By Isaac Kelley — I’ve read a lot of comics in my time and there are so many that I love. I started this On the Strip feature because, in my opinion, out of all those amazing works of comic art, there are two that stand head and shoulders above the rest. Two masterpieces that surpass any work of art in any medium, and they’re both comic strips, not comic books. One of those works is George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. The other is Charles Schulz’s Peanuts.

Peanuts was a newspaper comic strip created in 1949 by Charles “Sparky” Schulz, although he absolutely hated the strip’s name. It was about the lives of an assortment of neighborhood children and a dog. Schulz wrote, drew, and lettered every single strip by himself. A new strip appeared in newspapers daily for just shy of 50 years, delivering a steady meditation on failure, disappointment, and anxiety.

Peanuts was an incredibly popular and beloved comics strip in an era when comic strips held powerful cultural cache. Even today, most everyone knows the Peanuts characters. Twenty years after the strip ended, it remains a mainstay of our mainstream culture. However, I fear that the version of Peanuts that the collective remembers is watered down. Peanuts is sad and weird and sweet, and I think people only remember the sweet.

For half a century there was a new Peanuts strip every single day. There is a consensus that it was great in the ‘60s, and bad in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I cannot disagree more. Over the course of 49 years — while there were plenty of dud strips — there were no truly bad stretches. Peanuts was great when it started in the ‘50s, and it got better and better, becoming amazing in the ‘60s and transcendently good in the ‘70s. There was a slight drop-off in quality in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but to my mind, it remained the single best strip printed in newspapers for the length of it’s run.

The central character in Peanuts is, of course, good ol’ Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown is a born loser. His character is defined by losing. He never gets a valentine. He never wins a baseball game. He never kicks the football. His kite always gets eaten by a tree. He lies in bed asking about the cruelties of the universe and never gets an answer.

Charlie Brown suffers, but he continues to try. No matter how many baseball games he loses, he not only continues to play, he continues to manage the team. His favorite ball player is Joe Shlabotnic, the fictional worst baseball player of all time. This is a joke about how Charlie Brown can’t even be a fan right, but it is only natural. Of course he would feel a connection to the worst professional baseball player of all time.

Most of the rest of the Peanuts cast also repeatedly fail. Lucy never gains Schroeder’s affection. Peppermint Patty always gets a D minus at school. The Great Pumpkin never comes. Sally never understands basically anything. The only character that gets to be happy most of the time is Snoopy, who, of course, is a dog. He fails too, receiving a constant stream of rejection letters for his literary works, but unlike the human characters, it never gets him down.

Snoopy is a lot of people’s favorite Peanuts character, and he’s a very different sort of character than most. He’s Charlie Brown’s dog, but he rarely acts like a dog. He plays baseball with the kids, he pretends to be a World War I fighting ace, he writes terrible novels. He is not a creature of anxiety, he is a creature of play. Many of the Snoopy-centric strips have a very different feel than the bulk of Peanuts. They’re joyful.

Some folks say that you are either a Charlie Brown person or a Snoopy person. For some readers, the Snoopy strips are the good ones, the light, fun ones. For others, the Snoopy strips are filler fluff distracting from the humor of watching Charlie Brown repeatedly fall down. Of course, the truth is that one of the great strengths of Peanuts is that it contains both sorts of strips. The two types of strips make a larger statement: We will fail and face pain but we can also play and find joy.

Created in 1950, the Peanuts cast is largely all white. Created in 1968, Franklin is the only non-white character in Peanuts. It is true that there is nothing interesting about Franklin. HIs only character trait is “sometimes talks about grampas with Charlie Brown.” He exists only to be Black, even though his race is never mentioned in the strip. It is also true that it was highly controversial to depict a classroom as integrated in 1968.

Such is the nature of progress. Certain steps forward that seem bold at the time, end up seeing inadequate or even offensive with the benefit of hindsight. Franklin is not a good character. He’s barely a character at all. But what reads as inadequate tokenism today was well intentioned, far beyond what other comic strips of the era were doing. The character is an important part of comics history, and heck, I like that there was a random character that Charlie Brown bonds with over exchanging stories about their grampas.

Sparky was more organic in his depiction of gender equality. He treats it as self-evident that the girls are just as capable, complex, and interesting as the boys. The girls and boys play baseball together, and it is not remarked upon. There is a strong queer reading to Peppermint Patty, my favorite character maybe in all of fiction, along with her best friend Marcie, and it is almost impossible to not see it with modern eyes. Even though that was not intentional on the part of Schulz, to many Peppermint Patty is a lesbian icon. 

Adults are referenced but never appear on-panel in Peanuts. The children, as many people have observed, do not act like “real” children. They are more eloquent and more philosophical than your typical 8 year old. This isn’t a strip about the life of a child, it is about using children as a vehicle to meditate on anxiety and failure. 

Schulz employed a spare art style in illustrating Peanuts. The characters are deceptively simple, which lends to the strip’s power. The characters are more abstract than most, making everything slightly non-literal. Are we meant to understand that Charlie Brown has exactly one strand of hair in the front and a few in the back? No, we fill in the blanks.

One of the most well-known but weirdest recurring elements in Peanuts is the Great Pumpkin. Linus, the most religious character, believes in the Great Pumpkin. Every year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch, and every year Linus waits all night for the Great Pumpkin. The Great Pumpkin never comes. Faith, like everything else in Peanuts, is defined by failure.

There are rhythms contained in Peanuts, things that happen every year. Holiday traditions on Valentine's Day, Veteran’s Day, Halloween, and Beethoven’s Birthday. But also baseball season, and summer camp, and of course the biggest annual tradition of them all: Lucy pulling away the football at the last second. 

The most famous series of gags in Peanuts is Lucy pulling away the football. It has gone on to transcend the strip, becoming a cultural shorthand for repeated failure. Once a year, Lucy holds a football for Charlie Brown to kick. Charlie Brown knows that she always pulls away the football at the last second, causing him to fall. Lucy always convinces Charlie Brown that this time will be different. It never is.

Lucy and the football is the ethos of Peanuts distilled to the purest form. The world will always beat us. We know that it will, but what choice do we have but to try anyway? 

One of my very favorite Peanuts strips is a late period Sunday strip, one of the very last. Peppermint Patty is in pouring rain, covered in mud. She is kneeling in the mud, trying to play football with Charlie Brown who is off panel. Eventually Marcie approaches Patty. “Everybody’s gone home, sir. You should go home too. It’s getting dark.” Peppermint Patty looks very sad and does not look back at her friend. “We had fun, didn’t we Marcie? Marcie walks away, saying “Yes, sir. We had fun.” Alone again, Peppermint Patty says “Nobody shook hands and said, “Good game.”

Fantagraphics has lovingly reprinted the entire almost-fifty-year run of Peanuts in a series of 25 hardback volumes, and they’re about halfway through issuing paperback versions of those collections. The collections print the Sunday strips in black and white, so they have separately published a series of collections of just the Sunday strips, in color for those who care about that sort of thing. These reprints, when they started in 2004, kicked off a renaissance of lavish newspaper strip reprints. The bulk of the archive is also available online at https://www.gocomics.com.

Isaac Kelley should really be working on his novel, but he can't stop thinking about the comics so he wrote this instead.