assessment: Taking stock of people and ideas in the news.

Charles SchulzPeanuts requiem.

By Mark Alan Stamaty
Posted Thursday, Dec. 30, 1999, at 3:30 AM ET

The very best comic strips, for my taste, are the magic ones. They all come from the same place: "left field." Also known as "the blue." Or the intuition. The other place they come from is, of course, the real world. It's a combination of the two. The cartoonist experiences real life in some penetrating way. Then he (or she) takes a leap into the unconscious, the dreamlike, the mysterious within, hoping to emerge with something fresh, something original. In the best and rarest cases, what emerges is something brilliant and enduring like Peanuts.

When it first came on the scene, it was unlike any other cartoon. It had (and has) a powerful originality both visually and verbally. Schulz would set you up with a couple of tiny tots speaking in childlike innocence for three panels, then come out of the wild blue yonder with one of them sounding suddenly like a middle-aged college professor in the grip of a nervous breakdown. The dimensions of comic-strip possibility expanded.

Simplicity is its initial appeal. And openness. Innocence. It catches our eye and draws in our psyches. Economy of line with so much between the lines. A fraught simplicity, a growing complexity, an emotional involvement in Schulz's deeply felt world.

It works because it's genuine and because Schulz has just the right touch of magic. Not a bunch of schlocky gags. No overwrought corn. A genuine search is going on. The comic strip has a soul. Schulz believes in his world and cares about it, and so do we.

Jean Shepherd, the recently deceased radio genius who created magic with the spoken word, used to berate Snoopy back in the late '60s. Shepherd thought the whole idea of a dog with an imaginary life as a World War I pilot and a novelist, etc., destroyed the credibility of the strip. Shepherd was a hero of mine. His criticism caused me to question my own belief in Peanuts. I took it under consideration. I concluded that Shepherd was wrong.

How much leeway a comic strip can sustain, how far afield it can stretch and stray is always a delicate balance guided by the intuition of the cartoonist. Schulz has great instincts. I say all of it works.

I especially love the nutty, out of the blue lines, like Lucy telling Linus, "When oak trees get real old, they're cut down and used to make knotty-pine recreation rooms."

That's not contrivance. Not a hack gag. That's pure left field.

DISCUSS

E-MAIL

Mark Alan Stamaty is the creator of several comic strips, including the nationally syndicated Washingtoon. He is also an author-illustrator of children's books, including Too Many Time Machines.

If you liked this Assessment column, check out Backstabbers, Crazed Geniuses, and Animals We Hate, a collection of our all-time funniest, meanest, sweetest, and weirdest profiles.

Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum

What did you think of this article?

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Highlights from the Fray:

Stamaty's piece completely misses the central puzzle of Peanuts: why the strip 30 years ago was brilliant and today basically sucks.

Christopher Caldwell, in his brilliant piece in this week's N.Y. Press contends that it was Schulz's "calamatous artistic misjudgment" that allowed Snoopy and cuteness to overwhelm the marvelous angst that characterized the strip.

I think that Caldwell gives Schulz too much credit for understanding what was great about Peanuts. I think that, once the billion-dollar merchandizing juggernaut was well underway, Schulz got fat and happy. Snoopy and Woodstock represent the relatively banal inner life of a successful middle-age man. As Schulz's own angst disappeared, his strip went way downhill.

We still have the old strips. Go back and look at the old books--they're really worthwhile. Anything after, say, 1975 is not worth the time.

--Steve Miller

(To reply, click here.)

(12/30)