I was a little girl when I discovered Peanuts. One of my earliest memories is of my Dad drawing “Snoopy” on my T-shirt in indelible ink. My favorite uniform when I was around 4 years old was a Charlie Brown sweatshirt; there’s a picture somewhere at my Dad’s. It wasn’t all glamour.

I suppose I related to Charlie Brown. The expression “I got a rock” is part of my language as an adult — not that I’m cynical. I think the first time I heard little kids, or anyone for that matter, use words like “sarcasm,” “cynical,” and “depressed” was in the world of Charlie Brown, a world where the kids were smart and the adults were merely blah blah bla blah blah. “Please put 5 cents in the can,” for when the psychiatrist Lucy was in to discuss your problems, still exists in my language — although the price has gone up slightly now.

The Charlie Brown gang was certainly not without its hang-ups. Although Charlie Brown was the anchor of the strip, all his pals had their own distinct personalities and tenderly expressed neuroses. We all knew a Lucy, a Linus, a Peppermint Patty, a Sally, and a Snoopy. In fact, my husband claimes that he most resembles Pig-Pen. I hope that what we learned for ourselves from these characters was a sense of compassion and forgiveness.

However, Charles Schulz didn’t portray children as pious, or as little innocents waiting to be instructed by adults. They ask their own questions and have their own sense of wonder, whether through a belief in the Great Pumpkin or the Easter Beagle. These gentle parables have a light and joyful spirituality.

It is only in the television film, A Charlie Brown Christmas, that Schulz has Linus read the Nativity story directly from the gospels. He does this to console Charlie Brown after he apparently fails in his assignment to purchase the centrepiece in the children’s Christmas party by choosing a puny, threadbare tree over the more glittering offerings of a commercialized Christmas. Schulz, who, like myself, was raised Lutheran, would later describe himself as a “secular Humanist.” He clearly sought answers in other beliefs, while retaining the value of those initial teachings.

Music is another recurring motif and value in Peanuts. Needless to say, I identify most of all with the occasionally exasperated pianist, Schroeder. I had a head start when going to my childhood piano lessons because Schroeder had already made me familiar with the names Beethoven and Chopin, even though I probably would have preferred a bust of Fats Waller.

After so many musical allusions and references in the comic strips, the melodies were finally made audible in the Emmy-winning film A Charlie Brown Christmas. It turned out to be some of the hippest and most charming jazz ever, composed b Vince Guaraldi and performed by his trio. Hey, as a kid who loved jazz, that music was the best. It proves that you don’t have to that cutesy stuff for children. Thy can definitely handle it. The dancing scene in A Charlie Brown Christmas is the grooviest. We see young hipsters who only drink chocolate-milk and can still groove to some jazz, baby!

Schroeder’s running musical commentary could also be heard. I especially love the scene where Lucy is asking Schroeder to play Jingle Bells and, to her disappointment, he runs through every grand version including one on the pipe organ until your hear Schroeder’s exasperated toy piano… “plink plink plink, plink plink plink, plink plink plink plink pliiiiiiiiiinkkkkkkkkk!!!!,” then the revelatory “That’s it!” from Lucy. That happens quite often in real life to me.

My family and I have lived the characters every day, quotes pop up in conversation to illustrate a point, if only to face the realization that sometimes you only “get a rock.” Charlie Brown and his friends endure because Charles Schulz trusted the intelligence and instinct of even his youngest readers to understand subtly illustrated dilemmas and simple truths expressed in a cartoon strip. His creations appeal to you as a child and speak to you as an adult. I look forward to the day when I might share these books with my own children.

I can remember the first time I was ever truly, profoundly, morally shocked. My sister was mocking my Peanuts collection; she said she’d been to a party the night before, and there was a poster on the wall, with Lucy, Patty and Violet, all pregnant, pointing at the round-headed kid and saying “You’ve done it again, Charlie Brown!”

