Peanuts

Peanuts is a syndicated daily and Sunday American comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz that ran from October 2, 1950, to February 13, 2000, continuing in reruns afterward. Peanuts is among the most popular and influential in the history of comic strips, with 17,897 strips published in all,[1] making it “arguably the longest story ever told by one human being”.[2] By the time of Schulz’s death in 2000, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of around 355 million in 75 countries, and was translated into 21 languages.[3] It helped to cement the four-panel gag strip as the standard in the United States,[4] and together with its merchandise earned Schulz more than $1 billion.[1]

Peanuts focuses entirely on a social circle of young children, where adults exist but are rarely seen or heard. The main character, Charlie Brown, is meek, nervous, and lacks self-confidence. He is unable to fly a kite, win a baseball game, or kick a football held by his irascible friend Lucy, who always pulls it away at the last instant.[5]

Peanuts is one of the literate strips with philosophical, psychological, and sociological overtones that flourished in the 1950s.[6] Peanuts’s humor is psychologically complex, and the characters’ interactions formed a tangle of relationships that drove it.

Peanuts achieved considerable success with its television specials, several of which, including A Charlie Brown Christmas[7] and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,[8] won or were nominated for Emmy Awards. The Peanuts holiday specials remain popular and are broadcast on ABC in the U.S. during the appropriate seasons, since 2001. Peanuts also had successful adaptations in theatre, with the stage musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown an oft-performed production. In 2013, TV Guide ranked the Peanuts television specials the fourth-greatest TV cartoon of all time.[9] A computer-animated feature film based on the comic strip, The Peanuts Movie, was released in 2015.

Title

Peanuts had its origin in Li’l Folks, a weekly panel cartoon that appeared in Schulz’s hometown newspaper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, from 1947 to 1950. Elementary details of the cartoon shared similarities to Peanuts. The name “Charlie Brown” was first used there. The series also had a dog that looked much like the early 1950s version of Snoopy.[11]

Schulz submitted his Li’l Folks cartoons to United Features Syndicate (UFS), who responded with interest. He visited the syndicate in New York City and presented a package of new comic strips he had worked on, rather than the panel cartoons he submitted. UFS found they preferred the comic strip.[10][12] When UFS was preparing to syndicate the comic strip as Li’l Folk, that is Li’l Folks without an ‘s’, Tack Knight who authored the retired 1930s comic strip Little Folks sought to claim exclusive rights to the title being used. Schulz argued in a letter to Knight that the contraction of Little to Li’l was intended to avoid this conflict, but conceded that the final decision would be for the syndicate. A different name for the comic strip became necessary after legal advice confirmed that Little Folks was a registered trademark.[13] Meanwhile, the production manager of UFS noted the popularity of the children’s program Howdy Doody. The show featured an audience of children who were seated in the “Peanut Gallery”, and were referred to as “Peanuts”. This inspired the decided title that was forced upon Schulz, to his consternation.[14]

The title Peanuts was hated by Schulz and was a source of humiliation throughout his life. He accused the production manager at UFS of not having even seen the comic strip before giving it a title, and said that the title would only make sense if there was a character named “Peanuts”.[15] On the day it was syndicated, Schulz’s friend visited a news stand in uptown Minneapolis and asked if there were any newspapers that carried Peanuts, to which the newsdealer replied, “no, and we don’t have any with popcorn either”; this event confirmed his fears concerning the title.[16] Whenever Schulz was asked what he did for a living, he would evade mentioning the title and say “I draw that comic strip with Snoopy in it, Charlie Brown and his dog”.[17] In 1997 Schulz said that he had discussed changing the title to Charlie Brown on multiple occasions in the past, but found that it would ultimately cause problems with licensees who already incorporated the existing title into their products, with unnecessary expenses involved for all downstream licensees to change it.

History

1950s

The strip began as a daily strip on October 2, 1950, in seven newspapers: Minneapolis Tribune, the hometown newspaper of Schulz; The Washington Post; Chicago Tribune; The Denver Post; The Seattle Times; and two newspapers in Pennsylvania, Evening Chronicle (Allentown) and Globe-Times (Bethlehem).[19] The first strip was four panels long and showed Charlie Brown walking by two other young children, Shermy and Patty. Shermy lauds Charlie Brown as he walks by, but then tells Patty how he hates him in the final panel. Snoopy was also an early character in the strip, first appearing in the third strip, which ran on October 4.[20] Its first Sunday strip appeared January 6, 1952, in the half-page format, which was the only complete format for the entire life of the Sunday strip. Most of the other characters that eventually became regulars of the strip did not appear until later: Violet (February 1951), Schroeder (May 1951), Lucy (March 1952), Linus (September 1952), Pig-Pen (July 1954), Sally (August 1959), Frieda (March 1961), “Peppermint” Patty (August 1966), Franklin (July 1968) Woodstock (introduced April 1967; officially named June 1970), Marcie (July 1971), and Rerun (March 1973).

