You can generally map most of the main characters in Charles Schulz's Peanuts onto a sort of body/brain model. Snoopy is the strip's imagination. Charlie Brown is its undiagnosed anxiety. Lucy Van Pelt is a stand-in for the specific rage of being a little kid in a world that was made for adults. If you accept that premise, then Linus Van Pelt is the brains of the operation.

This got a little watered down as the strip continued, and Linus isn’t quite as intellectual in the various cartoon adaptations (his Bible monologue in A Charlie Brown Christmas notwithstanding), but he has a theologian's knowledge of the Bible and can pontificate like a Ph.D. in philosophy. It's fair to wonder just how many ridiculously precocious kids in Western fiction owe some part of their inspiration to Linus, both on and off the comics page.

Peanuts ran for just under 50 years. While Linus wasn't part of the........

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