The middle-class genius of Charles M. Schulz.
THIS SPRING HAS been a fine one for reissues of comic strips. Fantagraphics began its reprinting of every "Peanuts" strip ever published. The Complete Peanuts: 1950-1952 is the first of 25 volumes, with the final volume to be published in 2012. For "Peanuts" prehistory, the Charles M. Schulz Museum has released "Li'l Folks," the strip Charles Schulz drew before "Peanuts," in Li'l Folks, Charles M. Schulz: Li'l Beginnings. The latest reissue of George Herriman's strip, Krazy & Ignatz 1931-1932: A Kat a'Lilt with Song, also with Fantagraphics, will be out in June.
The "Peanuts" compendium is coffee-table size in musty, dignified colors. While gorgeous, it doesn't seem right to put "Peanuts" in this sort of literary coffin. Why not sunnier? Fantagraphics is in the business of promoting comics strip as serious art and has come out swinging. So we get Charlie Brown in serious browns.
But Charlie Brown was not serious. He was earnest. He believed in things-such as that Lucy would someday hold the football still so he could kick it. When I read "Peanuts" at length, something inside me says, "Yes, this is us!" only to raise my eyes, find it is no longer us and grieve. It's a jolt to see the suburban vision as nostalgic. When the detritus of the 20th century is collected, sifted and pondered, suburban American childhood will emerge as the utopia we didn't love until it left. And Charlie Brown will remind us.
CHARLES SCHULZ'S PARENTS were poor. They did not push their son, but neither did they discourage him in his dream to be a cartoonist. Like Charlie Brown, Schulz was the son of a barber. As a boy, he would sit in his father's barbershop after school, content to watch the customers. His second wife, Jean Schulz, thinks this is where he began observing how people walk and talk. She believes that because his parents didn't try to make him into anything, his mind was freer than most.
In 1946, Charles "Sparky" Schulz came back from three years at war, grateful to be alive. He'd wanted to be a cartoonist since childhood, and started inking in captions for a Catholic magazine and freelancing where he could. His "Li'l Folks" debuted as a weekly feature in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 22, 1947. It ran in the women's section.
The "Li'l Folks" anthology is a delicious, buttery yellow, a shade paler than Charlie Brown's shirt. A Snoopy-like dog jumps over a checkerboard where two children play. It says, touch me. It looks fun and real. "Li'l Folks" strips are reproduced on the right-hand side, with commentary and comparison with "Peanuts" on the left. The book is a labor of love. It indulges in the knowing inside winks that scholars know to avoid, but I'm glad the Schulz Museum didn't leave it to serious scholars. Sometimes justice requires fans.
"Li'l Folks" has a different quality than "Peanuts." The lines are thicker. Perhaps Schulz was making the best of middling reproduction quality in newspapers, but the lines vary in thickness far more than in "Peanuts." They have more of a "Family Circus" feel. The characters are deliberately cute, though by the end of the strip, they become sparer and begin to resemble those of early "Peanuts."
While late "Li'l Folks" and early "Peanuts" are similar in how they're drawn, "Li'l Folks" never invokes this dead-on gaze. "Peanuts" invokes the dead-on gaze from the start. (The one exception is the "Li'l Folks" character of the unnamed, angry infant.) The "Li'l Folks" kids are in the lower half of the frame. We look down on them. They're children to us. Cute. Occasionally precocious with social commentary. Often "glad-they're-not-mine" kids. They are ours-but they are not us.
The one character in "Peanuts" who looks most like a "Li'l Folks" kid is Lucy when she first appears. She starts as a toddler whose antics bedevil the others, especially Charlie Brown. Her eyes are blank. She gets some good jokes, most notably when she eats Charlie Brown's records (a joke that first appeared in "Li'l Folks") and then offers him some.
The only character who resembles the Charlie Brown we know is the unnamed infant, who loudly protests being put in a playpen: "Lemme out of here! I'm innocent, I tell ya!... I demand to see the warden." It's rather a bit of genius to see middle-class childhood as a prison, an idea that would gain currency 20 years later. Schulz's angry infant first appears on February 1, 1948. He acts like a trapped, angry everyman, a figure that resonates with Brecht, then newly popular in America.
What Schulz seemed to have wanted was a full Sunday panel in the comics section, plus a daily, like George Herriman's "Krazy & Ignatz."
