65 years ago today… Well, er, 65 years ago yesterday. But close enough. 65 years ago the first Peanuts strip was published.
Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, once said:
Peanuts was my introduction to the world of the comic strip, and Peanuts captured my imagination like nothing else. Because it was the first strip I read, its many innovations were lost on me, and I suspect most readers of Peanuts today have forgotten how it single-handedly reconfigured the comic strip landscape in a few short years. The flat, simple drawings, the intellectual children, the animal with thoughts and imagination – all these things are commonplace now, and it’s hard to imagine what a revolutionary strip it was in the ’50s and ’60s. All I knew was that it had a magic that other strips didn’t.
A lot of the magic for me is in those deceptively simple, stylized drawings. For me, the few lines that make up each character, their faces, and gestures are remarkably expressive. Two dots with parentheses around them have become the cartoon shorthand for eyes looking uneasy or insecure. When Charlie Brown’s eyes do that, you know his stomach hurts,
Peanuts has held my interest for many years because the strip is very funny on one level and very sad on another. Charlie Brown suffers – and suffers in a small, private, honest way. Schultz draws those quiet moments of self-doubt: Charlie Brown sitting on the bench, eating peanut butter, trying to work up the nerve to talk to the little red-haired girl – and failing. As a kid, I read Peanuts for the funny drawings and the jokes, and later I realized that the childhood struggles of the strip are metaphors for adult struggles as well.
Peanuts is about the search for acceptance, security, and love, and how hard those self-affirming things are to find. The strip is also about alienation, about ambition, about heroes, about religion, and about the search for meaning and “happiness” in life. For a comic strip, it digs pretty deep.
Of course, the strip has a flair for weird humor, too. Snoopy in goggles, his doghouse somehow riddled with bullet holes, yelling, “Curse you, Red Baron!” is, I submit, as bizarre an image as anything ever seen on the comics page. Peanuts defined the contemporary comic strip.
A couple more links:
The Hooded Utilitarian on why Peanuts is so great.
An old post of mine: Why Peanuts kicks Garfield’s Sad Furry Ass.
So what are some of your favorite Peanuts strips? Here’s one of my faves:
I read Peanuts avidly as a kid, but rather uncritically. I was a kid, after all. I was interested when I read How Snoopy Killed Peanuts when it came out in August because it provided a level of analysis I had never brought to Peanuts. I thought it was insightful and provocative. But I still love Snoopy.
I hadn’t read that, but now I have. Thank for the link! That was a great article. I’ve long thought that Peanuts went downhill in the 70s (I think everyone agrees on that), but I hadn’t before noticed that before the decline, Snoopy’s storylines had that essential elelment of failure which connected Snoopy to the rest of the strip.
Plus, there are so many great Peanuts strips reprinted as part of that article!
I feel like the “How Snoopy Killed Peanuts” relies very heavily on the True Art Is Depressing trope, which means I can’t really agree with what it’s arguing.
Also, it seems to be giving the least charitable readings to the latter day strips, such as the one with Spike thinking he should have studied piano, which has more than a tinge of pathos to it.
I also actually liked the lack of cleanliness that the author complains about, it made the strips a more human touch.
-Jeremy
I don’t think that True Art is depressing. But I think Peanuts was undeniably better when it had a bigger range of darks to paint with (i.e., earlier in the strip).
In general, I agree that I’d rather have a human-looking pen line than an inhumanly clean line (although some artists make the inhumanly clean line work). But I think that Schulz’s pen line was very human looking right from the start.
I’m not sure that lack of failure is the problem– I did notice that there was a period when all the new characters: Peppermint Patty, Franklin, Marcie, Woodstock…. were boring.
De-lurking to point y’all to SEK’s piece on how Peanuts got racially “integrated:” “Black People Can’t Swim, &c.”
Have you been to the Charles M. Schultz Museum in Santa Rosa, CA? It’s great. Filled with so many great items, and stories, and history. I highly recommend it if you’re ever in the area.