[This was originally posted in June 2002, and at some point disappeared from the archives, so I’m reposting. –Amp]
A friend of mine told me she didn’t like Peanuts better than Garfield. At first I assumed I had heard her wrong; then I assumed she was joking.
Why is Peanuts a better strip than Garfield? It’s hard not to feel ridiculous addressing this question (“why is ocean wetter than desert?”), but I’ll try.
1) Originality. Most of the best aspects of Peanuts were new when the strip started. In contrast, the main elements of Garfield are not only unoriginal – they’re usually taken from Peanuts. The basic idea of a smart pet dominating a loser owner, for instance, and the formal device of having pets “speak” in thought balloons, were both Peanuts originals that became the basis for Garfield.
2) Peanuts is a humane strip, whereas Garfield is cruel.
Not that Peanuts lacked for cruelty. The world shown in Peanuts is usually cruel — or, at least, it usually was before 1972, before the strip lost much of its vigor. But Peanuts never asks its readers to be cruel. Schulz may torture Charlie Brown, but he still wants us to sympathize with Charlie Brown’s predicament, nor are we meant to be thrilled by Charlie Brown’s failure. Compare this to the delight Garfield readers are meant to get from Jon’s humiliating rejection when Jon flirts with the pretty vet.
The reader is meant to feel superior to Jon — who is, after Garfield himself, the most important character in the strip. In contrast, readers are not invited to look down upon any major Peanuts characters; we’re supposed to feel their losses, not feel above them.
3) Emotional life. Because Schulz sympathizes with his characters, he was able to take their inner lives seriously. The result is that Peanuts at its two-decade-long peak had a much deeper, richer emotional life than Garfield — or almost any other daily strip.
Consider Linus: so insecure that he can’t go a minute without his security blanket, yet facing down bullies at school without hesitation (using his blanket as a whip). His home life is a perpetual losing war against an older sister who never gives him a moment’s peace, and he has an abiding but constantly frustrated faith in the Great Pumpkin. And at the same time, he’s a sincere Christian, whose faith is seldom talked about but usually evident in his serenity.
No character in Garfield is as multilayered or interesting as Linus. What, after all, is Garfield’s emotional life? He enjoys eating Lasagna; he dislikes Mondays (for no discernable reason, since he doesn’t have to go to work); he squashes spiders. Think of Linus’ ongoing struggle, against the scorn of all his unbelieving friends, to maintain faith in The Great Pumpkin. Can you imagine Opie having a crisis of faith?
Linus is only one of four equally well-developed main characters in Peanuts (Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and Lucy are the other three), plus several supporting characters have inner lives almost as complex (especially Peppermint Patty and Sally). I’m not saying, of course, that Peanuts should be read like an Anne Tyler novel; it’s a gag strip. We should read it for the gags and laugh. But having characters with inner lives not only makes the strip cozier to read, it makes the gags funnier, because the best humor is based in character.
Although the team of cartoonists who create Garfield honestly try to entertain, the strip is structured around disdain for the dreams of the main characters. Sure, you can wring endless gags out of that formula; but you can’t wring an interesting emotional life out of it, or any real connection between their readers and the characters.
4) Sexism. Peanuts is, I would argue, one of the least sexist dailies ever; despite being created before the modern feminist movement began, Schulz created some of the strongest, most memorable female characters in the dailies — Sally, Peppermint Patty, Marcy, and especially Lucy. Both Peppermint Patty and Lucy constantly refuse to fit into 1950s ideals of what girls should be — in Lucy’s case, by being too powerful a character to squeeze into the meek ideal even as she wanted to fulfill it, in Patty’s case by being serenely oblivious.
Garfield, created after feminism should have made us all know better, nonetheless manages to be almost perfectly sexist: there are no important female characters, and the few females that exist are drawn as ridiculous caricatures of femininity (I once attended a lecture by Alison Bechdel in which she made a good case that the female characters in Garfield are actually men wearing unskilled, bad drag), and are in the strip only so the guys can have girlfriends to chase after.
5) Grace. I’ve never found a vocabulary sufficient to discuss grace in comics drawing. It’s the way the lines all fit together purposely, pulsing with life, no line out-of-place and no line too studied. It’s all I love, visually, in comics: grace makes Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes look great, while lack of grace is why Cathy looks like shit. Every line drawn in Peanuts is perfectly placed, without ever being lifelessly mechanical. That combination of rendering skill and artistic soul is found in all the best comics — from Love & Rockets to Dykes to Watch Out For to Krazy Kat — and it is rarely done as well as Schulz did it.
