The beginning of the school year had a little ritual: a new pencil case we bought downtown, at a store on Pagano and Tagle streets, freshly sharpened pencils with a name on it and a blue jacket with a hand-stitched shield. The school had an obsession with identifying personal items. Once lost, they enter a state of limbo, and if they are not rescued within the specified times, they will be given away. My mother solved the school’s obsession with a label maker for large objects — GIL, three logo-like letters — and an endless strip with the legend “CAROLA GIL” in blue without a serif to sew onto clothes. I have been a regular visitor to Lost and Found.
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With each year’s innovations came what new generations came to call the “lunch box.” At my house we called it the picnic bag and at school it was called the picnic bag lunch boxAs lunch was attached to the morning shift, which was in English, the language was not changed until after 12 noon.
My favorite – and one I greatly regret not keeping – was one of the dogs Snoopy: Yellow, nest-shaped. On one side the dog was reading belly up next to the Woodstock bird and on the other side he was belly up munching on a milk sandwich. Inside, a yellow thermos with a cup lid and the entire cast printed on it: Charlie Brown, siblings Lucy and Linus Van Pelt, Sally…
The 70s and early 80s were taken over by Snoopy: T-shirts, notebooks, attachmentstin pencil case, stuffed animals, cartoons. Over the years, I’ve come to like other characters more than the Beagle himself.
This fascination had a real basis: Peanuts debuted on October 2, 1950, when action and adventure were ruling the comic book world. Charles Schultz showed that tape could be simple, passionate And philosophical. In the foreground is Charlie Brown, an oval-headed boy wearing a simple shirt (the distinctive squiggly line running through it would become apparent a few months later). Sad, sometimes insecure and plagued by existential angst, Charlie Brown is a lovable loser, and through Schulz’s fascination with a circle, a dash, a curler, and two little dots, he was able to convey to anyone in the world what the character was feeling. For nearly 50 years, he hand-drawn 17,897 strips, which reached 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries. By 1965, Peanuts had jumped from newspapers to television with a Christmas special, and in 1969 NASA named the Apollo 10 lunar module “Snoopy” and the command module “Charlie Brown.”
But what is the magic behind the bar? Most of them are probably minimal: a circle, two dots, and a line making a crooked mouth, and we already knew Charlie Brown was being defeated by existence.
Umberto Eco wrote in 1985 in New York Review of Books That Schultz’s capillary force does not appear in 10 separate segments, but rather “Grace, tenderness and laughter are born only from the changing repetition of patterns.. This is a bit of emotional choreography that makes you laugh and cry and that comes through with the familiarity of these characters.
Charles M. Schultz himself believes that the world of cartoons and strips has a unique quality unlike any other medium, whether it’s someone drawing for 2,000 newspapers or someone drawing a small drawing on an envelope in a letter to a friend. I found there was a connection there, and the potential to bring a little laughter and happiness (add reflection) “Without having to be too pompous.”
I have in my library a book about Charles Schultz in which he recalls 65 years of his work (Just What’s Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the art of peanuts)a labor of love by the amazing designer Chip Kidd) that we usually leave open randomly in different parts. In one of the first double pages, Lucy and Charlie Brown appear lost with anxious faces, carrying a bag full of golf clubs between the legs of elderly people who can only see each other up to above the knees. In Peanuts there are only references to the world of adults who always remain outside the scene. They are seen only from the child’s perspective. Every time I look back at that photo I remember the day when, in the elevator, I grabbed the wrong coat thinking it was my mother’s coat. When the elevator was empty, I was left alone, clinging to a stranger. Schultz was able to portray this confusion perfectly. Back to Echo: “In Charlie Brown’s face he shows us, with two strokes of his pen, his version of the human condition“.