Discovering the world of Peanuts
At some point in the year 1968, a small paperback book appeared in our house. It had been bought for my dad as a present, and it was the first of its kind I had seen. At the age of seven, I looked on paperback books as being for adults only, and the few we had around the house seemed to confirm that opinion. But this one was different. On the cover was a scratchy pen and ink drawing of a round-headed boy leaning with his head against a tree, around which a kite has become hopelessly entangled. There was another drawing of the same character on the flyleaf, together with a introduction, quoted from a New York newspaper, explaining in three paragraphs the genius of the man responsible for this drawing, one Charles M. Schulz. Closer inspection revealed the book to contain not dense text, as one might have expected, but page after page of strip cartoons. This must have struck me as somewhat odd – a ‘grown-up’ paperback book containing nothing but comic strips. The book’s title was the not unironic ‘You’re a Winner, Charlie Brown’, a sentiment developed in the back cover blurb, and it was my entry to the world of Peanuts.
In point of fact, Peanuts had been around the house for years, for the strip was running at that time on the back page of the Daily Sketch, which we had delivered every morning. It was specifically in order to read Peanuts that my dad chose the Sketch over other daily papers, and I can only assume that he’d been following the exploits of Charlie Brown and friends in its pages for a good many years. The Sketch was Britain’s first tabloid paper, and the only UK publication to syndicate the Peanuts strip. The first book-form collections of Peanuts in the UK appeared as Daily Sketch imprints in the late 50s or early 60s, but information on these rare publications is scant to the point of almost non-existence, and it wasn’t until 1967 that the first of the ‘bona fide’ Peanuts books began to appear in newsagents and booksellers.
You’re a Winner Charlie Brown was the very first in what would prove to be a most enduring series, and its simple, flat-coloured graphics and typography set the style for a run of over 80 titles, with new editions continuing to appear until the late 1980s, at which point the covers were needlessly revamped, losing the charming simplicity of the originals. First published in the USA by Fawcett Crest, this ‘standard paperback’ format series were themselves reprints of collections published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, which had been appearing since 1952. The British series appeared under the Hodder Fawcett/ Coronet books imprint, with cover designs that utilised the same illustrations as the American originals; but where the US covers had employed a variety of title treatments, the British imprints all used the same, distinctive ‘Flash’ font. Its ubiquity in the Peanuts paperback series left a lasting impression on me, to the extent that to this day, I can’t see that font in use anywhere else without mentally adding the words ‘Charlie Brown’.
I can dimly recall our dad advising us that, despite their childish appearance, the Peanuts books were not really aimed at children and that my brother and myself would consequently struggle to appreciate them. He was right, of course, but not for long. I would occasionally leaf through You’re a Winner Charlie Brown and the subsequent volumes which found their way into the house – the same year saw the arrival of This Is Your Life, Charlie Brown, while 1969 brought All This And Snoopy Too, actually the eleventh in the Hodder Fawcett series.
At the age of eight going on nine, I could hardly be expected to grasp the sociological/psychological nuances of Peanuts, but I soon began to appreciate the characters and their endearing (or otherwise) personalities. As a life-long dog lover, our dad clearly favoured Snoopy, and he quickly became a personal favourite for myself as well. In February of 1972, I joined the Peanuts fraternity with the first of my own personal copies, Here Comes Snoopy – a collection featuring the titular Beagle, and deriving from an era pre-dating his World War One Flying Ace fantasies (a thread which I always felt detracted from the strip). More books weren’t long in coming, with We Love You, Snoopy arriving shortly afterwards. Our dad was, of course, happy to buy more volumes for myself and my brother, because it meant he got to enjoy them as well, but if memory serves, the last of the series that he owned himself was Let’s Face It, Charlie Brown, arriving in 1970 or 71.
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| 'Snoopy Brown'? On some of the early Coronet paperbacks, Snoopy was given proper Beagle colouring. The era of merchandising confirmed him as white, and he's been that way ever since. |
With half a dozen or so books in the house, I felt I knew the world of Peanuts fairly well. In fact, my knowledge of the strip was running almost a decade behind, since the paperbacks initially focused on material from the period 1959-62, with occasional retrospective glimpses back into the middle fifties. Earlier strips did not appear at all: indeed, Schulz vetoed the reprinting of much early material in which the characters and ideas had not fully developed or were unrecognisable. Perhaps it was because I came in that that point, but I still prefer the 1959-62 era Peanuts to anything that appeared before or after those dates, and I believe this is considered the high water mark of the strip by many aficionados. The first of the paperback collections began, almost at random, with a cartoon from October 1, 1959 that saw a self-deprecating Charlie Brown attempting to build a bird house. The strips did not follow the original chronology, with the last page in the book having first appeared just five days later on October 6 of the same year. Other strips from this same era would not appear in paperback for years – this is especially true of the Sunday strips which required more work to reformat them for the small page size.
Although appearing in a conventional horizontal layout in the newspaper, when reprinted in book form, the Peanuts strips took on a different appearance. The four frames were typically cut up and staggered down the page, with the final frame abutting over the bottom corner of the one above it, in order to fit the space without being scaled down excessively. Now and then, the designers at Fawcett would get creative, by cutting away the frame borders, sometimes extending the horizon lines from the original drawings to leave one or more characters ‘exposed’ to the air of the page. When done thoughtfully, this could add considerably to the effect of a particular strip where Charlie Brown, as was so often the case, was left at a loss for words, and the absence of the frame served to emphasise his isolation. Sometimes, a character would be enclosed in an ovoid frame, giving visual contrast on the page. Even today, with a full run of high quality, ‘correctly-formatted’ reprints of the strip available, I still return occasionally to those original paperbacks for a reminder of how Peanuts used to look.
