Tag Archives: Peanuts

#1: Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz

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There are two main paths to liking Peanuts: the Snoopy way and the Charlie Brown way.

The Snoopy way focuses on the strip’s plush centerpiece; the irrepressibly imaginative and adorably ill-proportioned polymorphous people-pleasing juggernaut. Snoopy combines Hobbes’ furry lovableness with Calvin’s mischievous bad-boy allure; he’s cuter than Hello Kitty and more whimsically unpredictable than Opus. His is a face that launched a million lunch boxes and a massive life insurance campaign—he’s the personification of Schulz’s marketing genius. If there were a cute overload of the funny pages, it would have an outsize schnozz and curse at the Red Baron. Snoopy is Peanuts for the masses.

June 16, 1957

The Charlie Brown way focuses on the strip’s doleful centerpiece; the downtrodden, self-pitying loser and the endless variations on his losing. Charlie Brown is existential tragedy in a baseball cap. The numbing, torturous repetition as he tears apart his sandwich while watching the red-haired girl from across the playground, or the agonized howl as he strikes out yet again—this isn’t a charming diversion for the kiddies. This is a bleak vision. Charlie Brown is Peanuts for those with depth.

I actually like both Snoopy and Charlie Brown, separately and together. I find Snoopy irresistible—especially in Schulz’s earlier strips when he looked more dog-like, and when Schulz’s then-fluid line-work gave the character a vivacity that outshone even James Thurber, much less Jim Davis. And Charlie Brown is not only Beckett in miniature; he’s Beckett realizing that miniature tragedies are, through their very trivialness, even more heart-wrenching than grandiose ones. There’s some dignity in waiting for God…but waiting to finally kick the football? Transcendent cuteness and transcendent despair—a strip everyone loves, and which the people who hate what everyone loves can also love.

November 19, 1961

Still, I think that the focus on Snoopy and Charlie Brown can sometimes obscure the other players. Many of these characters, of course, have more than a touch of the stars in their make-up. Schulz drew an awful cute baby in his heyday, and it doesn’t get much more heartwarmingly precious than Linus sighing as he holds his security blanket. On the other hand, Lucy’s pursuit of Schroeder, or Linus’ pursuit of the Great Pumpkin, are as painfully hopeless as any of Charlie Brown’s repetitive failures.

But Linus and Lucy and Schroeder aren’t just a little bit Snoopy and a little bit Charlie Brown. They’re characters in their own right, with their own idiosyncrasies. Schroeder with his Beethoven obsession and his miraculous musical ability; Lucy with her determined crankiness and equally determined confusion; Linus with his contradictory nervousness and spiritual insight — they seem to have stepped out of Dickens, not out of Kafka or a marketing campaign.

Maybe the best example of this is Peppermint Patty. Patty was introduced in the ‘60s as the mercilessly competent leader of the opposition baseball team; a foil for Charlie Brown’s haplessness. Over time, though, she took on added depth, becoming one of the most complicated, and most featured, characters in the strip. Some of Schulz’s most hilariously extended narratives involve Peppermint Patty’s uncanny inability to grasp the obvious—it takes years before she realizes that Snoopy is a dog and not a funny-looking, big-nosed kid, a misapprehension that leads her to take obedience training classes, much to the disgust of her sidekick Marcie.

Schulz doesn’t just use her as the butt of jokes though. Some of his most affecting strips touch gently on Peppermint Patty’s ambivalent relationship to her tomboyishness. It’s always clear that she enjoys her ability at sports…but she also at times seems to wish to be a pretty girly-girl. She grins ear to ear when relating that her father calls her “a rare gem,” or boasts about him giving her roses for her birthday. And there’s a lovely moment when she and Lucy are planning to get their ears pierced when she looks over and declares, “I have no doubts about my femininity, Lucille!” It’s a joke because it’s a kid saying that—but it’s not really a joke on Peppermint Patty. On the contrary, it seems like a quiet affirmation; she can be a tomboy and a girl. Schulz loves her as both.

