Foreword by Matt Groening

Extracted from The Complete Peanuts 1955-1956

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.

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