Well, when I was a kid my gateway to reading since we didn’t have graphic novels at that time, my gateway to reading was Peanuts. My aunt had all these books on the shelf and I just roared through them all. And if there were words I didn’t understand like psychology or theology, I looked them up. I mean I didn’t even know what grief meant like in the phrase good grief. So Peanuts taught me a ton.
Peanuts is also the formative strip for any comic strip guy post 1950. It’s to us what Brando was to acting. You know, it seems like every art form broke open there in the 50’s, right? And Schulz did that for comics. Didn’t have to be slapstick anymore, the tone didn’t have to be outrageous, it could be subtle, you could go out on a quiet note instead of a loud note, you didn’t have to have a character going — at the end because – like it was just sort of — he modernized the comic strip.
You could get in any of your thoughts. You know like Dylan did for rock, you know, like doesn’t have to be silly love songs. Schulz did all of that. So he is the air that we breathe. Then, when I was older, the big three had a big influence on me. Breathed, who did Bloom County, Watterson, who did Calvin and Hobbes and Larson, who did The Far Side, Garry Trudeau with Doonesbury, Scott Adams with Dilbert.
They all influenced me.