May 31, 1974

It’s easy to miss, maybe, how much love there is in Peanuts, and how much life. The strip was so long-lived, and so great on so many levels, that some of its achievements get buried. Like, for example, the fact that it arguably introduced the best three or four female characters on the funny pages—not just Peppermint Patty, but Lucy, and Sally and Marcie are surely some of the greatest women, or girls, to ever come out of the brain of a guy, be he novelist or screenwriter or artist or comics creator. If you like charming, Peanuts is charming, and if you like dark, it’s dark, but it isn’t just charming, or just dark, or even just charming and dark. There are countless ways to like Peanuts, which is no doubt why it—deservedly, inevitably—tops this poll.

Noah Berlatsky is the editor of The Hooded Utilitarian.

NOTES

Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz, received 50 votes.

The poll participants who included it in their top ten are: Derik Badman, J. T. Barbarese, Eric Berlatsky, Noah Berlatsky, Corey Blake, Alex Boney, Scott Chantler, Jeffrey Chapman, Brian Codagnone, Dave Coverly, Warren Craghead, Tom Crippen, Katherine Dacey, Alan David Doane, Paul Dwyer, Andrew Farago, Bob Fingerman, Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz, Steve Greenberg, Geoff Grogan, Paul Gulacy, Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, Sam Henderson, Abhay Khosla, Molly Kiely, Kinukitty, T.J. Kirsch, Terry LaBan, John MacLeod, Vom Marlowe, Robert Stanley Martin, Chris Mautner, Todd Munson, Mark Newgarden, Jim Ottaviani, Joshua Paddison, Michael Pemberton, Stephanie Piro, Andrea Queirolo, Ted Rall, Joshua Rosen, Giorgio Salati, Kevin Scalzo, Tom Stiglich, Matthew Tauber, Jason Thompson, Mark Tonra, Matthias Wivel, and Jason Yadao.

Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts was a daily newspaper strip that began publishing on October 2, 1950. The final original daily was published on January 3, 2000. The final original Sunday strip was published February 13, 2000. In an eerie coincidence, Schulz passed away the night of February 12.

Reprints of the strips are published in newspapers to this day under the title Classic Peanuts.

There have been innumerable book collections of the strip published over the years. A complete, chronological 25-volume hardcover collection, titled The Complete Peanuts, is currently in progress, with 15 volumes published to date.

For those looking for an inexpensive, one-volume introduction to the series, the best choice is probably Peanuts Treasury. It is published by MetroBooks, and available for sale in the discounted book section of most Barnes & Nobles. A nicely printed hardcover collection, it retails for $9.98. The book reprints over 700 strips (over 100 of them Sundays) from between 1959 and 1967, the time considered by many to be the strip’s peak period. Click here to go to its product page on the Barnes & Noble website.

–Robert Stanley Martin

Best Comics Poll Index

Charles Schulz: High Anxiety

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The following was originally done as a presentation for Art Spiegelman’s seminar, “Comix: Marching Into the Canon” at Columbia University in 2007. I think it suited Art’s humor to assign me to do the required audio-visual presentation on a cartoonist we both perceived as far from my usual range of interest. He certainly did me a service in that while I also grew up with Peanuts, the process of making my power point slideshow and commentary added greatly to my appreciation of Charles Schulz’s comics artistry. Click on the images to enlarge.
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“Style…should be in a continuing state of some evolution, while at the same time, it embodies a handy set of tools, a vocabulary for dealing with the experience one is describing, or for defining, often obliquely, the special nature of one’s own presence in the midst of this experience.…” -Donald Phelps
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An important influence on Charles Schulz was George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, the early zenith of comic art: simplified, expressive ink line drawings in concert with each other and with thoughtful language.
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Schulz’s favorite cartoonist was Roy Crane, whose storytelling in Wash Tubbs mixes aspects of cartooning and realism. Crane’s work has a lot of clear white space, a feeling of air around the characters on the pages.
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Another key influence, Skippy by Percy Crosby: the class consciousness of children who are vastly separated in terms of education, and a breezy pen and ink style.
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An actual comic strip by Pablo Picasso, another of Schulz’s favorites. I like how the main bandaged figure is kept somewhat on-model.
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“Waiter! There’s a hare in my soup!”

