GOOD GRIEF, CHARLIE BROWN!, Somerset House

It's time to celebrate the enduring legacy of Peanuts: Somerset House exhibition is an entertaining and informative take on the much-loved comic strip

The world of Peanuts began as a four-panel comic strip and grew into one of the largest pop culture phenomena of the 20th-century. The new Somerset House exhibition, GOOD GRIEF, CHARLIE BROWN!, sets out to balance these two aspects: both reminding us of the original illustrations we fell in love with, and presenting an insightful overview of how Charlie Brown's place in the world has evolved over the years.

Created by Charles M. Schulz, the comic strip debuted in 1950 and quickly became an international sensation: at its height, it was translated into 21 languages and had a readership of approximately 355 million people. Yet many people today will know little more about the characters than their appearance on stationary and endless other forms of merchandise.

For them the exhibition will be eye-opening. Schulz’s background and the strip’s humble beginnings are comprehensively covered in the first room. On the long mezzanine above, the rest of the history of Peanuts is organised by themes that have emerged in the comic over the years, and a convincing case is made for reading the strips in the light of big ideas like existentialism, feminism and religion.

This thematic approach really pays dividends: it gives a bit of focus both to the choice of comic strips selected for display from the vast series, and to how the Peanuts-related artefacts are presented. Amongst the latter are letters to and from the Clintons, Ronald Reagan, and an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, enquiring as to whether Schulz coined the phrase ‘security blanket’ in his comics. Kim Jones’ personal collection of vintage Peanuts sweatshirts also gets a look-in. 

Full review here