George Herriman was T.S. Eliot's favorite poet, and a hero of the Lost Generation. So he is arguably one of the parents of Modernism, though it's hard to see how such a dour movement had anything to do with Herriman's rollicking critters. Perhaps if we declare the Marx brothers and W.C. Fields Modernists, the influence becomes clearer. But you can see it in the structure. In 1930 and 1931, Herriman began referring only sketchily to his canonical plot (Ignatz hits Krazy with a brick, which Krazy mistakes for luv) and building other stories around it, much the way Hemingway did with characters who'd lost themselves in the Great War, yet barely ever mentioned it. If Schulz is a child of Modernism, and I think he is, Herriman is a parent.
A Kat a'Lilt with Song is the fourth book in Fantagraphics' reissue of George Herriman's "Krazy & Ignatz"-Schulz's favorite strip. It began in 1911, but Fantagraphics decided to start its reissue with 1926, as the early years of the strip had already been reissued in the 80s by the now-defunct Eclipse Comics. Once Fantagraphics finishes reissuing the later Kat books, they'll reissue the early ones. Like the other three books, 1931-32 has a friendly Art Deco cover. Instead of trying to sum Herriman up, the books jam their prologues full of neat-o miscellany. The text in A Kat a'Lilt is by Bill Blackbeard and deals with Herriman's old strip, "Baron Mooch." The book also provides examples of the Krazy Kat daily strip. (Though "Krazy & Ignatz" was mostly known as a full-page Sunday strip, Herriman also drew a daily, four-panel version that was syndicated to about 20 papers. These rare dailies are reason enough to buy the book.)
Kat's human-like critters, mostly asexual, have that loose, rollicking line Schulz so loved. They traipse through a landscape that itself comes alive-though in A Kat a'Lilt, it becomes more barren-and there's the sense of being inside somewhere. The characters talk in their own vaguely ethnic patois-Spanish, mock-Chinese, Brooklyn, hints of Gaelic-and they obey their own logic. "Krazy & Ignatz" lacks the compelling rush to get to the end; the punchline is rarely in Herriman. Kat has a conversational rhythm, that of a storyteller who must keep a listener entertained with asides. The humor is throughout.
Like "Krazy & Ignatz," the "Peanuts" daily was a four-panel strip, but "Peanuts" was four equal panels, whereas "Kat" offered two slim and two long panels. Remember: "Peanuts" was designed to be filler, and this way, the panels could be arranged in a horizontal line, as a square, even up and down. In the 80s, Schulz finally asked for more flexibility with the daily. But the rhythm of "Peanuts" stayed based on the four-panel original.
"The quintessential Schulz humor is the last panel," says Jean Schulz. "It's all a twist on what you expect. You could take it off, and you'd have an ordinary joke. That is what makes Schulz different, even if the last panel is simply Charlie Brown saying 'Good Grief.'"
Krazy Kat was Sparky Shulz's hero after Schulz had served in the war. "Sparky felt 80 to 90 percent of a strip was the drawing," recalls Jean. "He loved the free way [Kat] was drawn, and the magical way the animals would work, the total abandon of the antics they would get into." Schulz called Kat "rollicking," a word he used for the feeling good drawing gave you.
In the 1950s, writing had to be economical to be considered good. Jean's view is that Sparky had only four panels to work with, and so chose a spare style. But maybe this 1-2-3-boom style of humor is a late facet of Modernism. I suspect the four-block form wasn't the only thing that gave Schulz's jokes the rhythm they had. (Herriman didn't use it in his four-panel daily.) "Peanuts" has a contemporary tv-style rhythm: Give the punchline too early, and the audience may wander off. ^^^
IN LATE 1949, Charles Schulz took his best clips to Universal Syndicate and got a four-panel strip that Universal Syndicate designed to be filler. He didn't like the name they gave it: "Peanuts." He never did.
It began running in October 1950. Schulz was 27 years old.
Schulz's daily schedule was set and unremarkable. Every day he got up, ate breakfast at the Redwood Empire Ice Area (now the Snoopy Home Ice Rink, that Schulz and his first wife, Joyce, founded in 1969). He ate and watched the skaters. Sparky loved watching skaters. Both his daughters skated, and he was an earnest hockey player. Then he went to the studio and drew. He sometimes went back to the ice rink for lunch. After lunch, he went back to the studio, then home for dinner, after which he and his wife sometimes went out. He drew daily for almost 50 years and never tired of it.
