I learned two things from the conversation around this new animated TV special about the least developed recurring Peanuts character:
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Charles Schulz fought tooth and nail to get Franklin into the comic strip in the first place, because out of segregation-era prejudice against African Americans a lot of newspapers believed Black people were not their target audience. (Imagine not being the target audience for the news.)
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After 50 years, the Black community still hasn’t forgiven Lee Mendelsohn and Bill Melendez for putting Franklin on the other side of the Thanksgiving table as the other kids, in a terrible folding chair, in the 1973 animated TV special A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.
Apparently this entire new Peanuts special, a collaboration between Charles Schulz’s son and grandson and “Jump Start” cartoonist Robb Armstrong (whose surname Schulz gave Franklin in homage), is built around these two specific things.
Here's some context from Frankin's first and second ever appearances in the comic strip:
That second-ever appearance has a tremendous understated poignancy to it that you’d only pick up if you understood all the shit that was going down in America on that day in 1968.
"Is your whole family here at the beach, Franklin?"
"No, my dad is over in Vietnam."
"My dad’s a barber…he was in a war too, but I don’t remember which one."
It’s pretty powerful, in a way I totally would have missed as a kid, that bonding over two specific cultural things, both of them quintessentially American—the personal relationship between civilians and the trauma of a faraway war, and the connection between the love of baseball and a nuanced understanding of personal failure—is what turned a chance encounter between this little white Boomer kid and this little black Boomer kid, three months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, into a lifelong friendship.
And not knowing the timing of Franklin’s first appearance, with the racist foundations of the institutions of American civilization coming under ruthless scrutiny by the people it most oppressed, at a level of visibility as of yet unseen since the days of the Civil War, I also would have totally missed the poignancy of Charlie Brown and Franklin’s first conversation being Franklin noticing that Charlie’s sandcastle is crooked and Charlie admitting that he has a reputation for building things poorly.
You wouldn’t pick this up reading through Peanuts strips in order from a printed anthology or an online archive, but you absolutely would in a newspaper, where so many of the real life stories you already read before you got to the comics page would have also been on these topics.
Franklin was initially created to judge America, compassionately, for its sins. There’s a gravitas to his tendency to quote the Old Testament.
"Do you like baseball, Charlie Brown?"
"My problem is that I like baseball too much."