 

Schulz wanted to be a New Yorker cartoonist, but didn’t have the nerve to submit his samples, like this one. One of his accomplishments was to successfully fuse the pared-down, elegant drawing and sophisticated irony of the New Yorker cartoon style to comic strips.
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A charming drawing from L’il Folks, his precursor strip to Peanuts.
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Peanuts debuted in 1950. Schulz immediately began pushing the envelope with his characters. Charlie Brown’s isolation and depression is omnipresent. In this very early strip he has a virtually hysterical reaction to being ostracized. Much humor is based on pain, and Schulz’s children were often all about pain.
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This shows Charlie Brown’s self-image: as a happy kid. This was not borne out by the next 50 years of daily strips.
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Charlie Brown became instantly recognizable. Contemporary popularity does not ensure one’s place in history, but in addition to creating indelible characters that resonate deeply in the American consciousness, Schulz was able to use his form to express complex sociological and psychological observations.
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It is often quite a dark picture of life that Schulz give us. In this case Charlie Brown is not paying attention, which the calculating Lucy takes advantage of, along with his chivalry. But what he is saying is that he is neglecting more important matters to go to a bad movie, just to get something for free. Perhaps Lucy does him a favor, he is overreacting and should go home to his homework. As well, if his chivalry was real, he would have been happy to give up his place to his female friend.
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Optimism is unfounded. The manipulative Lucy tells Charlie all women can’t be trusted, specifically their “tears.” The behaviors of Lucy and the other female characters could take their own separate analysis, Schulz still has issues from childhood that he lays out.
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Schulz didn’t like Lucy’s character but she suited his storytelling purposes so well that she became essential. All of his characters have issues themselves, and with each other. Themes of abusive relationships and unrequited love are all over Peanuts. This panel refers back to Krazy and Ignatz.
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Here Lucy relentlessly corrupts Charlie Brown’s long-awaited moment of pleasure, the first day of baseball season. Schulz decried the decline of American sportsmanship. He refined his concepts and evolved his drawing for clarity and simplicity of expression; ideal as a vehicle for his ideas, and ideal for efficiently producing a daily strip.
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Schulz said he thought Charlie Brown deserved some of the abuse he got because he was arrogant. In Marxian terms he is in false consciousness, fixed in a cycle of failure and disconnection. He can never achieve any status. His creator, though, retained the means of production. Schulz controlled his creation and did his own work with no assistants.
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Even the product drawings extend his themes. In this group Schroeder is a prodigy being seduced by the tormentor Lucy. Linus, when he’s not oblivious as he is here, is capable of acts of extraordinary dexterity. Snoopy plays violin, speaks French, and has Van Gogh and Andrew Wyeth paintings in his doghouse. Look at the expression on Charlie Brown’s face. Is it incomprehension? Jealousy? Embarrassment? What can Charlie Brown do? Charlie Brown is in the center, but feels marginalized. He looks at us, or at the void.
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This reminds me of the beginning of Maus, where little Art is deserted by his buddies and runs to his dad, crying. Vladek says, “Your friends? Lock them together in a room with no food for a week…then you could see what it is, friends.”
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Art Spiegelman’s perfectly timed version.
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“It’s kind of a parody of the cruelty that exists among children. Because they are struggling to survive.” -Charles Schulz
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“These children affect us because in a certain sense they are monsters…because we realize that if they are monsters it is because we, the adults, have made them so.” -Umberto Eco
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Al Capp said: “The Peanuts characters…wound each other with the greatest enthusiasm. Anyone who sees theology in them is a devil-worshiper.”
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Linus is not a monster, he’s Lucy’s little brother, and we see him here building himself someone that will listen to him. Is it an Army, is that a cannon? No, a congregation and pulpit. Linus has evangelical Lutheran leanings. This reminds me of Roy Crane, it’s a beautiful strip.
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Linus humbles Charlie Brown with his visionary imagination. Linus frequently quotes the New Testament in context.
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A philosophical debate on the mound, tiny children grappling with crucial issues, Linus contextualizing. This picture has formal and abstract compositional qualities, balanced in harmony (like “The Feast in the House of Levi” or “The Last Supper”).
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Schulz’s output was as often more humorous or lyrical strips, but I have chosen to focus on his more serious aspects, because that terrible irony expressed through masterful use of his medium is what elevates his work to Art.
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Schulz introduced an African American character in 1968, Franklin, whose father was in Vietnam. Franklin has no memories, which embodies the critiques of colonialism and speaks of the quandary of the descendants of African chattel slaves, cut off from their history. I may be reading into it with hindsight, but Schulz was by all accounts a voracious reader.
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Is the Artist influenced by society, or does Art influence society? In Schulz’s case both apply. Schulz explored major issues in his strip, which becomes impressive when you realize that such feelings were delivered to 360 million readers.
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This is Landing Zone Charlie Brown in Vietnam, 1968. I can’t imagine how Schulz felt if he saw this.
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In this hard world, even gentle Linus is momentarily seduced by Lucy’s cynical litany. Even though conceptually adult, Peanuts was on the comics page. Children like me who grew up with this strip were being informed by Schulz’s observations.
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With horrible logic Schulz made truth-teller Lucy a psychiatric therapist. And, sometimes faith is not enough for Linus, who is often overcome by high anxiety. His security blanket has been entered into the psychiatric lexicon. The level of fear of these children, their apprehensions in dealing with a world that seems forever out of their control is what has always stuck with me when I thought of Schulz’s work.
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I remember this one well from when I saw it as a child, it was a clear expression of it’s time. This gets right to the “nut” of it, for me. It tormented me for a while in preparing this presentation. What is it about these characters, their shape? It was right there on the edge of my brain, something almost subliminal. I then had a little Peanuts epiphany.

