The king of the comics, as far as I'm concerned, is still Peanuts by Charles Schulz. I love Linus, Lucy, Schroeder, Pigpen, the Little Red-Haired Girl, and Charlie Brown. There's a ring of reality to their relationships.

One sequence comes to mind. Linus has just written a comic strip of his own, and he wants Lucy's opinion. In the first frame, he tentatively hands Lucy his comic strip and says, "Lucy, would you read this and tell me if you think it is funny?"

In the next frame, you see Lucy patting her foot, and a little bit of a grin comes across her face. She looks at Linus and says, "Well, Linus, who wrote this?"

Linus with his chest heaved out and a great big grin says, "Lucy, I wrote that."

In the next frame, you see Lucy wadding it up, throwing it to the side, and saying, "Well, then, I don't think it's very funny."

In the final frame, you see Linus picking up his comic strip, throwing his blanket over his shoulder, looking at Lucy and saying, "Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life."

We find that humorous. I dare say if you and I thought long and hard enough, we'd remember being the crab grass in the lawn of somebody else's life. None of us wants to be a loser. None of us wants to be a source of discouragement. And yet, if we're not careful, we can find ourselves being more pessimistic than optimistic, more discouraging than encouraging.