August 2004 « Ninja Beaver.net

Picture yourself as an ordinary American male on October 2, 1950. America is at the height of its post-war celebration. The feeling that you have is one of an America with a bright future, you have a lifestyle that together with changing social and political conditions will mean an end to war, poverty and hunger. The city you work in is vast and gleaming, enhanced with whatever new-fangled production that the heat of white-hot technology can churn out. You are able to go anywhere you want in your new, state of the art Ford car and your freshly built, pre-fab home is fitted with all the latest mod cons. It has everything to help your wife be the good little home-maker and make sure you have a hot piping meal on the table when you return home from work. You have a great social group of friends, whom you can have a good round of golf with every weekend. And although some of their dinner parties can be a little tedious, it’s a small price to pay for the excellent opportunities it can throw your way at times. You think that your wife drinks a little too much at these parties, but at least it makes her a little more compliant for later on in the bedroom. Everything in your life is as you see it on “Leave It to Beaver” on your new 10″ screen television.

The future is so bright that you’ll have to wear shades, and more importantly- you are happy.

For to be unhappy in 1950′s America was seen as being antisocial rather than a personal emotion and it took a group of children to tell the truth:

“I have deep feelings of depression,” says a round-headed kid called Charlie Brown to an imperious girl named Lucy. “What can I do about it?”

“Snap out of it,” advises Lucy.

Peanuts © United Media

Here was something new in the comic strip. At the time, comics were dominated by action, comedy, adventure and melodrama. But with the first strip of Peanuts, Charles Schulz brought his own lifelong feelings of alienation, insecurity and inferiority into its world and started to show America its real face.

And this is the very beginning of Peanuts. There is no “You’re a blockhead, Charlie Brown!” here, or Woodstock, or The Red Baron. Snoopy doesn’t even look like Snoopy, just an ordinary beagle. There is no inkling of what was to come- musicals, merchandising, A Charlie Brown Christmas- just smart observations about art, literature, classical music, theology, medicine, sports, psychiatry and the law. And boy, were they angry.

In the early years the characters were volatile, burning. “How I hate him” is the punch line to the very first strip. Patty hits a boy hard in the second. Charlie Brown and friends were mean, eager to hurt each other, to be human, real people, with real psyches and real problems. Readers knew these children, they realised that with Peanuts that the looking-glass was being held up to their faces and sometimes they had gone through. When Charlie Brown confesses, “I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel,” he was speaking for people everywhere in Eisenhower’s America. Peanuts depicted genuine pain and loss, but somehow managed to keep everything warm and fuzzy.

Charles Schulz had a simplicity with his work that with just a few strokes of his pen could say clearly what his characters were feeling, and by melding adult ideas with children Schulz reminded us that although childhood wounds and pains can remain fresh, we have the power as adults to heal ourselves with humour.

It’s hard to believe now, with the Peanuts gang plastered all over the place, that Schulz’s strip was the fault-line of a cultural earthquake. It was edgy, unpredictable. Were they children or adults? The characters we know today- Charlie Brown, Schroeder, Lucy, Linus- are present, along with early starters Shermy, Patty (not Peppermint Patty) and Violet. But there is a difference. Whereas in later years, with the human condition becoming more comfortably numb, here at the start Peanuts conveyed the idea that things could be changed by sudden violence. By getting good and mad, you could resolve things. But on the other hand, no character before Charlie Brown reminded people of what it was like to be vulnerable, to be human. Charlie Brown never quits. He is a fighter but not in terms of how he is going to win but of pure endurance. Children are admirable for their lack of self-pity. Charlie Brown may feel sorry for himself, but he gets over it. He is ennobled by how well he handles being disappointed. He never cries.

With today’s comic strips being more censored by editors who want them just to be “funny”, it’s hard to see how Peanuts would have gotten started now. There is no Charlie Brown for today. Nobody is allowed to fail and get away with it. Its very premise would have it being rejected many times over- children being nasty and horrible to each other!? Existential?! Heavens forbid!! This says more about the delusional condition of our current society than perhaps Schulz ever did. The human race needs to be shown its disappointments, violence and doubts in all their glory. To forget these things makes us less than human.

Peanuts has a Dickensian quality about it. Where readers of an earlier generation would have recognized themselves in Scrooge or Pip or Sikes or Copperfield or Little Nell, the Peanuts characters now explained people to themselves and provided a widespread purpose for struggles in life. Peanuts had a lasting effect on the 20th century and the way we saw ourselves. This was Schulz’s greatest achievement, but he probably preferred to be known for his art. Schulz drew every single Peanuts strip without the aid of assistants. Charlie Brown and the gang became a worldwide phenomenon, but Schulz always struggled with the idea that he had created something that was worthy of the admiration and respect that was showered upon him: “I just did the best I could” he said.

In 1999, doctors discovered that colon cancer had spread to his stomach. They removed most of it, but the surgery robbed Schulz of the will to keep drawing and in December of the same year he announced his retirement. In January 2000 he drew the final Peanuts strip and just hours before it appeared in February he passed away. His life was entwined to the very end with his art. As soon as he ceased to be an artist, he ceased to be.

The children still appear of course in syndication, a never-ending Moebius strip of angst and recrimination. With the release of the first, beautifully presented volume in a series that will eventually reprint all of the strips, we’ll finally get to see the whole of Schulz’s masterpiece and hopefully confound a lot of peoples belief in what they think Peanuts was. A must have part of anyone’s literary collection.

The Complete Peanuts 1950-1952 is by Charles Schulz and published by Fantagraphics Books. In hardback priced £19.99.