“Lifelessly mechanical,” on the other hand, is an apt description of Garfield‘s art. Mainly, I’d guess, this is because Garfield’s creator Jim Davis stopped drawing the strip personally many years ago. It’s now drawn by cartoonists who are obliged to slavishly reproduce Jim Davis’ style; and artists trying to look like someone else can’t allow the least spark of spontaneity or individuality in their drawings. But even in the first few years, Garfield‘s visuals always had more skill than life. You can always see the draw-a-circle-than-draw-two-small-globes-embedded-in-it formula that goes into drawing the characters; all of their movements look staged rather than natural.
6) Peanuts is just plain funnier than Garfield. You remember the one where Lucy buried Linus’ blanket, and Linus desperately digs up the whole neighborhood looking for it? How about the one where an giant icicle appears above Snoopy’s doghouse, and Snoopy’s too terrified to leave? The one where Lucy runs back and forth at her “advice five cents” stand, being both customer and advisor? It’s hard to think of a dog in goggles standing upright on a bullet-ridden doghouse roof yelling “Curse you, Red Baron!” without getting a giggle.
I could go on forever, but I’m beginning to feel bad for picking on Garfield. Even for a strip as mediocre as Garfield, comparing it to Peanuts is unfair; only a handful of daily strips have ever been in Peanut‘s class.
But still. Man. I know there’s no accounting for taste, and it’s all subjective, and to each her own and all that…
But still…
How could anyone not see that Peanuts is better than Garfield?
The mind boggles.
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Well– if you are young enough to only have started reading the comics page about 1990…
As a child, I never got Peanuts. ‘Didn’t get it’ is still somewhat above the awfulness of Garfield, but I didn’t understand the adulation. As a teenager, same thing. Then Charles Schultz died and they started rerunning the older strips… what a difference it made.
heh. “kicks sad furry ass.” i’m gonna use that one, i think…
I always liked the one where Snoopy puts the boxing glove on his nose and then whips everyone, until he takes on Lucy, and when the dust settles Snoopy has his glove on his paw and Lucy has hers on her nose. I wish I could rustle up a copy of that one but I don’t know what year it was; before 1969 I am sure.
The one where Linus sees Snoopy lying on his blanket and he yells “Who let all those cats in here?” and Snoopy takes off and Linus reclaims his blanket. Oh yes, I remember that icicle sequence. That was a classic.
The way the Cat Next Door was all the more menacing for never being seen.
The way Peppermint Patty just didn’t give a rip whether others thought she was odd or not.
The way Schroeder didn’t let Lucy distract him.
I agree about the relative merits of Peanuts and Garfield, which you have made me see more clearly. “Get Fuzzy” is like Garfield with brains, but just as cruel.
I don’t like comics based on eternal losers, and I think you nailed it how Schultz’s sympathetic treatment is the only thing that made Charlie Brown’s predicaments bearable for me. I confess a fondness for the MAD mag parody/homage where Charlie kicks Lucy sky-high before she can withdraw the football and he yells “It’s up and it’s good!”
The reader is meant to feel superior to Jon — who is, after Garfield himself, the most important character in the strip. In contrast, readers are not invited to look down upon any major Peanuts characters; we’re supposed to feel their losses, not feel above them.
I hadn’t really thought about that before. One of many good points of comparison.
If you get a chance, check out Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone. He talks about the role Peanuts played in his young life. Throughout the tumultuous ’60s and ’70s, Peanuts was one of the few things that young and old could both embrace. But in a strip putatively about children, the only character that was recognizably a child was the dog.
Some of the very early Garfield strips I found very funny–back when Garfield really was a big old grumpy ugly cat. Never cute. It quickly degenerated into the rut it now remains in.
(The strip I absolutely adored was Sylvia, by Nicole Hollander.)
And the way the Little Redheaded Girl was all the more alluring for never being seen. (In real life, the Little Redheaded Girl grew up to be Charles Schultz’s wife, whch is all the more endearing, IMO.)
I also think that the triumph of Peanuts is extended into the original animated television specials, where Charlie Brown did have brief moments of redemption and acceptance, so we saw that though he was somewhat downtrodden, his life was not without friendship and appreciation from time to time. There was hope, and warmth, even when it all seemed lost. (I think particularly of the response once the sad little tree became a good tree in the Christmas special.) Garfield could not make a convincing television special; the live-action/CGI movies are universally panned and they are completely removed even from the world depicted in the strips. Garfield is now nothing but a marketing tool.
I acknowledge that Peanuts is better than Garfield.
As someone with but passing interest in comics, however, I will frequently take “loony looking expression on a cat” over many other forms of drawn entertainment.
