Our Lives with Charlie Brown

Charles Monroe Schulz was 20th-century America's favorite and most highly respected cartoonist. His comic strip, Peanuts, once appeared daily in more than 2,000 newspapers in the United States and abroad. Even today, 10 years after his death, classic Peanuts reprints continue to hold their own space in many major newspapers.

Compilations of the strips sold millions of copies during his lifetime and often showed up on best-seller lists. More recently, a series of volumes reprinting the complete run of Peanuts appeared on The New York Times listings.

Thousands of toys and gift items continue to bear the likenesses of Charlie Brown, Lucy, Snoopy, and their friends; a stage musical based on the strip has become one of the most frequently performed shows in American theatrical history; and several award-winning animated television specials continue to amuse us every holiday season on television and DVDs.

While Schulz himself was sometimes bewildered by the enormous popularity and influence of his creation, he held to a principle of integrity that allowed him to remain comfortable with the widespread merchandising of Peanuts.

Beginning with the first strip published on Oct. 2, 1950, until the last published on Feb. 13, 2000, the day after his death, Schulz wrote, penciled, inked, and lettered by hand every single one of the daily and Sunday strips that left his studio -- 17,897 in all for an almost 50-year run. No other cartoonist has matched this achievement.

I had the pleasure of knowing Schulz, who insisted that his friends call him Sparky, and visited with him from time to time in order to talk about comic art and my research into comics history. Because he was so well-read in modern American fiction, however, and knew that I was a professor of English, we often talked at cross-purposes. He wanted to talk mainly about literature while I wanted to talk about Krazy Kat, Popeye, and his favorite comic strips.

Over the years I collected various essays and articles he had published about his career, his profession, and his creation of the Peanuts characters, and research into his archives preserved at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center at Santa Rosa, Calif., uncovered several unpublished essays.

With the cooperation of the family and estate, I have edited and assembled these pieces into a volume to be published this spring as My Life with Charlie Brown.

What these essays demonstrate is that Schulz was a writer of considerable skill who knew how to express his ideas very effectively in prose as well as in cartoon images. Although he never considered himself an intellectual, and was often puzzled by my discussion of existentialism in his strip, he greatly respected higher education and was widely read in the great ideas and literature of the world.

The pieces throw a revealing light not only on his life and career but on his work ethic, his religious beliefs, and his philosophic attitude -- as well as his theories of humor. In the article, "On Staying Power," for example, he notes:

"If you are a person who looks at the funny side of things, then sometimes when you are lowest, when everything seems totally hopeless, you will come up with some of your best ideas. Happiness does not create humor. There's nothing funny about being happy. Sadness creates humor."

Because of his keen insights into the nature of things, as well as his graphic genius, Schulz left a lasting artistic legacy to the world. While cultural mavens have seldom granted the lowly comic strip any aesthetic value, he moved his feature in an artistic direction that was minimalist in style but richly suggestive in content. He has been nominated the greatest cartoonist of the 20th century.

Charlie Brown and his friends were occupied with what has possessed and continues to obsess all of us -- the relationship of the self to society, the need to establish an identity, anxiety over our neurotic behavior, and a desire to gain control over our own destinies.

We admire Charlie Brown because of his resilience, his ability to confront and humanize the impersonal forces around him, and his unwavering faith in his ability to improve himself and his options in life. Maybe this time he can kick that football held by Lucy.

In his insecurities and defeats, his affirmations and small victories, Charlie is someone with whom we can identify. Through him we can all experience a revival of the spirit and a healing of the psyche. This has been Schulz's amazing gift to us through his small drawings appearing in the pages of the comic section of the newspaper. He used to laugh when I told him his work was art, but Peanuts was the kind of art that endures because it continues to speak to our lives.

M. Thomas Inge is Blackwell Professor of Humanities at Randolph-Macon College, where he teaches and writes about American humor, Southern literature, and comic art. His edition of "My Life with Charlie Brown" by Charles M. Schulz will be published by the University Press of Mississippi in April.