I've been thinking about which "Peanuts" strips most closely echo our current crisis, and this is the one I keep coming back to. It's sneakily one of the saddest strips in the canon.

If you want to talk about a socially distanced character, you've gotta start with Spike. His one-man strips often read like snippets from a Samuel Beckett play.

Here's a character starved for interaction. I could do a thirty-tweet thread on Spike's loneliness and it would suit the moment perfectly.

I've heard arguments that Schulz lost his fastball later in his career, when he softened Charlie Brown a bit, but in some ways he just transferred that loneliness to Spike.

There's some variation--Spike is sometimes shown in the armed services, such as in this February 1996 strip, but even there, it's generally about loneliness and isolation.

I'll stop here, with a strip that probably sums up with one word how we're all feeling. It's amazing that a newspaper comic strip could plumb such depths.

It's funny--I did a Mother's Day thread months earlier and completely forgot about this Spike strip. Notice how it echoes some of the earlier strips here, where Snoopy sets off to look for his (and Spike's) mother. It's a long-running theme in Peanuts. https://twitter.com/LukeEpplin/status/1127590120129990657