I fully admit this is one of those opinions based on obnoxious indifference, and that I would be terribly annoyed at me if I were making such an obnoxious statement about something closer to my heart, for instance if I were saying Robert Jordan was a better read than Guy Gavriel Kay.
So, I guess what I’m saying here is that amiable (and also annoying) indifference may be what produces the lunatic opinion you describe.
Also, you know? I really like this blog, and I want you to know that. I’ve been contemplating writing you a letter to explain how much I really like this blog.
Compare this to the delight Garfield readers are meant to get from Jon’s humiliating rejection when Jon flirts with the pretty vet.
Updating to 2007, I believe that Jon and the vet are now an item, triggered by the deus ex machina of the vet acquiring amnesia and forgetting that she didn’t like Jon. I may be getting some details wrong there (as I don’t read every day, so may have missed a crucial plot twist), but it doesn’t change the main point.
Can you imagine Opie having a crisis of faith?
The dog in Garfield is Odie. I think little Ronnie Howard has a crisis of faith every tenth episode on the Andy Griffith show.
Garfield was licensed by the BSA to use as the central character in a whole bunch of materials to be used for Cub Scout recruitment. It went on for two years. When it was time to renew it, Garfield was dropped. The character just didn’t appeal to the kids. Which I could have told them, BTW, as Garfield sucks. Someone up in National really has their cranium firmly lodged in their anus. A whole bunch of someones, apparently.
well, you know — your brother pats birds on the head.
some get it, some don’t.
For the strips that were published within my lifetime, I would argue that Peanuts was not a significantly better strip (with the exception of strip artwork, where Peanuts clearly won) than Garfield. (Somewhat better, perhaps, but neither were very good.) I have no preference about the two strips.
Yes, yes, sure, it was once great and brilliant and blah blah blah, but for the last 20 years, it wasn’t, and I wasn’t inclined to go “Wow! *Now* it’s wonderful!” when they reran old strips in the paper instead of one of the many, many, many good current cartoons.
I will second grumpy’s observation that the early Garfield strips were much funnier than the later ones. Unfortunately, the “golden age” of Garfield only lasted through, say, the strips in the first book collecting them. Which, needless to say, they let go out of print pretty quickly. The drawing was rough and somewhat quirky, there was at least a wisp of character development, and there was some real humor, sometimes even a little thought required.
It goes without saying that Garfield never was in the same ballpark as Peanuts, and that what worth there was lasted only a fraction as long as the best years of Peanuts.
Three words:
Calvin and Hobbes.
Anyone remember the sequence where Charlie Brown develops a rash on his head that looks like the stitching on a baseball, goes to camp with a bag over his head and becomes popular? That is, he’s popular until the rash goes away and he takes the bag off.
Bloom County.
Back when I was a kid; Pogo.
I’m very much *not* up to date here, because I stopped reading Garfield in the mid-80s, but had you asked me back than if Garfield or Peanuts was the better cartoon, I’d have said “Garfield”. Because Garfield was true, half of the strips got the “yepp, that’s me, that’s my cat, that’s my life” laugh. While the Peanuts characters were strangers that one had to get to know to understand, and even then it wasn’t funny. It might have left Garfield in the dust in every aspect that makes a good story, but not in the one making a good cartoon.
I’d take Calvin and Hobbes over both, though. Good storytelling, funny, and true.
JMH outdated O.
I heard that garfield was intentionally mediocre – bad, but not so bad they couldn’t market the merchandise for it, and bad because if it got too popular it’d be hated like disney is.
I’ve always loved calvin and hobbes better since I saw the website that posited that Fight club was a continuation of C&H into adulthood.
Peanuts beats garfield hands down in the “Yoko Kanno stole the theme song for incorporation into one of her anime soundtracks” stakes for inspiring The Egg and I/You, and so peanuts had to exist – cowboy bebop wouldn’t have been the same otherwise.
Hell, I find my self humming that damn soundtrack somedays thanks to that damn catchy redoing of it.
Thanks for re-posting this Amp! What fun!
As much as I love Peanuts I think it’s weird that the strip keeps running. I mean, how long has it been since Charles Schultz passed away? I understand he did enough strips in advance to take us into the 22nd century, but come on!
On the other hand, his widow donated a vast library of materials to the Center for Cartoon Studies http://www.cartoonstudies.org/ (which is a real 2-year college for cartoonists in Vermont). So who am I to judge?
