LIFE Peanuts

SCHULZ SIGNS OFF, LIVES ON After Peanuts debuted in 1950, it ran uninterrupted for almost 50 years until Charles Schulz announced in December 1999 that he was retiring. He died two months later, of colon cancer, on February 12, 2000, and the final Peanuts installment, shown here, appeared the next day. At the time, the strip was syndicated in more than 2,600 newspapers. Today, Schulz fans can see his original sketches, personal photographs, and other Peanuts-related material at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, in Santa Rosa, California. They’re quirky, peculiar, and oh, so human. We love the Peanuts gang because we recognize them for who they are: members of our family.…

One of my (many) favorite Peanuts strips shows Snoopy in Happy Dance mode. In the first frame, he taps joyously and wordlessly, noticing out of the corner of his eye a leaf falling from a tree. In the second frame, he twirls 180 degrees to welcome the leaf as his partner. In the third, ears and arms raised, he swings around do-si-do style. It’s the suave look on Snoopy’s face that gets me. It’s as if he’s Rhett Butler reeling Scarlett O’Hara around the Atlanta gala in Gone With the Wind. But while director Victor Fleming closed in on Butler’s rakish charm with the help of makeup artists, musical cues, and expert edits, Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz captured his beagle’s trademark joie de vivre with a few strokes of the…

LETTER PERFECT Schulz, here at his drafting table, used one style of pen for lettering and another for drawing. When he learned that his favorite nib, or pen-tip, manufacturer was going out of business, he bought the company’s entire inventory of nibs. PENCIL TO PAPER In the early years, Schulz started a strip with the lettering, in pencil, then added the characters, also in pencil. Next, he inked the strip, adding speech balloons around the words last. Shown here is an unfinished sketch for an undated early comic that never ran. STEPPING OUT Schulz signed his contract with United Feature Syndicate in June 1950. The first Peanuts strip—the first frame of the first strip shown here—appeared in October. It included Charlie Brown, Shermy, and Patty (no relation to Peppermint Patty).…

Cyrano pined in vain for Roxanne, Quasimodo for Esmerelda, Jorah for Daenerys. But when Charles Schulz failed to win the hand of flame-haired Donna Mae Johnson, he nursed his broken heart—then immortalized his sorrow with pen and ink. The idea jelled for the cartoonist in 1961, while he was listening to the Hank Williams song “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You),” about a jilted lover. Overcome with sadness, Schulz unloaded his emotions onto his cartoon alter ego, Charlie Brown. Soon Cupid’s arrow was winging its way across the schoolyard and heading for America’s favorite sad sack. As always, Charlie Brown was eating his lunch alone and wishing for friends. Then he spotted the Johnson stand-in and sighed almost audibly, “I’d give anything in the world…

Charles Schulz’s great comic strip has hardly lacked for admirers or attention since it first appeared in 1950—in itself somewhat surprising, since the strip had a long ramp up to sublimity—and so to join in the ranks of those who sing its praises might seem as redundant as Charlie Brown taking one more run at that football. But one point in particular is perhaps not made often enough and so still worth making: that for all of its charm and for all of the television specials drawn from it that rightly occupy a place of affection in our revolving American holidays, Halloween to Christmas and back again, the actual comic spirit of the strip at its best, from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, is astoundingly, “rewardingly” bleak and mordant.…

EARLY ON: A DIFFERENT KID Charlie Brown debuted in Li’l Folks, the predecessor strip to Peanuts. In the May 30, 1948, entry, a boy sporting a jaunty military side cap shakes the paw of a Snoopy-like beagle and introduces himself as Charlie Brown, though he doesn’t quite look or act like the beleaguered neurotic he would become. Even in the early years of the Peanuts strips, Charlie Brown is not the Charlie Brown we know today. He is clearly the star of the show—he’s the only character at the start with both a first and last name—but he’s rough around the edges. He can be self-conscious and insecure, but just as often he’s a smart aleck, sometimes petty, and often a heel. In one strip, a friend pulls him up…