Schulz decided to produce all aspects of the strip himself from the script to the finished art and lettering. Schulz did, however, hire help to produce the comic book adaptations of Peanuts.[21] Thus, the strip was able to be presented with a unified tone, and Schulz was able to employ a minimalistic style. Backgrounds were generally not used, and when they were, Schulz’s frazzled lines imbued them with a fraught, psychological appearance. This style has been described by art critic John Carlin as forcing “its readers to focus on subtle nuances rather than broad actions or sharp transitions.”[22] Schulz held this belief all his life, reaffirming in 1994 the importance of crafting the strip himself: “This is not a crazy business about slinging ink. This is a deadly serious business.”[23]

While the strip in its early years resembles its later form, there are significant differences. The art was cleaner, sleeker, and simpler, with thicker lines and short, squat characters. For example, in these early strips, Charlie Brown’s famous round head is closer to the shape of an American football or rugby football. Most of the kids were initially fairly round-headed. As another example, all the characters (except Charlie Brown) had their mouths longer and had smaller eyes when they looked sideways.

1960s 

The 1960s is generally considered to be the “golden age” for Peanuts.[24] During this period, some of the strip’s best-known themes and characters appeared, including Peppermint Patty,[25] Snoopy as the “World War One Flying Ace”,[26] Frieda and her “naturally curly hair”,[27] and Franklin.[28] Peanuts is remarkable for its deft social commentary, especially compared with other strips appearing in the 1950s and early 1960s. Schulz did not explicitly address racial and gender equality issues so much as assume them to be self-evident. Peppermint Patty’s athletic skill and self-confidence are simply taken for granted, for example, as is Franklin’s presence in a racially integrated school and neighborhood. (Franklin’s creation occurred at least in part as a result of Schulz’s 1968 correspondence with a socially progressive fan.[29][30]) The fact that Charlie Brown’s baseball team had three girls on it was also at least ten years ahead of its time. The 1966 prime time television special Charlie Brown’s All Stars! dealt with Charlie Brown refusing sponsorship of his team on the condition he fire the girls and Snoopy, because the league does not allow girls or dogs to play.

Schulz threw satirical barbs at any number of topics when he chose. Over the years he tackled everything from the Vietnam War to school dress codes to “New Math.” One strip on May 20, 1962, even had an icon that stated “Defend Freedom, Buy US Savings Bonds.”[31] In 1963 he added a little boy named “5” to the cast,[32] whose sisters were named “3” and “4,”[33] and whose father had changed their family name to their ZIP Code, giving in to the way numbers were taking over people’s identities. In 1958, a strip in which Snoopy tossed Linus into the air and boasted that he was the first dog ever to launch a human parodied the hype associated with Sputnik 2’s launch of Laika the dog into space earlier that year. Another sequence lampooned Little Leagues and “organized” play when all the neighborhood kids join snowman-building leagues and criticize Charlie Brown when he insists on building his own snowmen without leagues or coaches.

Peanuts touched on religious themes on many occasions, especially during the 1960s. The classic television special A Charlie Brown Christmas from 1965, features the character Linus van Pelt quoting the King James Version of the Bible (Luke 2:8–14) to explain to Charlie Brown what Christmas is all about (in personal interviews, Schulz mentioned that Linus represented his spiritual side). Because of the explicit religious material in A Charlie Brown Christmas, many have interpreted Schulz’s work as having a distinct Christian theme, though the popular perspective has been to view the franchise through a secular lens.[34]

During the week of July 29, 1968, Schulz debuted the African-American character Franklin to the strip, at the urging of white Los Angeles schoolteacher Harriet Glickman. Though Schulz feared that adding a black character would be seen as patronizing to the African-American community, Glickman convinced him that the addition of black characters could help normalize the idea of friendships between children of different ethnicities. Franklin appeared in a trio of strips set at a beach, in which he first gets Charlie Brown’s beach ball from the water and subsequently helps him build a sand castle, during which he mentions that his father is in Vietnam. He never occupies the same panel, however, with Sally.[29][30]

1970s–1990s 

In 1975, the panel format was shortened slightly horizontally, and shortly thereafter the lettering became larger to compensate. Previously, the daily Peanuts strips were formatted in a four-panel “space saving” format beginning in the 1950s, with a few very rare eight-panel strips, that still fit into the four-panel mold. Beginning on Leap Day in 1988, Schulz abandoned the four-panel format in favor of three-panel dailies and occasionally used the entire length of the strip as one panel, partly for experimentation, but also to combat the dwindling size of the comics page.[citation needed] Later in the ’90s, Schulz abandoned the characters Patty, Violet, Pig-Pen and Franklin.

Schulz drew the strip for nearly 50 years, with no assistants, even in the lettering and coloring process.[35]

In the late 1970s, during Schulz’s negotiations with United Feature Syndicate over a new contract, syndicate president William C. Payette hired superhero comic artist Al Plastino to draw a backlog of Peanuts strips to hold in reserve in case Schulz left the strip. When Schulz and the syndicate reached a successful agreement, United Media stored these unpublished strips, the existence of which eventually became public.[36] Plastino himself also claimed to have ghostwritten for Schulz while Schulz underwent heart surgery in 1983.[37]

In the 1980s and the 1990s, the strip remained the most popular comic in history,[38] even though other comics, such as Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes, rivaled Peanuts in popularity. Schulz continued to write the strip until announcing his retirement on December 14, 1999, due to his failing health.