Thanks for reminding me about “Sylvia” — Apparently Nicole Hollander is still at it. Check it out – http://www.nicolehollander.com/navigate.htm
Purposely mediocre? That sounds about right for Garfield. Yeah, the first year or two were interesting. Remember when Garfield was actually shaped like a cat and sat on his rear with his big belly rolling out for everyone to see? He was funny in a dry brittle kind of way. Now Garfield is all buff and “proportional” and doesn’t really look or act like a cat, as far as I’m concerned.
I really loved Berke Breathed’s “Bill the Cat”, from Bloom County, which was a a skinny, feral, mangy, flea bitten, hair-ball coughing mess (who wore bvds for some reason) that brought to mind Keith Richards an a bad hair day. I also enjoyed the next strip Berke Breathed did, whose name escapes me right now…it was wonderfully surreal.
And now I bow to the gods of comic strips who made Calvin and Hobbes possible. Thank you.
I loved Garfield when I was a kid. It was a great strip when it started – edgy, funny, and very real. As soon as it got popular, it turned to complete and utter crap. A bit of an object lesson there, probably.
I was just heartened to see someone besides me saying that “Cathy” is shit.
I read Cathy religiously, praying for the day when Irving reveals to Cathy that he is gay, married her just to satisfy his controlling mother, and has infected her with HIV.
I never claimed to be a nice man.
I’ll chime in on a couple of comments here — to agree that the later Peanuts mostly seemed to be layered onto the earlier Peanuts, in incomprehensible fashion for latecoming readers; and to say that Calvin & Hobbes is, in my opinion also, the best of the best…
Peanuts had a problem for me, even going back to the earlier stuff, that makes me see why someone could say Garfield was superior as humor, even though it’s really shite. The problem with Peanuts is that if, like me, you’re fairly sensitive to certain kinds of embarrassment and pathos, those elements usually trump the funny and it becomes a sort of extended ordeal. Empty one-liners are not much, but they’re not that, either.
I prefer a humor that is kind to its participants. You get the feeling that if the Peanuts gang were employees of the comic strip, they’d be getting dicked out of the health plan, so that we could sympathize with their misfortune. In some ways I’m less comfortable with that kind of cruelty than I am with the facile kind shown in Garfield; and Calvin & Hobbes is, of the strips mentioned, the one I can take ‘seriously’ enough to really laugh at, because the C&H world is one in which it’s seriously possible to win, as well as to lose, and that looks enough like my world to make it worth the trip.
That said, I’m grateful to Peanuts for “Sir”, among other things. :-)
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Everything you say about Peanuts and Garfield is true. But Garfield, such as it is, is still being written as a continuing series, and Peanuts is not. It bothers me that newspaper inches that could go to a contemporary cartoon (Get Fuzzy, Boondocks, maybe even something brand new) are instead being dedicated to reruns. All those Peanuts cartoons are collected in books, and at this point they ought to be read that way, it seems to me.
A.J. Luxton: The problem with Peanuts is that if, like me, you’re fairly sensitive to certain kinds of embarrassment and pathos, those elements usually trump the funny and it becomes a sort of extended ordeal.
Thank you. That was what I meant with “not funny”, but I couldn’t quite nail it down.
NM, I certainly agree that Peanuts should be retired from newspaper pages. So should Garfield, for that matter. If the original creator is dead — or is alive, but can no longer be bothered to write and draw their comic strip — then let that space be used for someone who is both alive and willing to create.
Oh, and if it’s a vote for the best comic strip EVEH, I vote for Pogo. Walt Kelly was a genius.
I love the collections even more because of his essays–10 Ever-lovin’ Blue-eyed Years with Pogo has some wonderful writing about the McCarthy era. (I especially like the part where his wife is slamming glasses down on the table in a bar, saying “DAMN that CBS loyalty oath!”)
And yes, every Christmas I sing “Deck us all with Boston Charlie….”
Sorry to correct you, Dreama, but the story of Schulz (and please, spell his name correctly, without a “t”) marrying the “little red-haired girl” in real life is as wrong as can be. As documented in a couple Schulz biographies and collections, the character was based on Donna Johnson, an accountant at the Art Instruction Inc. school Schulz attended. They did go out for a spell, but when Schulz proposed Johnson refused him and married firefighter Allan Wold instead. See “Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz” (Pantheon, 2001) for a photo of a subsequent reunion and the only known drawing, never published until after his death.
meh…Im a calvin and hobbes woman myself.
I do love a good charlie brown christmas and the great pumpkin though.
There was this one sequence of strips, where Peppermint Patty had these really cool sandals that her dad bought for her, and the teacher wouldn’t let her wear them at school because they were against the dress code. She cried. And so did I, a little. Schultz had a way of capturing those little things that can bring the sky crashing down when you’re a kid.
Garfield has never made me cry.