Okay, not a bad life, if that was my greatest shock at ten years old. But that’s how much I loved this stuff. I was a great collector, as a kid. In fact, I was a completist. My specific targets were Doctor Who, Asterix and Charles M. Schulz. For a good five or six years, I’d go into Swansea city centre, every Saturday morning, and rifle through the books in John Menzies, determined to find every single one of those old Hodder & Stoughton Peanuts paperbacks. Number 18 always eluded me – it sounds so daft now, a missing paperback. So small a thing. But not when you’re young – this was huge, this was important, this was my quest! And then my mother went on a weekend trip to Glasgow, and came back, holding the mighty 18 aloft. It came wrapped in a white paper bag. I took it out; read it without daring to bend the spine; then slid it into place, on the bookshelf, between numbers 17 and 19, finally knowing the satisfaction of a collection complete.

I bet my sister’s still laughing.

But we trivialise this stuff as we get older. We get embarrassed by our love of comic strips and old TV shows. It’s impossible to believe that puppets and cartoons and beagles once meant so much to us, so we laugh at ourselves and turn this stuff into ironic pub chat. As though we were once stupid.

Well, sod that. Frankly, I was clever! I chose the best! Because those things you love, they become part of you. In rifling through these new and beautiful reprints, I’m amazed to see how much of Peanuts has entered my way of thinking. Barely a day goes past without me muttering “Another unmarried marriage counsellor.” Whenever someone says “I’m back!”, I can’t stop myself saying “Have you been away?” And to this day, I’m still pondering whether a broken heart is worse than getting lost in the woods. But it goes deeper than simple quotes – I can see Schulz‘s rhythm and style in everything I write, maybe everything I say. That double punchline, with the first gag compressed into the same frame as a muttered, better gag; the sudden Lucy-like rants, in bold; best of all, that silent third panel, the resonant, speechless, white-and-black pause, holding us in suspense, just before the end. (Sometimes, I write the word “pause” into a script, and when an actor barely leaves a beat, I want to show them a Peanuts strip, that vital third frame, and yell “That’s what I mean by a pause!!” while holding my arms up above my head like Lucy Van Pelt. No one can raise their arms in anger quite like her.)

Because Charles M. Schulz is the world’s greatest cartoonist (fact), it’s often forgotten what a great writer he was. Novelists, bloggers, screenwriters, anyone at a keyboard, could learn so much from his speed, his compression, his repetition, let alone his wild imagination. And the man’s a master of subtext, with all the gags and slapstick underscored by the haunts of unrequited love, lost causes, the risks never taken. Even in the funniest sequence Schulz ever drew – Snoopy and Peppermint Patty trapped on a waterbed – their bouncing lunacy is underscored by the fact that Patty’s house is being burgled, offstage, with her mysteriously absent father nowhere to be seen. There’s never anything funny without something going wrong. Of all his visual inventions, nothing is greater than Schulz‘s rolled-up eyeballs, where the eyes becomes like quote marks, looking to heaven in despair; he perfected the cartoon sigh.

When lists of the great comedians are being compiled – those people who know that comedy is just tragedy contained within the right frame – then the names might range from Chaplin to Hancock to Seinfeld, but Schulz is never included. Partly, that’s because comic strips are seen as somehow lesser. But also, I think the blame might lie in this volume. “Happiness is a warm puppy.” Ouch. Damn that strip! It’s cute, it’s sweet, it might even be true sometimes, especially if you’re six, but for many people – certainly my sister – that became a trademark. The whole world of Peanuts was branded as sentimental. Just one gag, one simple, passing strip, and a label was formed. The “Happiness” slogan seems as dumb as those wretched and slightly disturbing “Love Is . . .” cartoons. Not fair! Look beyond, look deeper! This stuff is so much cleverer, and so much more true. That smiling puppy is utterly self-centred, to the extent that he doesn’t even know his master’s name. He’s only happy until he remembers the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. And his best friend (the inventor of Twitter, surely?) can search all he likes, but he’ll never find his mother. Oh, cling to that puppy, tight as you can, cos it’s not going to last.

