The Enduring Popularity of Peanuts
By Jane McBride
Snoopy is the only dog I respect. I stay as far as I can from dogs in real life (they’re scary), but Snoopy can’t hurt me. Because he’s not a dog. He’s Snoopy. He is as much a flesh-and-blood dog as Winnie-the-Pooh is a flesh-and-blood bear. Snoopy is a collection of curves and dots, simple lines abstracted into a fun little guy. He is selfish and thoughtless, sure, but also harmless.
The thing is, it took time for Snoopy to become Snoopy. Most long-running cartoons look very different in their early years, and Peanuts ran for decades. In the beginning, Snoopy was based on Charles Schulz’s own childhood pet, and more closely resembled a real beagle. Snoopy would gradually evolve into something detached even from the reality of the strip’s other characters.
One moment that changed everything was when he first slept on the roof of his doghouse. It’s so iconic now that we don’t question it. That’s just what Snoopy does. But when Schulz drew that for the first time, other cartoonists were amazed.
Snoopy’s eccentricity flows so naturally that it abstracts everything around him. The doghouse goes from two dimensions to only being shown from one side. And his bird friends go from pigeon-like things to tiny yellow creatures that speak in dashes. As David Michaelis observes in Schulz and Peanuts: a Biography, Snoopy is allowed a freedom of whimsy and self-expression that the actual children are denied because of their neuroses. One of the only times he’s brought down to their level is in a comic near the end of the strip’s run, where he’s playing in the snow and suddenly realises that, unlike the kids, his dad never taught him how to make snowballs. Michaelis interprets what could have just been intended as a simple joke as something more poignant; Snoopy, who can normally do everything Charlie Brown and the others can’t, is unable to join in on their snowball fight.
The child characters went through their own evolution. While the kids always had those big head/small body proportions, in the beginning they looked and behaved more like normal comic strip children of the time, such as Little Lulu or Nancy. There’s some cruelty and self-hatred, but nowhere near the extremes they’d eventually reach.
The original title for Peanuts was Li’l Folks, which had to be changed since there was already a comic out there with a similar name. Schulz hated Peanuts, a title chosen by the syndicate. It was apparently named after the Peanut Gallery, an area where the young audience sat in children’s show Howdy Doody, but Schulz was afraid people would think it was Charlie Brown’s name. That’s why Sunday strips would usually include the subtitle Featuring Good Ol’ Charlie Brown, and also why none of the animated movies or specials used the comic’s official name in their titles.
Honestly, I think the title change was a good idea. Li’l Folks just isn’t as simple or catchy. As a kid, I always assumed the name was a reference to expressions like, “I worked hard and all I got was peanuts,” which fits the comic’s theme of constant failure and disappointment. I never assumed it was Charlie Brown’s name. I never knew any of the characters even had names until I found some second-hand collections of the comic and became obsessed. My teenage self grew to adore Peanuts, and I collected as many Peanuts paperbacks as I could find.
Peak Peanuts is from the seventies onward. The previous decades were times of morphing. The fifties strips were too cutesy, and while by the sixties Schulz had found his gently depressive tone, the art was a little crude and lumpen. In the seventies, his pen lines became smoother and slicker, and this style lasted until Schulz’s health problems near the end of his life. His hand had become wobbly, but he still insisted on drawing every comic without help until the end.
Peanuts in its prime has a look that reminds me a little of the clear line style found in Franco-Belgian comics. But Schulz also combined this clarity with sketchiness and scruff when he needed to, allowing a clumsiness that felt natural for his young characters.
Peanuts was one of my introductions to minimalism. It helped me learn that less is more, and while this article’s prose is probably too cluttered, I always try in the fiction I write and the art I draw to emulate his quiet approach to storytelling. Schulz’s simplicity, combined with his emotional honesty, is what makes Peanuts so unique. Today, there are many comics out there about depression and anxiety, but few take Schulz’s subtle, self-deprecating approach.
The panels are square and rigid. The lines inside are simple and familiar. And while most strips end with a punchline, there’s a deep unhappiness and defeat behind it all.
“Sigh.” More than “Good grief,” that’s the Peanuts catchphrase. In one of my favourite strips, Marcie asks Peppermint Patty why she doesn’t get her mother to help make a skating dress. Peppermint Patty explains that she doesn’t have a mother. Marcie, alone in the last panel, says she’s going to go home and paint her tongue black. It’s delivered like a regular punchline, but even for Peanuts this moment is dark. There’s nothing else like this in newspaper comics. Not even Calvin and Hobbes has moments like that. Older strips, such as Krazy Kat, Little Nemo or Gasoline Alley, may have had brighter colours and wilder imaginations, but they lacked the blank spaces and empty sighs of Peanuts.
While more grounded than other comics, Peanuts did belong to its own little world. There are no adults shown, something that adds to the emptiness. Kids are left to be somewhere between child and adult. You only realise how much adults don’t belong when you try to picture them alongside the children — Schulz discovered this early on, after drawing a crowd of adults in a Sunday strip, and deciding afterwards to never show adults again. Readers are almost always stuck at level with the kids’ bulbous heads, enclosed in their reality. Even the way these characters talk is specific and strange. They quote Bible verses, are obsessed with sincerity and only ever call Charlie Brown by his full name. Schulz’s comics have a similar quality to Raymond Carver’s prose, with their deep, strange sadness kept tight in a mundane, simple world.
For as long as people read comics, they will always love Peanuts.
