Charles Schultz, American cartoonist and creator of "Charlie Brown and Peanuts" gang (1922-2000).In an interview in 1999, Schultz said that although his philosophical views evolved over the years, "the term that best describes me now is 'secular humanist.'" He went on to say, "I despise those shallow religious comics. Dennis the Menace, for instance, is the most shallow. When they show him praying--I just can't stand that sort of thing, talking to God about some cutesy thing that he'd done during the day. I don't think Hank Ketcham [Dennis' creator] has any deep knowledge of things like that." Schultz cringed at the mention of Family Circus, the strip by Bill Keane that is strewn with cutesy references to Jesus (who wants to protect children on school buses, but can't because of laws about separation of church and state!) and those sickly-sweet images of invisible deceased grandparents looming protectively over the kids. "Oh, I can't stand that," Schultz laughed. "You could get diabetes reading them, couldn't you?"
2 comments:
I always enjoyed the Peanuts strip – Snoopy, especially, as “Joe cool” – and while reading through the godlesswonder blog I found out that Schultz considered himself a secular humanist which I found very exciting!
I also share Shultz specific repulsion of the family circus. Even as a young child I had a certain disdain for that comic, the worst ones are when the writer seems to have ran out of ideas and decides to simply have one of the children run around the house leaving footprints showing where they have ran and what they have ran over, thoroughly un-enjoyable.
jd - I never liked Family Circus either, even as a kid. The writer did run out of ideas and it seemed rather redundant and boring. There was no "wit", nothing "memorable"...snoozy like church! LOL!
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