Schulz was drafted in 1943, spent two years training, and then served in Germany as the war wound down. At one point his platoon camped in a swamp near Dachau. He said that what he remembered most about the war was loneliness. But suddenly…



…”everything changed.” I think this monstrous act to end a monstrous war imprinted on Schulz. The form of Charlie Brown, all tied up with fear and guilt, aligns with the alien image. He is the inheritor of the world we have built. Charlie Brown is the bomb.

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You’ve Lost Your Way, Charlie Brown

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This essay first appeared on Splice Today.
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Conventional wisdom would have it that Peanuts fell off precipitously as the strip entered the 80s. On the evidence of the latest volume of The Complete Peanuts, covering 1979-1980…well, conventional wisdom may have a point.

The art in Peanuts had by the 80s long since declined from it’s early heights. Over the decades Schulz’s line had lost much of its nimble dexterity — so much so that it’s easy to forget how good he was back in the day. The whole point of this sequence from February 1964, for example, is the kinetic elegance of the motion lines.

By 1979, though, the battle between Snoopy and Linus has been robbed of its energy; all that’s left is a couple of almost apologetic motion scratches and an anti-climax. The fight has gone out of the art.

In the mid-70s, Schulz made up for the relative tameness of the illustration with some of his most adventurous narratives. For example, one storyline which stretched through September and October of 1976 began with Peppermint Patty’s relatively innocuous effort to go to private school. It then quickly spiraled into escalating heights of absurdity, as Patty went to the Ace Obedience School for dogs and finally the tale ended in an epic battle with a cat which Patty had mistaken for her attorney, Snoopy. In fact, at the end of the story, Schulz seems almost to be taking advantage of his reduced drawing skills, moving the most frantic action off-panel to suggest a spectacular conflict which can only be imagined, not rendered.

