliance of semiotics on the linguistic sign. But it still needs to be formalist semiotics, or it’s not theory. Theory’s formalist semiotics claims that the sign can be both verbal and visual, but the structure is derived from the workings of the verbal signs, because as Bert said, the syntagm of nature isn’t as ordered. That’s the oversimplification that I think comics challenges so powerfully, and you guys both said that contemporary art assumes it…

 

Fringe, Metadialogue, and the Multiverse

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There’s a strange phenomenon that sometimes happens in later seasons of television shows, where the weight of all of those previous years occasionally produces moments of metadialogue. It frequently appears as part of an effort to cope with the sheer unlikelihood of seven seasons of drama, the typical string of intensely emotional events which is unpunctuated by moments of normal, boring, every day life. A few weeks ago on Grey’s Anatomy, for example, a newer doctor asked sort-of protagonist Meredith Grey why Alex Kharev, one of the other remaining original characters, seems like such a jerk. “He’s been through a lot,” answers Meredith. “He had a girl go crazy on him, his wife almost died and then she walked out on him. And then he was shot and almost bled to death in an elevator.” It’s a weird moment; not only does it puncture the shoe’s admittedly-thin veil of plausibility (no one has that level of wackadoo tragedy happen to them in such a short span of time), but Meredith’s wryly explanatory list just draws attention to the oddity of Alex’s excessively eventful life. Grey’s Anatomy seems to be doing its best to brush over this bit of patent fictionality by hiding it in plain sight, but it’s hard to imagine writing or hearing the line without immediately recognizing the show’s artifice. Once you start looking for this kind of dialogue, you see it everywhere – detectives on cop shows grouse about how many dead bodies they see in a year, characters joke about that one time a few years ago when they were buried alive, long lasting characters look around and comment on the number of new hospital staff members after a particularly disruptive cast turnover. One of the characters on another Shonda Rhimes show, a therapist named Violet, frequently bemoans her bad luck, and at one point even asks – “Why does this sort of thing keep happening to us?” Because you’re on a primetime soap opera, Violet. Happiness does not make for good plot.

There was a particularly good example of this kind of metadialogue on the J.J. Abrams show Fringe a few months ago. (*Ahem*: Major Fringe spoilers ahead, if you’re concerned about that sort of thing). Fringe has undergone a pretty monumental transformation from the show that first appeared to the show currently airing on Friday nights. Initially, Fringe followed a formula made familiar by The X-Files, a police procedural with added supernatural elements – monsters and the unexplained spring out of the woodwork, and an eccentric, intrepid team of curious investigators searches for the reasons why (and the ways to stop it). Most new episodes came packaged with a new supernatural event which was handily dispatched by the hour’s end, and although some characters and plotlines hinted at a deep, dark secret in the background, that secret functioned asymptotically. Stories seemed to continually approach the point of uncovering the series’ organizing mystery, but they drew closer and closer without ever arriving at the mystery’s content.

Nothing says procedural like a cop in a doorframe holding up a badge

 

At some point during its second season, though, Fringe took a sharp right turn into the weird (and arguably, the better). Olivia and Peter, investigators of “fringe science,” along with Peter’s fabulously off-kilter mad scientist father Walter, discover and then travel to a parallel universe (the existence of which provides the underlying explanation for many of the previous season’s strange phenomena). The other universe, or “Over There,” is home to many doppelgänger versions of Fringe‘s original characters, including a much more fun-loving and freewheeling Olivia (who Peter dubs Faux-livia) and a powerful, sane version of Walter (Walternate). As it turns out, the rules of Over There are different from our own, and the course of history has shifted slightly, leading to the complete quarantine of Boston and much of the Midwest, a militarized society, a gold rather than green Statue of Liberty, and the continued use of zeppelins. (Zeppelins!)