A feature of the strips which my brother and myself particularly enjoyed was the use of continuity – in other words, a storyline that extended over the course of several days, and occasionally weeks. We referred to these long-form storylines as ‘sagas’, an early favourite being the example from January 1961 in which Lucy steals Linus’ beloved security blanket and burys it. This appeared in This is Your Life, Charlie Brown, which our dad acquired in 1968 or 69. It must have been around the house in July of 1969 because I dimly sensed some connection between a reference in the strip to Hyannis Port and the Chappaquiddick incident which was widely reported in the British media at that time. Perhaps more than any other, the ‘buried blanket’ storyline confirmed me as a Peanuts fan, at the age of just eight years old. I may not have fully understood the concept of a security blanket, but I could see the devastating effect of its loss on Linus – who goes through a ‘cold turkey-esque’ phase of withdrawal – and his joy at being reunited with the blanket, courtesy of Snoopy (who, in one of his few ‘real dog’ moments, digs it up). After Snoopy, Linus would become my favourite character in the strip.
In January 1976 the animated Peanuts cartoons began to appear on the BBC. I believe some ITV areas had shown them before this date, but I’d never seen them. The earliest, A Charlie Brown Christmas, compiled various story ideas from the strips, and had appeared in 1965, with a warmly nostalgic jazz soundtrack by composer Vice Guaraldi. Oddly, Schulz seems to have considered the animations as adult items, and was discomposed by their promotion as Children’s television. Watching them after more than half a decade of reading the books, I felt they did seem to be pitched at younger viewers, and the BBC placed them squarely in the middle of children’s viewing hours at 5.15pm. My diary records that I considered them ‘pretty good’, and the animation was certainly faithful to the characters. The biggest problem for me was the voices: until this moment, I’d never given any consideration as to how Charlie Brown and his friends would sound. Clearly, they were children, but equally they were not given to making childish utterances. Some of the voice actors seemed to be struggling with the complexity of the dialogue, which didn’t help; and as for the odd squeaks and meaningless noises emitted by Snoopy, I for one knew he was capable of much more lucidity, if only in his thoughts.
I continued to collect the ‘original’ Peanuts Coronet paperbacks until the mid 1980s, by which time the strip’s chronology had got up to around 1975, and I was beginning to lose interest. I can understand why Schulz introduced new characters in his quest for novelty – he had, after all, been producing the strip for over thirty years by this time – but I always ended up feeling that they weakened the strip, by shifting the focus away from the very strong core of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus and Lucy who had been involved in all of the greatest episodes. When Snoopy’s extended family began to pop up, I knew it was time to move on. Interestingly, Schulz later came to look upon Snoopy’s relatives as a mistake and regretted giving them so much prominence in later strips.
It was only with the publication of Fantagraphics’ complete collection that I finally got to see the strips in their original continuity. Working through the volumes in order is a fascinating process, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who ever gives thought to the creation of a comic strip of this kind. What these volumes show us is how long it took for Peanuts to evolve into its ‘classic’ formula, both in the way it looked, and the way it worked. For the first two or three years, Charlie Brown is a fairly unlikeable character, given to wise-cracks and solipsism, with only occasional glimpses of the insecurity that would become his defining characteristic. The strip is too wordy – Schulz had yet to realise the value of a simple ‘look to camera’ from Charlie Brown to convey his reaction to a situation – and, after a year of visual simplicity, it becomes excessively detailed in the manner of backgrounds and interiors. By 1953 the characters have a ‘super slick’ quality that works against them, and many aspects of the strip’s graphic language have yet to be set in stone: Snoopy’s doghouse is routinely shown in a 3/4 view, as are the characters themselves on occasion. Schulz would later establish profile and flat front views as the only workable poses for his characters, while the doghouse was almost never seen from any other angle save sideways on after 1961 or 62… the joke of Snoopy sleeping on the roof wouldn’t work otherwise (as a child, I imagined the doghouse to have a flat roof, and shaped rather more like a beehive than a dog kennel. I was always surprised to see it depicted with a pitched roof).
One aspect of Peanuts that I could not have imagined when first thumbing through my dad’s paperback books was the avalanche of merchandising that followed in its wake. Character licensing in the late 1960s was a relatively modest affair compared to what it would become, and I think I’m right in saying that, had one wanted to own a cuddly Snoopy or a plush Charlie Brown at that time, you’d have been out of luck. I saw no such items in the shops until the mid 70s – and in any event, I’ve always felt that Snoopy doesn’t work in 3d – even rotating the character for the purposes of animation looks wrong. But I am clearly in a minority, as Snoopy must be one of the most merchandised characters in the history of comics. The first Peanuts products I ever saw outside of the paperback books were the greetings cards produced by Hallmark (who were also, I believe, responsible for the first cuddly Snoopy toys). The cards were always welcome at birthdays and Christmas and were a go-to item whenever I needed to get one for my brother or my dad. On occasion, I even made my own. Beyond them, however, I felt no desire to own any other Peanuts merchandise: I liked the strip for what it was, and that has always felt sufficient. Even so, it was not unwelcome to see the characters subject to a more recent revival, although the resultant movie was several worlds removed from the 2-dimensional, melancholic world I knew from Schulz’s original drawings.
There have been no new Peanuts cartoons now for over 20 years, but the world of Charlie Brown and Snoopy remains enduringly popular. Will it remain so? The cartoons are fairly well grounded in the zeitgeist of the era from which they emerged, and as a sociological phenomenon they will surely continue to attract students of the post-war era; and the timeless simplicity of the characters is still widely appreciated. A Google search on ‘Snoopy’ returns 145 million results, most of which are, I have no doubt, directly related to the character. So I suspect the Red Baron won’t be sleeping easy in his bed for a long time to come!