I’ve still got my collection. All those white-spined paperbacks – well, white until someone decided to print them in colour, but don’t get me started, a completist’s anger is a fearsome thing – they’re still lined up, now transported intact from Swansea to Manchester. And not untouched! Because my love of these things isn’t just nostalgic, and I refuse to reduce them to irony. There’s still nothing better, on a Saturday afternoon, than skimming through those wonderful books, remembering not to call her “sir”, that schools can talk, that blankets are alive, that Beethoven’s birthday is December 16, that somewhere there’s a town called Petaluma.

My ten-year-old self was right. I love Peanuts now, as much as I ever did.

Was Charles Schulz‘s comic genius the product of his psychic wounds? Certainly the Schulz depicted in Rheta Grimsley Johnson‘s authorized biography, Good Grief (1989), was a mass of resentments and phobias that seemed attributable, in turn, to emotional traumas in his youth: his unpopularity at school, his skinniness and pimples, the rejection of his drawings by his high school year book, the death of his mother on the eve of his inudction into the army, the little red-haird girl’s rejection of his marriage proposal, and so on. The man who became the best-loved artist on the planet was increasingly prone to attacks of depression and bitter loneliness. (“Just the mention of a hotel makes me turn cold,” he told Grimsley.) Although he left his native Minnesota, he replicated its comforts in California, building himself an ice rink whose snack bar was called “The Warm Puppy.” By the 1970s, he was reluctant even to get on an airplane unless someone from his family was with him. Here — the armchair psychologist might think — was a classic instance of the pathology that produces great art: wounded by adolescent traumas, our hero took permanent refuge in the childhood world of Peanuts.

But what if Schulz had chosen to become a toy salesman, rather than an artist? Would he still have lived such a withdrawn and emotionally turbulent life? I suspect not. I suspect that Schulz the toy salesman would have gutted his way through a normal life the same way he’d gutted out his military service. He would have done whatever it took to support his family — begged a Valium prescription from his doctor, had a few drinks at the hotel bar.

Schulz wasn’t an artist because he suffered. He suffered because he was an artist. To keep choosing art over the comforts of a normal life — to grind out a strip every day for fifty years; to pay the very steep psychic price for this — is the opposite of damaged. It’s the sort of choice that only a tower of strength and sanity can make. The reason that Schulz‘s early sorrows look like “sources” of his later brilliance is that he had the talent and resilience to find humor in them. Almost every young person experiences sorrows. What’s distinctive about Schulz’s childhood is not his suffering but the fact that he loved comics from an early age, had a gift for drawing, and was the only child of good parents.

This is not to say that the depressive and failure-ridden Charlie Brown, the selfish and sadistic Lucy, the philosophizing oddball Linus, and the obsessive Schroeder (whose Beethoven-sized ambitions are realized on a one-octave toy piano) aren’t all avatars of Schulz. But his true alter ego is clearly Snoopy: the protean trickster whose freedom is founded on his confidence that he’s lovable at heart, the quick-change artist who, for the sheer joy of it, can become a helicopter or a hockey player or Head Beagle and then again, in a flash, before his virtuosity has a chance to alienate you or diminish you, be the eager little dog who just wants dinner.

On page 183 of the current volume you will find a strip in which Snoopy grabs Linus’s blanket in his teeth, swings Linus round and round in the air, sends him flying skyward, and reflects: “I’m the first dog ever to launch a human being!” This strip probably refers to the Russian space dog Laika, who was launched in November 1957, but it could also serve as a description of the volume as a whole. In the 1960s, Peanuts would break free of gravity altogether — achieve a degree of popularity for which there was not remotely any precedent, abandon all pretense of depicting realistic children and animals, and attain the stylistic escape-velocity at which an artist is no longer shadowed by any precursor himself. What launched the strip to such heights was, above all, the character of Snoopy. The years 1957 and 1958, which this volume covers, find Snoopy being transformed from a cartoon dog into the I-am-what-I-am of later years. These are the years when his snout reaches maximum extension, double or triple its original length. He still sheds fur, fetches balls, chases birds, and licks people for no reason; but now, for the first time, he does things that aren’t conceivably doglike; he stands on Schroeder’s piano and plays a violin; he suits up for baseball. Meanwhile, the children’s personalities are settling into their now-familiar contours, and Schulz is developing the longer narrative sequences and archetypal gags (Linus’s blanket, Charlie Brown’s kite, Lucy’s competition with Beethoven, Charlie Brown’s “pencil pal,” the baseball sequences) that characterize his breakthrough work.

