I

On the cover of Peanuts 2000, a collection of the final year of Charles Schulz's strip, appear ten characters, all of whom I'm sure you know. There's Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Linus right up front, Charlie Brown in an "I Wuv You THIS Much" pose that looks more likely taken from a mug than a strip. In the middleground, off to the right, stands a group of three girls: Lucy, Sally (identical "hug-me" pose), and Marcie. In the background, Peppermint Patty is frolicking with Pig Pen -- who, out of the 373 strips in the book, appears in one, which is about how filthy he is -- and Franklin. Woodstock hovers up in the corner. Who's missing?

II

For all the superlatives heaped on Schulz when he retired and then died shortly thereafter, one of the most remarkable facts about him was barely mentioned: 49-plus years into Peanuts, he was still trying out new stuff. When I do hear this discussed, it's generally in the negative. Hardcore Schulz fans, at least in the demesne of alternative comics, tend to regard the last 30 years of his career as a pallid epilogue to two decades of unsullied genius. They speak of talking schoolhouses, golf jokes, Zambonis on the baseball field and endless Snoopy kin, a retreat from the sophisticated humor of the '60s into irrelevant treacle.

I think this is silly -- not as silly as saying Dan Clowes should have stuck to the punchier, funnier stuff, but along similar lines. Most obviously, both statements ignore the law of diminishing returns: If Schulz had done another 30 years of strips exactly like his '60s strips, they wouldn't have been as good as the '60s strips, even if they were -- even if he had maintained interest in doing his strip in exactly that same manner, which would have been as pathetic as if Dan Clowes was still drawing the continuing adventures of Needledick the Bugfucker. That's just how life works, and I doubt that anyone who dismisses Peanuts after 1969 would have been impressed with another 30 years of L'il Neurotic jokes, either.

And Peanuts really did improve in some ways. It got worse in others, yes, but that still beats holding pat. For instance, it wasn't until the end of the '60s that Schulz started treating his female characters as anything other than shrews or Shermies. (1) Lucy, the 7-year old incarnation of every Thurber Woman rolled into one, is as perfect an antagonist as has ever been created, but she's more force-of-nature than character -- rarely someone that things happen to, usually something that happens to others. Patty and Violet, on the other hand, are as blandly functional as steel girders: Their jibes are as indistinguishable as those of Patty and Selma, and less spirited to boot.

I don't bring this up to pick on Schulz, just to point out that it's usually considered a healthy sign of artistic development -- think Clowes and Ghost World -- when a writer becomes capable of creating convincing protagonists of the opposite sex. Once Sally made it out of her stroller she was almost as thin-skinned as Lucy, but sympathetically so; Schulz sided with her wide-eyed indignation more often than not. Though she never became as major a character, Sally was able carry a sequence on her own; rare is the strip in which Lucy appears without a victim.

After Sally came Peppermint Patty, who started out as Charlie Brown's chummiest female foil but quickly became a first-string protagonist -- one who often seemed to exist in an entirely new strip within the strip. A full discussion of this would take another article, or more; suffice to say that I find Peppermint Patty as strong -- as aggravating yet sympathetic, as idiosyncratic yet archetypal, as funny -- a character as any Schulz created, and I think that to dismiss everything Schulz did after the '60s is to dismiss, among other things, his evolution. (2)

Secondly, though I'm sure I could find hundreds of exceptions, I prefer Schulz's continuities to his one-off strips. The storylines from the '60s may be more consistent in quality, but the '70s was when Schulz just started reeling off one sequence after another, with the length sometimes approaching Thimble Theatre territory: One of Schulz's longest storylines ever, in which Peppermint Patty prepares for an ice-skating match, lasted well over a month and had three or four "chapters" to it. The '70s continuities weren't necessarily more frivolous or less imaginative, either. Recall that 1973 was, in the storyline that Schulz often seemed proudest of, when Charlie Brown developed a baseball-stitch rash on the back of his head, had to go to camp as "Mr. Sack" and found himself elected Camp President and the most popular kid there. And 1979 was when Charlie Brown ended up sick in the hospital, wondering if he had died and nobody had told him; the moment at the hospital when he refers to himself as "Charles Brown" is, in its own way, possibly the most unnerving thing to ever appear in the strip.

Lastly -- and this is completely subjective, I'll admit -- but, Joe Fill-in-the-blank excepted, I really enjoy the Snoopy and Woodstock stuff. Perhaps this is simply generational; growing up, I owned just as many of the '70s books as the '60s,3 and so I regard Woodstock as just as legit a character as Schroeder, jaunts to the Daisy Hill Puppy farm as just as legit as Lucy's annual pulling away of the football. Given that I started reading Peanuts before I started reading, it's no surprise that I have a keen appreciation for it as a kid's fantasy strip, and for Snoopy as the frankly anthropomorphic character he became. At the very least, any fan of Bill Watterson's synthesis of adventure and humor has to admit that, given that Watterson claimed to never have seen Barnaby at the time, the clearest inspiration for his more fantastical storylines comes not so much from the '50s and '60s Peanuts as from these maligned later strips. As Peter Blegvad has noted, only a jailer would find the term "escapist" derogatory -- and only a killjoy would find charmless a well-rendered comic strip about the pretend adventures of a dog and a little bird.

And note that this charm was often deceptive. Like many cartoonists, Schulz seemed best able to deal with pain through the prism of the funny animal: Mawkish or not, Snoopy and Woodstock's fruitless, endless searches for their mothers were all drawn from the tragic death of Schulz's own mother. (4) Even without this extrinsic knowledge, there's an underlying despair to them that is neither childish nor easy to dismiss.

[To read the rest of this review, please see The Comics Journal #242.]

Notes:

1. If you're not familiar with the '50s strips, Shermy was one of the four original Peanuts characters, who disappeared by the end of the '50s due to, I assume, his utter lack of a discernable personality. Some might just call this a "straight man," but there is a difference. A straight man can have a distinct, if muted, personality: Carl Reiner, National Lampoon Radio-era John Belushi, Mary Tyler Moore, Dave Foley and Kyle Gass are all, in their own way, classic straight men, but they're by no means interchangeable. Firmly in this tradition, Charlie Brown, Linus, Snoopy, etc. often act as straight men as well. But the essence of Shermydom is fungibility; he's a prop.

2. I note that the first people who sprang to mind as champions of Early Schulz Is The Only Schulz are Joe Matt and Ivan Brunetti -- both brilliant Schulz-influenced cartoonists whose work is off-the-scale gynophobic -- and Chip Kidd, who let's just say has a really impressive collection of Batman-and-Robin ephemera and leave it at that.

3. And certainly a lot more than of the '50s, though I recall being completely transfixed the first time I saw Snoopy's doghouse drawn in three-quarters view, in Peanuts Jubilee.

4. Which, speaking of Schulz's influence on '80s cartoonists, was later used as a trope by Berke Breathed in one of the few things he didn't nick from Garry Trudeau.

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