Meditation requires sameness, safety and routines. Schulz's life had all three-as did 1950s America. Meditation works best when people believe theirs is the best of all possible worlds. With its set schedules of work and leisure, its dedication to a single set of ideals and its sense that there was nothing else worth striving for beyond more of the same, life in 50s suburban America looks like Zen meditation. Zen with cocktail parties, to be sure, but a year in a Japanese monastery would probably leave most people craving martinis. The mind-trips of the 60s began not with drugs, but among children on green lawns among houses all the same. Consider this sameness as the sameness of Buddhist rock gardens. Sometimes a prison, a restricted life can also be the gate to endlessness.
"Peanuts" was one of the most popular strips in the world by the 60s. Politics barely touched it, though Schulz introduced a black character, Franklin, after Martin Luther King was assassinated. Schulz didn't believe politics had a place in comic strips. He didn't care for caricature, or for political cartoons, and he didn't like "Doonesbury."
"It's always a shame when people get so caught up with trying to give out their messages that they forget they have to be funny," Schulz said in a 1997 interview. He wanted to draw a gentle strip, one with no cruelty in it beyond Lucy jerking away Charlie Brown's football.
In December 1969, at the height of the counterculture and political turmoil over Vietnam, 55 million viewers, more than half the nation's television audience, watched the fourth airing of A Charlie Brown Christmas Special. On Broadway that same year, You're a Good Man Charlie Brown played to sold-out houses. A feature-length cartoon, A Boy Named Charlie Brown, was also setting attendance records at Radio City Music Hall. The strip had 150 million readers daily. All this from an apolitical strip about kids and a dog.
Jean recalls that Sparky Schulz looked at all people as equals and didn't really distinguish between children and dogs. He didn't like it when they misbehaved, but they were all human to him. This gives new dimension to "Happiness is a warm puppy." Something like homegrown American Buddhism.
"To be a cartoonist you have to be able to draw the same thing over and over without ever drawing it the same," Schulz said. Jean spoke of how he could translate emotion through his hand into the lines. "Sparky used to say that, when he was drawing, he used to feel the emotion, which explains why the same line of Snoopy's eye can be sleeping in one panel, and smirking in another, from a touch difference in the line."
"Sometimes he had an idea and couldn't wait to get to the studio." Schulz referred to his characters as "keys," as in keys on a piano, and was happy to have so many keys to play on. Jean recalls him doodling and writing at the symphony.
When Schulz didn't have an idea, he'd go to his drawer full of pictures of things. "I remember once, he asked me if I had any pictures of quilts. Charlie Brown is often in bed with his quilt. Sparky would spend hours drawing and redrawing an object until he got it 'right.' It was his form of meditation," Jean believes. He even did this late in life. Once in the 80s when the Red Baron was in France and had to call an agent in the Resistance, Schulz needed a French phone booth. So he looked until he found a picture of one, and drew it until he got it right. He had to perfect an object before it became one of the things in the panels. And yet, the thing we remember most about his landscapes and interiors is how bare they are.
He never felt he got his backgrounds right. But by drawing the objects, the jokes would come. As far as Jean can recall, Schulz never worked on the jokes. When stumped, he simply drew, often very lightly, on a legal pad.
Jean recalls, "One of the things that's amazing is the amount of effort he put into what we read in four seconds. You think, the paper is going to be thrown out, what difference does it make? He was doing it because he felt this was his love. He wanted it to be as perfect as he could make it... You don't realize what went into it when you see it."
CHARLIE BROWN WAS BASED not on Sparky Schulz, as many suspect, but on Charles Brown, a friend of his. Charles Brown seems to have been a happy, affable man. Charles Brown and Sparky Schulz remained friends all their lives. Brown died in the 90s and appears not to have capitalized on his famous namesake.
Jean Schulz is still active in the Schulz Museum. She was kind enough to let me interview her for this piece. Much of the information in it is hers. Her enthusiasm for her husband's work glows without seeking to place it above anything. I rather liked her. In our conversation, she was an active thinker, open to new ideas and observations. She would not let me look up to her, and it was impossible to look down on her, which is kind of how "Peanuts" worked.
The "Peanuts" characters stare straight at the audience. Their heads are almost directly in the middle of the frame. Not lower than us. Not higher. The amount of airspace above their heads is the same as in a type of 3/4 cinematic shot, called the Rembrandt shot, named for the painter and based on how he situated his subjects. The Rembrandt shot is a way of filming people that causes the audience to look them in the eye. We look the "Peanuts" kids in the eye. They look us in the eye. They always have and they always will.