Walter vs. Walternate

 

The great thing about Fringe‘s Over There is that its entertaining, superficial differences also come with a new set of narratological paradigms. As Peter and Olivia discover, the breach between universes has led to the alternate universe’s gradual disintegration, and Walternate’s method of holding his world together frequently involves trapping thousands of unfortunate, innocent citizens in a timeless, motionless state – literally frozen in amber – in order to prevent the universe from unraveling. The stakes are much higher, and those simple Monster of the Week plotlines are no longer sufficient to represent or address the other universe’s terrifyingly fragile state. In their own universe, Peter and Olivia encountered and dispatched isolated pockets of oddity, leading to the show’s episodic and frustratingly static structure, but Over There, a monster is never just a single event. Any deviation from the standard laws of physics is a potential site of total, universal dissolution, and unless it can be stopped, hundreds or thousands of people could die in order to keep the world from simply falling apart. As a result, the show has drifted away from its initially episodic structure into something more serialized, allowing plots to expand beyond the boundaries of an hour to keep pace with the long-term goals of the main characters Over There, who have plans to save their universe that necessarily exist outside the moment of an individual bizarre occurrence.

I should mention that although the other universe introduced an entirely different set of narrative possibilities for the show, Fringe has not abandoned its episodic format. Instead, in a lovely convergence of form and content, the troublesome fictional breach between universes has been accompanied by blended narratological structures. Serialized plot lines often come packaged inside a particular, episode-length conflict, and those smaller procedural story lines no longer produce the same infuriating fictional stasis that plagued Fringe during its first season. In fact, Fringe has done a great job of using some of the often-ignored paratextual possibilities of the episodic structure to provide landmarks and signals inside its new multiverse. The show’s opening credits, previously a uniform blue, remain blue when the episode takes place in the show’s original universe, but turn red when the episode takes place Over There. (There’s also a third possibility, which allows episodes that take place in the past to begin with an awesome retro-themed credit sequence). In other words, it’s not just that the new universe changed Fringe from an episodic into a serialized show, but rather, both serialized and episodic elements became far more meaningful inside a multiverse where significant plot events might remain meaningful outside the space of a single episode.

All of which brings me back around to my initial point – that wonderful, weird moment of metadialogue that sparked this whole thing in the first place. At one point during a recent episode, Peter pauses in a serious discussion with Olivia about their troubled romantic relationship (he falls in love with Faux-livia, life gets very complicated) and asks, “does it ever feel like every time we get close to getting the answers, someone changes the question?” It does feel that way, and Peter’s right, of course. The questions have to keep changing, because otherwise, the search for answers would grow tedious, and once every question has an answer, the show has no purpose. But the line is particularly apt because Fringe stopped merely changing the content of the questions, and began to change the nature of the questions as well. It went from, “why does this man have a mechanical heart?” and, “how do we stop this mysterious virus?” to, “who has a stronger ethical code, Walter or Walternate?” and, “which universe deserves to be saved?”

I don’t want to suggest that Fringe is now perfect, or that purely episodic shows are necessarily inferior, or that any struggling scifi show should throw in a parallel universe and cross its fingers. But that line from Peter highlights the thing that’s helped move Fringe from an easily forgettable show into something effective and watchable – the questions change. Maybe it’s because Fringe has been under the threat of near-cancellation from its beginning, or because the voices involved in its production changed, or because it just took a season and a half to figure itself out, but Fringe’s malleability has kept it from succumbing to inertia. As a result, the monsters are scarier, and that moment of metadialogue which elicits such groaning on a show like Grey’s Anatomy, yields a wry smile instead.

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Update by Noah: You can read more of Kathryn’s writing at her blog.

Music for Middle-Brow Snobs: Robotboy

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A number of people (okay, two. two people) have expressed regret at the demise of Music for Middle-Brow Snobs. So I thought I’d resurrect it, at least fitfully. Here then is an electronicaish download for those interested.

Download Robotboy here.

And if you’re interested in what you’re getting, the tracklist is below.