In 1979-80, though, the long meandering narratives have gone the way of the exciting line work. There are still some extended stories, but they lack the snap of the sequences from just a few years earlier. A storyline where the kids end up at an Evangelist camp has an unfortunate air of hesitant moralism. Schulz’s world is too small to even fit adults, much less adult opinion, and his hesitant jabs at the Moral Majority seem like they were faxed to him by a focus group. Berkeley Breathed would soon wed something of Schulz’s aphasiac genius to political commentary…but whenever Schulz himself tried for relevance, the results were ugly (*cough* Franklin *cough*).

One muffed storyline could happen to anyone. But Schulz increasingly relies on recurring gags which simply aren’t that funny. The chief offender here is Snoopy’s Beagle scout troop. Snoopy leads Woodstock and several other birds over hill and dale, up mountain and down, making cute little quips about angel food cake. It’s not that it’s horrible, exactly — I chuckled at many of these strips. But, at the same time, the conceit really plays against Schulz’s strengths. The birds are all visually interchangeable, and because they speak in bird language which only Snoopy understands, they don’t have the strong distinctive personalities of Schulz’s other players. And without those distinctive personalities striking off each other, it’s hard to generate much conflict or interest. You basically end up with Snoopy talking to himself in front of a bunch of ciphers. A little of that goes a very long way.

And yet….while there’s no doubt that this volume is an inferior work of genius, there’s also no doubt that it is, still, the work of a genius. In some ways, the genius shines through even more brightly when the general level is lowered. In the 50s and 60s, Schulz operated at such a consistently transcendent peak that you could start to take him for granted. Here, though, there are dull patches to remind you just how good the good parts are. Without the distraction of the motion lines, for example, this Sunday strip we looked at before:

attains a purity of fuddy-duddiness. The whole comic comes down to that last panel, where everything has misfired. There’s no glorious rush, just a stumbling, thumb-fingered, doofy perfection.

And then there’s this:

That left me laughing helplessly. It’s a platonic Peanuts joke; that last line doesn’t even rise to a pun. Instead it’s simply flat, unexplained surreal nonsense, delivered by a dog with a giant nose and a blank expression.

There’s no doubt that Schulz lost his way in the 80s. But his strip was always about losing its way. As he grew doddering and inconsistent, he moved closer to the doddering inconsistency at the core of his art. The pleasures in this volume are fewer, but, for fans at least, when they come they have a special bonk.

No Panel, No Border, No Beagle

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One of my all time favorite Peanuts panels is from the late 70s. Sally has corralled Snoopy first into helping her scare away bullies at the playground (“Speak softly and carry a beagle,”) and then into terrorizing innocents at the playground (“Speak loudly and carry a beagle.”) In this strip, Sally is stomping off to force some kid out of the sandbox. She thinks Snoopy is right behind her, ready to bark ferociously and run the kid off. But Snoopy, unbeknownst to Sally, suddenly perks up his ears and stares off frame. “My old flame!” he declares, and disappears. Sally’s left to the tender mercies of her unterrorized peers (“How can you speak softly and cary a beagle without a beagle!”) As for Snoopy and his flame…your guess is as good as mine. Was Snoopy just wandering off into one of his own fantasy scenarios? Did he really see a girl beagle from his youth? It’s a mystery. Schulz never followed up on the storyline. Snoopy disappeared from the panel, from the strip, and from the story.

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Chip Kidd and Peanuts and Kids

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Over at Comics Comics Tim Hodler dislikes the use of cropping in art books devoted to comics.

This probably demonstrates my ignorance, but I don’t like this trend of cutting up images, like an old movie pan ‘n scanned for VHS. (The same thing was done in Blake Bell’s Ditko bio and Chip Kidd’s Peanuts book, among others.) It’s an especially unwelcome practice in a “The Art of ______” book. I want to see ______’s art! I want to see how the artist composed the image, and I don’t really care if it looks good or bad. (Pretty much everything Jaime draws looks good, any way.) That is in fact a big part of my interest in such a book: tracking the artist’s development.

