Peanuts, Charles Schulz, and Women

I haven't been a Peanuts (the comic strip) fan since I was about 7. However, Charles McGrath's book review of David Michaelis' biography of Charles Schulz is fascinating. Apparently (I at least never knew this), Schulz was moody, often depressed, and seemed like less than a cheerful person a majority of the time, and I never realized that the male characters of Peanuts were bits and pieces of Schulz himself, while the female characters were based on women in his life. To wit:

"Peanuts” was almost transparently autobiographical. There really was anunattainable Little Red-Haired Girl. Her name was Donna Mae Johnson, and shejilted Schulz in July 1950; he nursed the rejection, along with all the other slights he suffered from wished-for girlfriends, for the rest of his life.Charlie Brown, wishy-washy, disillusioned, but also secretly ambitious, was theartist himself, of course; and so were Linus, the oddball; Schroeder, meticulousand gifted; and, above all, Snoopy, with his daydreams, his fantasies, his senseof being undervalued and misunderstood. Violet, with her mean streak; and Lucy,bossy, impatient and sarcastic, were all the controlling, withholding women inSchulz’s life, especially his mother and his first wife, Joyce."

That's certainly a less-than-charming perspective on women, and given Peanuts' readership, it must have been at least somewhat influential, , as have many other comics that I'd never considered as anything more than virtually-never-funny (think Margaret in "Dennis the Menace" or even Suzie from the beloved "Calvin and Hobbes", though she was a far more complex version of the "girl who studies hard and hates fun" model. Plus, Calvin and Hobbes was great).