1. Robotboy — Robyn
2. Suddenly the Trees Are Giving Way — Ulrich Schnauss
3. My LIttle Beautiful — µ-ziq
4. Carceres Ex Novum — Xeper
5. Night Knuckles — Clark
6. Donkey Rhubarb — Aphex Twin
7. Little Things — Martyn
8. Lasttrak —Plastikman
9. Cast Out Your Demons — Legion of Two
10.The Belldog — Eno-Moebius—Roedelius

Charles Schulz: High Anxiety

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The following was originally done as a presentation for Art Spiegelman’s seminar, “Comix: Marching Into the Canon” at Columbia University in 2007. I think it suited Art’s humor to assign me to do the required audio-visual presentation on a cartoonist we both perceived as far from my usual range of interest. He certainly did me a service in that while I also grew up with Peanuts, the process of making my power point slideshow and commentary added greatly to my appreciation of Charles Schulz’s comics artistry. Click on the images to enlarge.
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“Style…should be in a continuing state of some evolution, while at the same time, it embodies a handy set of tools, a vocabulary for dealing with the experience one is describing, or for defining, often obliquely, the special nature of one’s own presence in the midst of this experience.…” -Donald Phelps
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An important influence on Charles Schulz was George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, the early zenith of comic art: simplified, expressive ink line drawings in concert with each other and with thoughtful language.
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Schulz’s favorite cartoonist was Roy Crane, whose storytelling in Wash Tubbs mixes aspects of cartooning and realism. Crane’s work has a lot of clear white space, a feeling of air around the characters on the pages.
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Another key influence, Skippy by Percy Crosby: the class consciousness of children who are vastly separated in terms of education, and a breezy pen and ink style.
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An actual comic strip by Pablo Picasso, another of Schulz’s favorites. I like how the main bandaged figure is kept somewhat on-model.
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“Waiter! There’s a hare in my soup!”

 