One long-running gag, given treatment in multiple strips for the first time in 1958, is Charlie Brown’s yearly failure to get any valentines. In Peanuts, A Golden Celebration, published shortly before his death, Schulz told a Valentine’s story from his own childhood. When he was in first grade, his mother helped him get valentines for everybody in his class, so that nobody would be offended by not getting one; but he felt too shy to put them in the box at the front of the classroom, and so he took them all home again to his mother. At first glance, Schulz‘s story recalls a strip on page 97 of this volume: Charlie Brown peers over a fence at a swimming pool full of happy kids, then he goes home and sits by himself in a bucket of water. But Schulz, unlike Charlie Brown, had a mother on duty — a mother to whom he chose to give his whole basket of valentines.

A child deeply scarred by a failure to get valentines would probably not grow up to draw lovable strips about the pain of never getting valentines. (A child like that — one thinks of R. Crumb — might instead draw a valentine box that morphs into a female body part that devours his valentines and then devours him, too.) Beneath the conventional narrative of Schulz‘s childhood failures is the story of a happy young man oversupplied with parental love. His little family’s closeness gave him strength; its closedness probably helped estrange him from the world. Love feeding art feeding estrangement feeding forgiveness: the gifts Schulz was given became his gift to us.

Certainly anyone who glances at the rambling little preamble doesn’t actually need any formal introduction to Peanuts.

From our infancies we’ve had our chins wiped with official Snoopy bibs and been swaddled in unofficial security blankets. Over the decades we’ve bohght, received, worn, played with, and stared at an endless series of Peanuts books, greeting cards, sweatshirts, showstrings, coin banks, figurines, advertisements, and TV shows. (Lest you think this is a knock, just remembers I’m the Simpsons guy, and we’ve allowed Bart Simpson asthma inhaler holders and Duff Beer fishing lures.

But clear away the insurance commercials, billboards, dolls, apprel, stickers, soap dishes, and all the rest, and we’re left with the real thing: the Peanuts comic strip itself, Charles Schulz‘s brilliant, angst-ridden, truly funny, fifty-year-long masterpiece of joy and heartbreak.

I dug Peanuts from the time I could read, and spent way too many nights as a kid staying up late under the covers with a flashlight, poring through such nifty anthologies asYou’re Out of Your Mind, Charlie Brown!, Who Do You Think You Are, Charlie Brown?, and You Can’t Win, Charlie Brown.

I loved these books because they were entertaining and original, and because there was nothing cutesy or condescending about the Peanuts gang.

I was excited by the casual cruelty and offhand humiliations at the heart of the strip. Peanuts was not only funny, it seemed emotionally real (and unlike anything else at the time). Occasional sadness comes up in Peanuts (such as, in this book, Charlie Brown’s frequent complaints that no one likes him, and Patty’s unsympathetic explanations of why this is so). But this darkness is offset by a friendly drawing style, lots of great jokes, and an overall sense of childhood exuberance that makes the discouragements of life seem like a worthy price to pay.

Back then it also seemed like everywhere you went, from friends’ houses to vacation-beach getaways to used bookstores to your weird old aunt’s bungalow, you were guaranteed to find Peanuts books that you’d never seen before just lying around, with such compelling titles asI Need All The Friends I Can Get, Happiness Is A Sad Song, and You’ve Had It, Charlie Brown.

My grade-school buddies and I were a precocious bunch, constantly attempting to draw the likenesses of all our cartoon favourites, from Popeye to Batman to Sad Sack to Hucklberry Hound. We even tried imitating the angular drawings of the New Yorker‘s Saul Steinberg — that’s how annoying we were. We especially loved copying the Peanuts kids, because they seemed simple enough at first glance.

