LONG BEFORE JERRY SEINFELD became comically rich and famous with a sitcom about nothing, there was Charles Schulz, the man who gave us Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus and the rest of the Peanuts gang.
Schulz, a son of a barber who grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, was a modest, seemingly unremarkable man who produced transcendent work. At its peak, Peanuts was syndicated in 75 countries, translated into 21 languages and had a total readership of 355 million.
And yet Schulz, who died in 2000, claimed Peanuts was “about nothing.” Of course, we all knew better. Peanuts was about everything.
In the nearly 18,000 strips that Schulz drew over 50 years (1950-2000), adults almost never appear. When they do, they are abstract, all legs. When they are allowed to…