As a kid, I studied the comics religiously—and by "religiously," I mean I read Beetle Bailey in church. To this day, I’d rather read the funny pages than any other section of the newspaper. However, with the exception of a couple of cartoonists who have resigned, they aren’t funny—so laughter isn’t the appeal. I suppose it relates to the desire for comfort and familiarity, for clinging to life’s security blanket. But if the unexamined life isn’t worth living, the unexamined comic strip isn’t worth reading. And the baffling work of Charles Schulz demands scrutiny.

Peanuts, to me, has always been perplexing below the surface. Just what exactly is going on with that interminable narrative? Schulz, while ostensibly writing a simple comic strip about the innocent tribulations of youth, created a deeply cynical world devoid of clarity. The Peanuts characters exhibit contradictory behaviors so often that the structure nearly collapses. They communicate with each other in the most senseless fashions imaginable. And Schulz leaves the reader with a pessimistic, doomed, anti-intellectual vision of the world.

Regarding contradictions, consider Snoopy. He sleeps on top of his doghouse, has a pet bird, works as an attorney and surgeon, competes at Wimbledon, travels back in time to fight the Red Baron in World War I, composes novels on a typewriter—and yet he can’t feed himself.

Beagles are notoriously leisure-oriented, and sycophantically drool upon their owners, exuding unmitigated love, devotion, and dependence. Snoopy, conversely, refers snidely to his owner, the deeply damaged and eternally fallible Charlie Brown, as "that round-headed kid."

Then again, Charlie isn’t on a first-name basis with Snoopy, either. He routinely calls him "my dog," asking his friends, or what passes as his friends, "Have you seen my dog?" Further, he directly questions Snoopy regularly, inquiring, "Why can’t I have a normal dog like everyone else?" This separates Charlie from his closest ally in the world of Peanuts.

Charlie Brown is a study in clinical depression. He yearns for the unrequited love of "the little red-haired girl" (nobody seems to know each other’s names, suggesting isolation and ephemeral relationships). With a permanent look of despair on his over-sized head, he constantly issues defeatist proclamations such as: "I don’t seem to fit in anywhere! I don’t seem to belong! Everything I try is a disaster!" He loses virtually every game he plays and reveals a touch of schizophrenia by talking to the pitcher’s mound as if its a friend and a lucky charm, but it’s actually the source of his despair, failure, and unrewarded toil. By the way, when he gets hit by a baseball, why do his clothes fly off? That shirt, the perennial black-and-orange, striped shirt, remains on his body for 50 years, yet the slightest tap form a child hitting a baseball knocks it off his body, which you’d think would provide him with an irresistible opportunity to change clothes. Perhaps the shirt is the source of his poor luck. Regardless, he seems to be aware of his mental troubles, because he regularly pays five cents for psychiatric sessions with that indomitable portrait of stubborn cruelty, Lucy. But despite all of the evidence that he’ll turn into one of those lonely kids who goes on a schoolyard killing spree, he seems to be the most popular kid in the neighborhood. No explanation is ever provided.

Lucy is presented as an evil foil to Charlie Brown. She tortures him by repeatedly removing the football before he can kick it. She demonstrates such a perfunctory interest in baseball that the reader has to assume she joined the team with the deliberate intent to sabotage the games. She operates an illegal psychiatric practice in which her sole patient, Charlie Brown, incurs callous abuse instead of the treatment he so desperately needs. She’s arrogant, petty, and small-minded. However, she’s also obsessed with Schroeder and leans against his piano, staring at him like a pathetic ‘NSync fan.

Perhaps the most befuddling aspect of Peanuts resides in the homo-erotic subtext between Marcie and Peppermint Patty. Marcie, the Billie Jean King look-alike, needs Peppermint Patty in order to benefit from Patty’s athleticism and ability to intimidate bullies. Patty, the scholastic Edsel, needs Marcie in order to get through school. Patty, suffering some sort of narcolepsy, sleeps through class—something for which she can’t entirely be blamed, considering the teacher’s meaningless squawks—and uses Marcie for answers. They both want each other to improve—Marcie exhorting Patty to pay attention and study, Patty exhorting Marcie to stand up for herself and develop some athletic ambition. They seem to have cultivated, albeit perhaps inadvertently, a blossoming dominant-submissive relationship.

Marcie refers to Peppermint Patty as "Sir." For a long time, Patty said, "Don’t call me ‘Sir.’" Eventually, however, she stops and appears to grow accustomed to it, maybe even fond of her dominant role. Marcie is perfectly content in her submissive position, after all. So they have nothing to complain about. The give-and-take synergism rolls on unimpeded by the inevitable hoots and sneers they’ll engender later in life. Meanwhile, though, nobody else is aware of their relationship, or at least they except it to either fester or flourish in the proverbial closet. Their childhood companions seem to have tacitly agreed to not ask, provided Peppermint Patty and Marcie agree not to tell.