It’s unsettling to agree with Tim…but I agree with Tim. I have a fair number of fine art books in the house, and you know, I don’t see any of them doing this crap. If you have a book about constructivist art posters, say, they show you the whole damn poster, because they figure that’s what you’re there for. Books about Japanese prints show you the lovely Japanese prints. Sometimes they crop to show you close-up details, but it’s a far cry from the aggressive layouts you see in a lot of comics productions.

And you know what? I don’t actually know the names of the designers of any of those art books I own — almost as if everyone involved thought the artist in question was more important than the designer.

Anyway, there’s a long comments thread at Comics Comics, and designer Jacob Covey disagrees strongly with Tim. You can read Jacob’s whole impassioned comment at the link, but there were a couple of revealing remarks. First:

A lot of people bought that book [that is, the Chipp Kidd Peanuts book] precisely because of the design decisions and a lot of those people had a light shined onto the genius of Schulz. (In no small part because it gave some of his “edge” back after decades of sappy marketing.)

Got that? People bought it for Chip Kidd, who introduced a whole new audience to that unknown outsider artist, Charles Schulz. Because, you know, nobody had actually ever heard of Schulz until Kidd unearthed him and made him safe for hipsters (an idea which, among other things, is an insult to hipsters, most of whom are, like everyone else, perfectly capable of loving Schulz without having him spoon fed to them by a indifferently talented curatorial vulture.)

I did agree with this by Covey, though I don’t think it points quite in the direction he seems to think it does.

And, remember, this was a daily strip for the masses. It’s not the property of comics people. Schulz belongs to everybody and there’s a lot of ways to read him.

Schulz does belong to everyone. And you know who he especially belongs to? Kids. The thing I like least about the Chip Kidd Peanuts collection is that, with all the pictures of tschotzkes and all the cropping and all the strips produced at minute sizes, it’s very difficult to read the book to my son. I gave it a try or two because the boy is so obsessed with Peanuts at the moment — but the whole endeavor was an exercise in eye strain and frustration. Eventually I just put the collection back up on the shelf and vowed to stick with the also-overdesigned-but-at-least-user-friendly fanta complete collections.

Basically, if you create a Peanuts book that parents can’t easily read to their kids, I think I’m justified in saying you’ve failed. And I further think I’m justified in suggesting that you’re a pretentious fuck who deserves a swift kick in the pants.

Perfect Peanuts

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After she read him the above from the 1953-54 Fantagraphics Peanuts collection, my son said to my wife, “Yes, that’s right, because people aren’t perfect. Only things are perfect.”

To which my wife replied, “Well, actually, things aren’t exactly perfect either. Nothing is really perfect.”

So my son thought about that for a second, and then he said indignantly, “Then why is there even a word ‘perfect’! There shouldn’t even be a word!”

Then he said, “I’m hungry!” and went to get a snack.

Spiritual Enlightenment from Peanuts

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I was reading the 1963 Fantagraphics Peanuts collection to my son (now on sale!) he’s gotten really into them recently. Anyway, there’s one fantastic series of strips where Linus paints a Biblical mural on the ceiling of Snoopy’s doghouse. In perhaps the best, Linus comments that he isn’t sure what Antiochus Epiphanes of the Maccabee story looks like— a lack of knowledge which, Snoopy comments, is forgivable in a six year old.

My son is very curious about how old the Peanuts characters are exactly, so I pointed to the end of the strip and said, “Look, Snoopy says Linus is six, just like you.”

“Linus is six?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “But he doesn’t act like he’s six really does he?”

“No,” he said. “Because he carries a blanket around and sucks his thumb.”

“Um, right.” I said. “But he also does things that seem older. Like painting a mural on the roof of a doghouse. Could you paint a mural on the ceiling of a doghouse?”

“I could if the doghouse was big enough.”

“I don’t…”

“I could. I can paint. And I could paint a mural about the Hanukkah story.”

As is the way of my Semitic people, I have, of course, done absolutely nothing to further my child’s religious education, prompting my wife, who was sitting nearby, to ask the obvious question.

“How do you know that the Maccabees have anything to do with Hanukkah?”

He looked at us like we were crazy. “Because,” he said, “I saw it on Krypto the Super Dog.”