Peanuts was our own daily security blanket, even if Lucy’s advice isn’t very good

Like millions of Americans, I grew up with Peanuts. But I never outgrew it.

Wherever I lived, wherever I travelled, I could find those three or four panels in the paper each morning. And Charlie, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, Franklin and the gang brought childhood rushing back.

Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz on the necessity of loserdom Read more

That’s what made Charles Schulz so brilliant – he treated childhood with all the poignant and tender complexity it deserves. He gave voice to all its joys and anxieties – a spectrum of emotions that run from the start of a new baseball season to the anguished “Augh” that comes with losing the big game. He explored the emotions that we too often forget kids feel until we’re reminded that we once felt them ourselves. Hope. Doubt. The exquisite pain of unrequited love. The self-exploration of what it means to be different. The comfortable knowledge that it’s all going to be OK – even if Lucy’s advice isn’t very good.

For decades, Peanuts was our own daily security blanket. That’s what makes it an American treasure.

In his final strip, Schulz wondered how he could ever forget the Peanuts gang. Thanks to a groundbreaking series of books collecting all of Schulz’s Peanuts strips, the rest of us never will – and we can share our love for the gang with our children and grandchildren for decades to come.

• The Complete Peanuts 1999-2000: Volume 25 is published on 21 April by Canongate.