But it took roughly 10 years for the characters to come into focus, the bodies to assume their rightful shapes, and the strip to move in the direction of emotional weight combined with natural charm and a vein of the tragic - that combination of intensities that evades fashion and audience and amounts to what we call timelessness. Apparently Schulz hated it because it didn't mean anything-were the characters the Peanuts or what? No explanation-hence it's the perfect name. Its title was quickly changed to Peanuts by the head of UFS. His first serious try at an ongoing strip, Li'l Folk - gossamer gags featuring marble-eyed children with large, egg-shaped heads - was picked up by United Feature Syndicate in 1950. Post-war, Schulz both took and taught correspondence courses in art while unsuccessfully submitting single panel cartoons to the slick magazines. In the army, he rose to be a rifleman and staff sergeant he convoyed through the rubble of Europe, glimpsed Dachau after its liberation, and nearly killed a US army medic with a potshot from an appropriated German pistol. (She died of cervical cancer a week before Schulz entered the army, an ordeal related movingly by Michaelis.) Obsessed by the great comic strips of the 1920s and 1930s, the artist found his vocation early and sold his first cartoon, of a dog named Spike, to Ripley's Believe it or Not! in 1937. What are its parts? What well of giving produced its terrific warmth, its unfathomable sweetness? Why do we love these characters?īorn in Minneapolis in 1920, Schulz was the son of a hardworking German barber and a Norwegian mother who was both overprotective of and remote from her only child.
We get as broad and meticulous a picture as we'll ever see of Charles Schulz himself, benevolent creator with a Nordic chill in his soul but the strip, the alchemical product itself, remains enigmatic. The strip had, in its mystical modesty, the power to make a reader feel as innocently receptive and indefinably sad as its subjects.ĭavid Michaelis's Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography goes some distance toward sourcing the sadness, chasing the feather. "Unassuming" described the strip and its characters, each of whom - Charlie Brown, the solemn boy with a sprig of forelock Linus, thumbsucking philosopher Lucy, shrill voice of the hero's insecurity Snoopy, dancer, dreamer, flying ace - wore an expression of eternal surprise, as if freshly dumbfounded by each other's words or acts.
Never sentimental, never ironic, it took place in a kiddie modernist flatland where every gag was deadpan and every day held its little heartbreak, its little revelation.
For 50 years, Charles Schulz's Peanuts fluttered above the pop culture tempest like an airborne feather, seeming to add none but the subtlest vibrations to an increasingly convulsive world.
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