But it turned out these giant heads and dots for eyes were tricker than they looked. Our Charlie Browns weren’t ever sweet and impassive. In our wobbly hands, Charlie brown’s big round head turned into a macrocephalic oval, his eye dots drifted apart, and his body got fatter and more squished. No matter how much we practised, our Charlie Browns looked like freaks.

Gradually, my friends grew up and turned to other pursuits, while I never matured and kept cartooning to this very day. Eventually my crude little Charlie Brown transformed into my crude little Akbar and Jeff, the erstwhile stars of my weekly comic strip Life in Hell. (Eagle-eyed enthusiasts will note that Akbar and Jeff’s zig-zag-striped shirts are identical to Charlie Brown’s, making my comic strip either an especially honorable homage to Charles Schulz or his most blatant ripoff.)

Looking at the comic strips in this volume, I’m struck by just how rich and consistent the world of Charles Schulz was back in 1955 and 1956. I like that Peanuts doesn’t contrast the kids’ piddly concerns with that of adults. I like that from the beginning, grown-ups didn’t exist, except as offstafe voices (usually that of Lucy and Linus’s mother).

And I like the unpredictability of the jokes. Some of them carry on the traditions of classic American comic strips, with such impossible sight-gags as Charlie Brown flying a kite wuth a ship’s anchor chain, or Snoopy retrieving an unpopped soap bubble.

Other strips offer a more open-ended, emotional outburst. In the 1955 cartoons of July 8, September 23, October 6, and December 6, as well as that of November 11, 1956, Schulz‘s funny but unnerving punchline consists of an agitated Linus shouting, “Five hundred years from now, who’ll know the difference?”

The kids are all quite young in these early strips. On January 4, 1955, we see that four-year-old Lucy (“the world’s number one fussbudget”) still sleeps in a crib. Her tormented yet optimistic brother Linus can’t walk yet — he crawl-wobbles through the air — but compensates by building gigantic sand castles and inflating square balloons. Characters who later disappear, including Patty, Shermy, Violet, and the loud-talking Charlotte Braun (who looks like Charlie Brown with a scribble for hair), are quite vigorously on the scene. “Pig-Pen” figures in a number of strips (I love the quote marks around his name). And Snoopy’s fantasy life is just beginning.

On February 22, 1955, Snoopy talks out loud to himself, exclaiming, “Sometimes I wish I were a rhinoceros!” Over the next two years he tries being a giraffe, kangaroo, alligator, python, bird, and lion. During these two years Snoopy also visually mimics the profiles of a pelican, Lucy, Violet, a moose, and Beethoven. (I especially love Snoopy’s Mickey Mouse pose on November 26, 1955, and Charlie Brown’s reaction: “Frightening, isn’t it?”) We also get to see Snoopy dance and iceskate on his hind legs, knowing this is just the beginning for the talented beagle.

I got to meet Charles Schulz just once, in May of 1998. I was holed up on the Fox lot in Century City, working on some Simpsons nonsense, when I received word that the great man himself was eating lunch in nearby Venice. I dropped everything and raced across town, stumbling into the restaurant where the affable Schulz held court before a group of fans and friends, including Drabble cartoonist Kevin Fagan and spattery Peanuts painter Tom Everhart. If Schulz was ever bugged by Akbar and Jeff’s striped shirts, he didn’t let on.

I told Schulz of my all-time favourite Peanuts comic strip, which I hadn’t seen in some forty years, but which remained as a permanent part of my feverish brain.

The strip shows Lucy mthodically making a series of tiny snowmen, then stomping on them, as Charlie Brown looks on.

Lucy explains matter-of-factly: “I’m torn between the desire to create and the desire to destroy.”

“Thank you for that strip,” I said. “In one sentence you summed up my life.”

Schulz smiled politely.

Do you hear ne?

He smiled politely!

I made Charles Schulz smile politely!

I just now realize I’m more like Charlie Brown than I’ve ever admitted to myself.

It is a little-known fact about the Beethoven strips that if you were to take the music in them and play them at the piano, they would be as accurate as any of Beethoven’s sheet music.