Schulz wanted to be a New Yorker cartoonist, but didn’t have the nerve to submit his samples, like this one. One of his accomplishments was to successfully fuse the pared-down, elegant drawing and sophisticated irony of the New Yorker cartoon style to comic strips.
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A charming drawing from L’il Folks, his precursor strip to Peanuts.
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Peanuts debuted in 1950. Schulz immediately began pushing the envelope with his characters. Charlie Brown’s isolation and depression is omnipresent. In this very early strip he has a virtually hysterical reaction to being ostracized. Much humor is based on pain, and Schulz’s children were often all about pain.
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This shows Charlie Brown’s self-image: as a happy kid. This was not borne out by the next 50 years of daily strips.
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Charlie Brown became instantly recognizable. Contemporary popularity does not ensure one’s place in history, but in addition to creating indelible characters that resonate deeply in the American consciousness, Schulz was able to use his form to express complex sociological and psychological observations.
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It is often quite a dark picture of life that Schulz give us. In this case Charlie Brown is not paying attention, which the calculating Lucy takes advantage of, along with his chivalry. But what he is saying is that he is neglecting more important matters to go to a bad movie, just to get something for free. Perhaps Lucy does him a favor, he is overreacting and should go home to his homework. As well, if his chivalry was real, he would have been happy to give up his place to his female friend.
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Optimism is unfounded. The manipulative Lucy tells Charlie all women can’t be trusted, specifically their “tears.” The behaviors of Lucy and the other female characters could take their own separate analysis, Schulz still has issues from childhood that he lays out.
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Schulz didn’t like Lucy’s character but she suited his storytelling purposes so well that she became essential. All of his characters have issues themselves, and with each other. Themes of abusive relationships and unrequited love are all over Peanuts. This panel refers back to Krazy and Ignatz.
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Here Lucy relentlessly corrupts Charlie Brown’s long-awaited moment of pleasure, the first day of baseball season. Schulz decried the decline of American sportsmanship. He refined his concepts and evolved his drawing for clarity and simplicity of expression; ideal as a vehicle for his ideas, and ideal for efficiently producing a daily strip.
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Schulz said he thought Charlie Brown deserved some of the abuse he got because he was arrogant. In Marxian terms he is in false consciousness, fixed in a cycle of failure and disconnection. He can never achieve any status. His creator, though, retained the means of production. Schulz controlled his creation and did his own work with no assistants.
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Even the product drawings extend his themes. In this group Schroeder is a prodigy being seduced by the tormentor Lucy. Linus, when he’s not oblivious as he is here, is capable of acts of extraordinary dexterity. Snoopy plays violin, speaks French, and has Van Gogh and Andrew Wyeth paintings in his doghouse. Look at the expression on Charlie Brown’s face. Is it incomprehension? Jealousy? Embarrassment? What can Charlie Brown do? Charlie Brown is in the center, but feels marginalized. He looks at us, or at the void.
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This reminds me of the beginning of Maus, where little Art is deserted by his buddies and runs to his dad, crying. Vladek says, “Your friends? Lock them together in a room with no food for a week…then you could see what it is, friends.”
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Art Spiegelman’s perfectly timed version.
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“It’s kind of a parody of the cruelty that exists among children. Because they are struggling to survive.” -Charles Schulz
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“These children affect us because in a certain sense they are monsters…because we realize that if they are monsters it is because we, the adults, have made them so.” -Umberto Eco
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Al Capp said: “The Peanuts characters…wound each other with the greatest enthusiasm. Anyone who sees theology in them is a devil-worshiper.”
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Linus is not a monster, he’s Lucy’s little brother, and we see him here building himself someone that will listen to him. Is it an Army, is that a cannon? No, a congregation and pulpit. Linus has evangelical Lutheran leanings. This reminds me of Roy Crane, it’s a beautiful strip.
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Linus humbles Charlie Brown with his visionary imagination. Linus frequently quotes the New Testament in context.
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A philosophical debate on the mound, tiny children grappling with crucial issues, Linus contextualizing. This picture has formal and abstract compositional qualities, balanced in harmony (like “The Feast in the House of Levi” or “The Last Supper”).
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Schulz’s output was as often more humorous or lyrical strips, but I have chosen to focus on his more serious aspects, because that terrible irony expressed through masterful use of his medium is what elevates his work to Art.
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Schulz introduced an African American character in 1968, Franklin, whose father was in Vietnam. Franklin has no memories, which embodies the critiques of colonialism and speaks of the quandary of the descendants of African chattel slaves, cut off from their history. I may be reading into it with hindsight, but Schulz was by all accounts a voracious reader.
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Is the Artist influenced by society, or does Art influence society? In Schulz’s case both apply. Schulz explored major issues in his strip, which becomes impressive when you realize that such feelings were delivered to 360 million readers.
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This is Landing Zone Charlie Brown in Vietnam, 1968. I can’t imagine how Schulz felt if he saw this.
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In this hard world, even gentle Linus is momentarily seduced by Lucy’s cynical litany. Even though conceptually adult, Peanuts was on the comics page. Children like me who grew up with this strip were being informed by Schulz’s observations.
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With horrible logic Schulz made truth-teller Lucy a psychiatric therapist. And, sometimes faith is not enough for Linus, who is often overcome by high anxiety. His security blanket has been entered into the psychiatric lexicon. The level of fear of these children, their apprehensions in dealing with a world that seems forever out of their control is what has always stuck with me when I thought of Schulz’s work.
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I remember this one well from when I saw it as a child, it was a clear expression of it’s time. This gets right to the “nut” of it, for me. It tormented me for a while in preparing this presentation. What is it about these characters, their shape? It was right there on the edge of my brain, something almost subliminal. I then had a little Peanuts epiphany.

Schulz was drafted in 1943, spent two years training, and then served in Germany as the war wound down. At one point his platoon camped in a swamp near Dachau. He said that what he remembered most about the war was loneliness. But suddenly…



…”everything changed.” I think this monstrous act to end a monstrous war imprinted on Schulz. The form of Charlie Brown, all tied up with fear and guilt, aligns with the alien image. He is the inheritor of the world we have built. Charlie Brown is the bomb.

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