We get nothing but a shallow glimpse into the parental paradigm in Peanuts. However, it’s fair to say that most of the kids appear to be be growing up in traditional homes. But Peppermint Patty is an exception. She often refers to her dad, never to her mom. She frequently says her dad is out of town—again, no mention of a mother. So perhaps Marcie’s role is that of a mother figure, a nurturer, providing the love and attention of which Patty’s life is so conspicuously bereft. But then, how do we account for the "Sir"-laden submission? Mothers don’t submit. They dominate. Once again, a Peanuts relationship seems to establish its form and then promptly turns around and reverses itself. Nonetheless, Marcie and Peppermint Patty embody mutually satisfied attraction while the other peanuts are plagued by unrequited attempts at romance every time they poke those badly proportioned skulls out of their shells. In one strip, a kid flirts with Marcie by calling her "Lambcake." She punches him. Afterward, the kid tells Peppermint Patty, "I like your friend ... I think she’s cute, Sir!" Patty shouts, "Don’t call me ‘Sir"! and kicks him in the ass. The pet names, evidently, are reserved to the girls. Intruders will be destroyed. With the exception of the one gay couple, Peanuts relationships are universally unrequited or, if temporarily satisfied, doomed to fail—implicitly condemning procreation and, by extension, humanity itself.

Communication, in Schulz’s work, is simultaneously presented as easy, almost telepathically simple, and yet also impossible, virtually devoid of meaning.

For example, Snoopy can receive and process information from his pet bird Woodstock, even though, to us, Woodstock’s banter is conveyed in a series of lines and random markings, almost like bird-claw scratches in the dirt. Can we trust Snoopy’s translations? For all we know, Woodstock is preaching communist propaganda instead of fulfilling the Gracie Allen role to Snoopy’s George Burns.

Snoopy’s brother Spike, who lives like an exile in the Arizona desert, frequently writes to his mother, despite having no access to money for stamps, pens, paper, et cetera and, most crucial, lacks the fundamental writing necessity of opposable thumbs. You can’t communicate in print without opposable thumbs. That’s why Shakespeare was so talented—great thumbs.

Snoopy is also a writer, but, coming from middle-class suburbia, rather than penurious cactus squalor, he types on what appears to be an old Remington. This makes slightly more sense, because thumbs aren’t used very often to type. But once again, it’s an example of the ease with which most thoughts are conveyed in Peanuts. As I mentioned, arguably Charlie Brown’s only friend, Snoopy, doesn’t even know his owner’s name. Charlie, of course, would have no way of knowing, anyway, because Snoopy’s thoughts are conveyed through voiceless cartoon bubbles. He’s really talking to himself. But Charlie and the others seem to communicate with him as effectively as they communicate with each other, which, then, reestablishes the connection between man and best friend, between boy and dog, between Snoopy and that round-headed kid.

Consider, however, Charlie Brown’s teacher. It’s amazing that these children managed to develop such literate voices with a teacher who emits monotonous, grunting whines ("Wa-waa-wa-wa-wa-waa") like a cat with its tail caught in a fan.

Occasionally, the kids speak to adults but the elder characters never speak for themselves, at least not overtly. They respond with mysterious voices that can be understood only by the children.

The vision Schulz created is one of the most puzzling and cynical in all of the fictional arts. A world where nothing changes, it’s a dystopian nightmare in which expectations are satisfied, and never diverted from, like the blandest of meals. We expect Lucy to suddenly pull away the football before Charlie kicks it, and that’s precisely what will happen. We expect Schroeder to reject Lucy, and he does. We expect Peppermint Patty to once again demonstrate her infantile grasp of basic knowledge, and she does. The scenarios repeat themselves infinitely. It’s like a black hole in which no idea can enter or exit.

From 1950 to 2000, this gang of seven-year-olds—inexplicably labeled Peanuts—failed to age a day. They discussed it frequently, but the shell was never cracked. The skin never wrinkled. Pigpen never took a shower, put on a suit, and joined the working class.

Charlie Brown is bald. Why? Does he have a cancer? He hardly seems the type to shave his head for rebellious reasons. Actually, it isn’t shaved, because two resilient hairs remain. Basically, he looks like an old man, which is symbolic of Schulz’s inverted, backward vision of humanity. It’s a reverse narrative in which the children ponder life’s fleeting seasons and then, when they grow up and become teachers, they incomprehensibly babble like bilious babies.

Schulz perpetuates an air of anti-intellectualism. He avoids showing us adults. Instead, children are depicted as bitter, desensitized senior citizens while the adults are either nonexistent or, when they’re introduced peripherally, turn out to be more child-like than the children. The teacher can’t speak, for instance. The smartest character, Linus—a kid who possesses vast knowledge of history, Biblical scripture, and can weave a tale like the finest of British raconteurs—is most comfortable attached to a security blanket and a sucked-upon thumb, suggesting the thirst for knowledge is nothing more edifying than the thirst for breast milk. Linus is a wealth of obscure information, which demonstrates a curious intellect and refined maturity. However, he also clings to a blanket and sucks his thumb, which isn’t a mere contradiction—it represents Shulz’s belief in the infantile and regressive nature of knowledge, as he routinely impugns intelligence and celebrates the futility of life.