Charlie Brown. Snoopy. Schroeder. Lucy. Patty. Violet. Just simple comic strip characters? Comic strip characters, yes. Simple, no. Each of them has an identity. Schroeder that of the glacial aesthete. Pig-pen that of the unhampered natural man. They clasp these identities to themselves as if they had real existence. They do not. They are fictions, fleeting constructions of the mind. Nonetheless, these identities are all that protect them from the terrifying abyss of absolute nothingness above which they dangle. The Peanuts Gang have been rudely expelled from the serene uterus of uncreatedness and force to make their existence ground itself in the groundlessness of nihility.
With that acknowledged there is a question, a question that must be answered much as we might like to avoid it. For if we do avoid it, hiding in some frivolous divertissement or dark corner of the imagination, it will remain. Waiting for us. The question is a simple one. What would Peanuts be like in a parallel universe?
| The multi-million dollar grossing cartoon strip might present its sinister side more often if the gang were plucked from their politically stable state and thrust into an Orwellian dystopia. | |
| The "comic" strip is desended via a long winding path from the ancient Greek theater's komedia. In a parallel universe, Charles Schultz might please millions of youngsters with an analogous "tragic" strip. | |
| The laws of nature exhibit a pleasing regularity in our universe, as well as the one the little Peanuts tykes currently inhabit. But what if some freak occurence pulled them into a parallel universe where the supernatural did not merely happen? What if Peanuts took place in a universe where the supernatural was taken for granted. | |
| "All our social conventions, including the comic strip, are blinders against the Nothingness which is despair." Martin Heidegger penned those words many years ago; today they remain a pretty safe generalization. But in a parallel universe, Peanuts just might break that generalization. | |
Last updated 2001/03/07. Back to Frankie or whereever you came from.