All men of good will are cheering the publication this month of the first volume
of The Complete Peanuts, an ambitious project
from Fantagraphics Books, most known as publishers of arty comics
by the likes of Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes. The book debuts this
week on the New York Times hardcover fiction chart at
number 19. This series will reprint every single one of Charles
Schulz’s Peanuts strips in handsomely designed volumes,
each covering two years. The first volume, now available, covers
the tail end of 1950, when the strip began, as well as all of
1951-52.
Allowing for no cynicism and no carping (except maybe the lack
of color in the Sunday strips), this book — and the trends it
represents — is a multileveled triumph.
First, it’s a triumph for art over kitsch — for the integral
energies of a work of popular art over the rampant and possibly
damaging commodification of it. Unlike last year’s
style-over-substance tribute to Schulz, designed by New York’s
pop-culture-fetishist-of-the-moment Chip Kidd, Peanuts: The Art of Charles
Schulz, which contextualized Schulz’s achievements in terms of
artifacts — toys, advertisements, yellowed newspaper clippings of
the strips — the devoted comics fans at Fantagraphics are letting
the work speak for itself.
And it stands up. This first volume will surprise those who only
remember the canonical Peanuts as it matured in the late
'50s and on through the '70s. (Most agree it lost a lot of steam
and charm in the '80s, with the growing domination of Snoopy’s
relatives and bird buddies.) As the strip begins, Charlie Brown is
a bit of a scamp, not the trod-upon but enduring loser he became.
(Though the punchline of the very first strip, highlighting that
these cute cartoon kids aren’t as cute as they might seem, is a
friend saying of Charlie Brown, “How I hate him!”)
Peanuts in this first volume mostly revolves around
genuinely childish shenanigans between him and three other (largely
colorless) characters, Shermy, Patty (not the later tomboyish,
struggling-with-school Peppermint Patty) and Violet. They play in
sandboxes and the snow, fuss over candy, and sell mud pies. Snoopy
is still a dog on all fours, evincing only subtle hints of his
later quasi-humanity — and he isn’t even definitively Charlie
Brown’s dog at the start, merely a neighborhood mutt of sorts.
Schroeder shows up as an infant, already a piano prodigy. And
before this volume’s end, Charlie Brown’s endless-childhood long
nemesis Lucy Van Pelt enters as an infant and quickly evolves into
the super fussbudget and relentless needler of good ol’ Charlie
Brown.
But there from the beginning are Schulz’s strikingly clean and
modernist pen lines, elegantly minimalist design and background,
and indescribable but unavoidable sheer comic charm. In one strip,
Patty approaches Charlie Brown playing sailor with a cap formed of
a newspaper page. She asks for the Captain. Charlie Brown: “He’s
right over there, ma’am.” Patty: “But how can I be sure which one
the captain is?” CB: “His hat is made from the editorial section!”
In another, Charlie Brown says to Patty: “Isn’t your favorite radio
program on at six o’clock?” Patty: “You’re right! It is!!” She
dashes for the radio. “Hey! It’s six-thirty already! I’ve missed
it!” CB: “I know it…I can’t stand that program!”
FROM ITS HUMBLE BEGINNINGS in fewer than 10 papers, it grew to be
one of the most widely read objects in the history of the human
race, an unprecedented popular success while still winning the love
of intelligentsia ranging from Umberto Eco to Garrison Keillor (who
wrote the introduction to Complete Peanuts Vol. 1.)
Peanuts’ dual levels of popularity are curious — on its
own terms it added a distinctly modernist look (in the stark
simplicity of its line and figure work, unique in its day, reducing
cartooning to bare yet still skillful essentials) and an
existential voice and image to the comics pages. As comedy and
comics historian Ben Schwartz noted in a recent article in
Comic Art, Schulz’s work fit in snugly with a American
literary mentality exemplified by the likes of Salinger and popular
sociology like The Lonely Crowd: “postwar failure and
frustration.”
Indeed, far from merely charming and diverting, Peanuts
presented every day for 50 years a curious and fantastic litany of
failure (Charlie Brown), malice (Lucy), self-deception (Snoopy,
Linus, Peppermint Patty), and genius that goes nowhere (Schroeder
and his toy piano). Yet it still somehow became widely beloved on
the crudest level of festooning bedsheets and lunch pails and
pitching life insurance and cruddy snack cakes.
Yes, everyone loved Peanuts, but it’s sometimes hard,
from the perspective of the fan of comics-art-for-arts sake, to
figure out exactly why. The strip’s essence, one would think, would
make hawkers of cheap products and cheaper sentiment run away from
its characters screaming. Yet it remained compelling on so many
levels that we managed to achieve an amazing level of pure cultural
denial over what Peanuts was really selling us. It’s true,
I suppose, that all of us have elements of Charlie Brown, of Snoopy
the supercilious fantasist, of Lucy the self-assured terror,
somewhere in us, or at least in our experience. What
Peanuts never gave us — even though myth would say
lowest-common-denominator culture demands it — is uplift or a
happy ending. It gave us one curious, alienated postwar American’s
skill and vision and determination (he kept drawing himself in a
final decade when he could barely draw an unshaky line) and that
turned out to be more than enough.
What this new reprint series tells us about our rich cultural
moment, though, is unrelentingly cheery, even if Peanuts
itself was far from it. This reissue project is a triumph for the
cornucopian wonders of the wealthy west over the forces of cultural
dissolution. This series is not an unprecedented achievement of
archiving the easily lost middle and low cultures of our past,
though it is so far the most popular and attention getting.
WHILE NOT ALL OF them were brought to fruition, ambitious complete
reprint projects have been launched in the past two decades for
such comic strips as Prince
Valiant, Krazy
Kat, L’il Abner, and, scheduled to start soon,
Gasoline Alley.
We are living in a golden age of the preservation and reissuing
of Everything, if there is even a small niche market for them, from
DVD versions of canceled TV shows like Freaks and Geeks and
Sledge
Hammer! to CD reissues of obscure old singles of every
taste, from garage
punk to sunshine
pop to foreign
psychedelia to country blues.
Digitization as a means of media preservation almost guarantees
that if anyone anywhere loved it, it will come back for fans both
old and new. We aren’t yet to the point where everything anywhere
anytime is readily available to us; but we are getting surprisingly
close, and this Peanuts reprint is a bellwether of that
trend.
This is important. We are talking of physical goods here, of
course, and a surfeit of them that can, admittedly, be maddening.
But the physical in this case is a carrier for the spiritual, for
an endless and endlessly renewed storehouse of love, affection,
memory, and the means by which we have all understood, endured, and
enjoyed our lives.
Buried in trash heaps of paper and vinyl, broadcast to the
heavens, the interlocked joys and abilities of personal enthusiasm,
technologies, and markets are resurrecting and preserving gems from
what time and circumstance have caused to be tossed as rubbish with
yesterday’s newspaper. Even if you don’t care if you never look at
Charlie Brown’s mopey mug ever again, we are all the richer for
it.
