Long Before ‘South Park’

Given the ubiquity of Charles “Sparky” Schulz’s “Peanuts,” it is hard to remember that the strip was in many ways a highly unlikely success story. The protagonist Charlie Brown is a loser whose obstreperous ego makes it difficult to root for him, even when he suffers shocking abuse at the hands of the ruthless tykes who populate his nameless American neighborhood.

His neighbors Lucy and Linus Van Pelt are classically maladjusted children; she a budding sadist who enjoys humiliating the round-headed Brown on a regular basis, both on the football field and in her makeshift psychiatric office, where she doles out therapeutic advice of a peculiarly dubious kind to him and other unsuspecting patients; he a thumb-sucking blanket-carrying junior Christian mystic with a belief in a mysterious entity called the “Great Pumpkin” who ostensibly rises over random pumpkin patches each Halloween to dispense gifts to sincere children the world over. Lucy’s love interest, the dinky maestro Schroeder, piously plays only Beethoven on his toy piano and has no sense of humor whatsoever, while Brown’s dog Snoopy unaccountably fancies himself a World War I pilot locked in endless battle with Germany’s Red Baron despite the fact that he is barely energetic enough to raise his canine carcass from the roof of his doghouse. From such humble materials are legendary comic empires made.

“Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz” collects more than 500 of Schulz’s strips and offers a lovely introduction to the most influential daily comic strip of the 20th century. Designed and edited by graphic designer Chip Kidd, the book features beautiful photographs of original artwork and vintage newsprint and thereby manages to capture the texture of Schulz’s comic art in all its daily Benday dot glory. The volume also contains enchanting images of collectible “Peanuts” memorabilia, including dolls fabricated in 1958 by the Hungerford Plastics Corp., a series of tableaux for the Viewmaster stereoscope from 1966 and the “Peanuts” board game by Selchow & Richter from 1967. An exercise in nostalgia, the book is all the more poignant given Schulz’s passing on Feb. 12, 2000.

From the earliest strips, many of the hallmarks of “Peanuts”’ minimalist style are amply in evidence. Schulz’s line is simple, his compositions are uncluttered and each four-panel daily strip sets up a gag that pays off richly in the final panel. Each character has a carefully delineated psychology and, in the best tradition of the American situation comedy, the series features little or no character development over time, as each member of the “Peanuts” gang is a kind of archetype expertly deployed by Schulz in his staggeringly inventive mini-narratives.

It is fascinating to watch Schulz get to know his characters as he invents them and then trots them out to see what mischief they have to offer.

Though Charlie Brown, ostensibly modeled on Schulz himself, is the series’ protagonist, he is less hero than anti-hero, a kind of screen onto whom the strip’s various figures pour out their apparently endless aggression. In the very early strips (“Peanuts” started Oct. 2, 1950), Violet and Patty are the central female figures, mainly concerned with the fabrication of mud pies and the regular belittlement of Charlie Brown. Along the way, Schulz invents ancillary characters such as the filthy Pigpen, but when these figures run their course he is all too happy to dispense with them.

Lucy makes her appearance in 1953 as a rather sweet, wide-eyed baby whom Charlie Brown takes care of, though it would not be long before Lucy would be regularly taking care of Charlie Brown. Despite Schulz’s distaste for his heroine, Lucy is the strip’s dark comic engine, just as her brother Linus is its comforting transcendental philosopher. Of Lucy, Schulz once remarked: “She represents all of the cold-blooded, self-sufficient people in the world who do not feel that it is at all necessary ever to say anything kind about anyone.” Then again, kindness is never funny, as Schulz knew all too well.

At the beginning of the ‘50s, the decade of “Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best,” Schulz had already cottoned to the fact that the lives of American children are filled with quiet malevolence and that adults have little clue about the affective existence of the little folks who share their homes for the first two decades of their lives. Thoroughly eradicating any adult presence from the world of “Peanuts”, Schulz allows the monstrous ids and egos of these children free reign, and the results are not pretty.

This is the secret appeal of “Peanuts”: Despite Hallmark Corp.’s attempt to hijack the strip for its saccharine greeting cards, despite the innumerable “Happiness is ...” T-shirts sold in ‘70s gift shops, Schulz’s world is decidedly unsentimental, and his vision of childhood is finally a lot darker than it has been thought to be. While the strip’s language and subject matter are never vulgar, it is not as far as it first appears from the world of “Peanuts” to the worlds of “The Simpsons” and “South Park.”

Above all, it is the variety of Schulz’s invention that proves most astonishing, for although the strip’s energy did flag somewhat during its last decade, Schulz managed to produce “Peanuts” daily for fully 50 years, concocting wonderfully comic gags and gambits every week. Whether it is Linus worrying about his beloved teacher Miss Othmar’s mental condition as his class makes eggshell “igli” (“one igloo, two igli,” he informs a befuddled Charlie Brown) or Lucy explaining the plot of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” to her brother with the aid of Charlie Brown, who hangs upside-down in a tangle from the kite-eating tree or the neighborhood baseball team assembling mid-game on the pitching mound to discuss the implications of the story of Job, Schulz and the “Peanuts” gang charm the reader with their manifold eccentricities. A great artist in a humble medium, Charles Schulz opened new vistas, not just for the daily comic strip but for our understanding of childhood.

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Adam Bresnick writes for several publications, including the (London) Times Literary Supplement.