Wow I can honestly say I’ve never been to a “I hate Garfield and He sucks site” LOL> GO PEANUTS… Personally I enjoy both being a thirty yr old and child that grew up in the 80s, and read comic strips and watched the specials.
Peanuts humor was subtle in nature, but I must admit that the “deeper meanings” and veiled subtext went over my head as a child. I didn’t catch on to its effects upon me until I was older and discussed the “did you ever notice this or that on Charlie Brown. . .” with my friends chats. Being female and African-American I was rarely ever significantly represented? The ever comicly jested “Franklin” who never spoke, and just stood in the corner of a few shows but was never a group member? And there were never any Black or Minority girls? But there was a Lesbian? Peppermint Patty, and if she wasn’t, she was the Biggest Tomboy I’ve Ever Seen! She had her own personal slave calling her “Sir”. Every female Caucasin Archetype was present but without any minoirities present after 1969-1974?
So sorry I’m not going to Condemn Garfield and Odie, for outlasting Charlie Brown and Linus? at least in the marketing dept. At least Lou Rawls, and the Temptations were doing the soundtracks.
So I got up every Saturday to tape Garfield and the Muppet Babies, but I didn’t bother taping the new Charlie Brown shows. It just wasn’t funny enough. It was however like a an animated Seinfeld. Not funny ha ha, chuckle chuckle, but in a quirky-make you think? But at that age, on a Saturday AM eating Cocoa Pebbles; I don’t wanna think, I wanna sleepwalk through my morning and see silly gags and hear smart-cracking one-liners.
Peanuts is classic is its own way much the way Disney shorts and no dialogue Tom and Jerry are also. There aren’t anything to compare them too? Mickey Donald & Goofy are who they are? Tom and Jerry chasing each other around the house not saying a word to orchaestral scores is unique and never dull? But throw on Pokemon and I’ll be asleep in two minutes. . . IMO Peanuts is in a class of unique trendsetting iconic features that cannot help but be an Influence in Animation and Comics. That is an Honor my friends not a Disrespect.
It’s easy to lampoon Garfield as sexist, since it’s also banal and bad… but would you similarly lampoon comics that you enjoy? For example, Bloom County/Outland/Opus. Bloom county is the height of sexism. All the male characters in Bloom County are wacky, intricate, insane, fascinating people. The women in bloom county are, at best, absent, and at worst, sex objects and dull voices of reason.
Calvin and Hobbes is similar – the women are dull, reasonable stereotypes (Suzie, Mom, babysitter) while the men are exciting, funny, interesting characters (Calvin, Hobbes, Dad).
The fact that it’s sexist in a polite way doesn’t make it any less sexist. Then again, that approach is nigh-universal in humour – men are always the source (and brunt) of the humour, and women always play either the role of the sex object or the “straight man”. If Abbot and Costello movies were made to day, Abbot would always be a woman. The only time female characters are funny is when they’re neurotic.
I agree with you about Bloom County, and in the past I have criticized BC for sexism, although I don’t think I’ve ever done so on this blog.
I disagree with you about Calvin and Hobbes; Susie and Mom are no less interesting or exciting than Dad is! (The babysitter is a less important character, but I’d say she’s more interesting and developed than, say, the bully character.) Calvin is certainly sexist, but Watterson is aware of that and made fun of it from time to time.
There certainly are comic strips I love that are sexist; Pogo is an obvious example.
Ok, so you’re not a Garfield fan. Apparently you’re not alone.
But why curse the darkness when you can light a candle? When life gives you Garfield, why not make Garfield-free Garfield?
I love “Garfield Without Garfield.” It’s a simply brilliant strip, and it almost justifies the existence of “Garfield” itself.
It’s disturbingly good, although I sometimes feel a slight pang of guilt over it; it’s almost like being a Bedlam-tourist…
I hear what you’re saying about Garfield. However, I think the cartoon points out more, that John is a loser, than the women he’s trying to get with are losers. Also, I like the humor involving Garfield much more than focusing on what’s going on with John.
The Garfield and Friends TV Show, which now is available on DVD, was funny too. They also include the farm themed shorts US Acres. (Orson’s Farm in the UK)
I remember one where the rooster kept trying to steal food from the barn, and it was tied into Orson reading a parody of The Raven by Poe. So the rooster goes into the barn, after a few verses of Orson mourning his lost Lenore, he then says “Quoth the rooster..” and the rooster shouts, “Where’s the floor?!” The floor was taken out of the barn. LoL
Peanuts is an extremely clever and intelligent comic, but Garfield isn’t all bad as you seem to have claimed it is. I really like the animated movies that were based off the Peanuts comics.