The Four Color Media Monitor

The BBC ran a history article about the late Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schultz, and how he developed his classic cast of kids led by Charlie Brown:

Charles M Schulz's timeless creation Charlie Brown may have been as popular as any character in all of literature, but the cartoonist was modest about the scope of his miniature parables. In a 1977 BBC interview, he said: "I'm talking only about the minor everyday problems in life. Leo Tolstoy dealt with the major problems of the world. I'm only dealing with why we all have the feeling that people don't like us."

This did not mean that he felt as if he was dealing with trivial matters. He said: "I'm always very much offended when someone asks me, 'Do I ever do satire on the social condition?' Well, I do it almost every day. And they say, 'Well, do you ever do political things?' I say, 'I do things which are more important than politics. I'm dealing with love and hate and mistrust and fear and insecurity.'"

While Charlie Brown may have been the eternal failure, the universal feelings that Schulz channelled helped make Peanuts a global success. Born in 1922, Schulz drew every single Peanuts strip himself from 1950 until his death in February 2000. It was so popular that Nasa named two of the modules in its May 1969 Apollo 10 lunar mission after Charlie Brown and Snoopy. The strip was syndicated in more than 2,600 newspapers worldwide, and inspired films, music and countless items of merchandise.

Part of its success, according to the writer Umberto Eco, was that it worked on different levels. He wrote: "Peanuts charms both sophisticated adults and children with equal intensity, as if each reader found there something for himself, and it is always the same thing, to be enjoyed in two different keys. Peanuts is thus a little human comedy for the innocent reader and for the sophisticated."

Exactly. And that's how it became one of the most successful comic strips for half a century, though it remains a question of whether it'll still remain durable in an era where political correctness sadly took so much grip. Only time's going to answer that query.

Labels: animation, comic strips, good artists, history, licensed products