Four panels. Line drawings, deceptively simple.
A small boy walks down the road, smiling. Another boy and a girl sit and watch as he passes. The boy speaks.
“Well! Here comes Charlie Brown. Good ol’ Charlie Brown.”
And then, when he’s gone, the kicker: “How I hate him.”
The first Peanuts strip – published in seven newspapers across America on 2nd October 1950 – and already the basic rules of Schulz’s world are established. Life is cruel. (Incidentally, for those seeking historical context, 2nd October 1950 was Trevor Brooking’s second birthday, Don McLean’s fifth, and Graham Greene’s forty-sixth).
Peanuts didn’t come from nowhere. From June 1947 to January 1950 its creator, Charles Monroe Schulz – known to everyone as “Sparky” – had been drawing a feature called Li’l Folks for his local paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Like Peanuts, Li’l Folks was adult-free; like Peanuts, it had a leaning towards the philosophical; and like Peanuts, its characters displayed a strange maturity that, even more strangely, didn’t seem out of place.
A single panel comic, Li’l Folks had a varying cast, some of them templates for characters who would become part of Peanuts: a dapper young man with a fondness for Beethoven; a small dog not dissimilar to the young Snoopy; and, from 30th May 1948, the name Charlie Brown, which was not apparently attached to a single character, but seemed to float between a variety of them.
Schulz was already developing a four-panel variant on Li’l Folks, and when, early in 1950, his editor refused his request for a pay rise, he didn’t hesitate. Withdrawing his services, he went to New York and sold the four-panel strip to a syndicate.
It sounds so simple. And perhaps it was. Perhaps they took one look and said “Yes. Oh yes please.” Even in that first strip there’s something that marks it out. A world-weariness, perhaps, a cynicism that one can only assume was lacking in other comic strips of the time.
And so it continues. In the second strip, Patty – a sweet-looking blonde, with a bow in her hair and a plain gingham dress – pauses her recitation of “Little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice” to punch Charlie Brown, apparently unprovoked, in the eye.
Brutal.
It’s not all about cruelty and violence, of course. In those first three months there are everyday encounters between the four characters (three human, at this stage, and one canine); wry observations; simple, non-violent conflicts; neat visual gags. Snoopy failing to jump through a hoop has particular pathos, Charlie Brown’s laconic “nice try” neatly offsetting the slump of Snoopy’s body, suspended ignominiously halfway through the hoop.
And while they are likely to utter grown up things, (“don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”) in their activities they are clearly children. There are comic books, mud pies, seesaws, jump ropes, toy drums – all of which would help ground the strip in reality for its readership. More than once, Snoopy behaves like a real dog, stealing a ball or sprinting to Charlie Brown at the merest hint of the opening of a candy wrapper.
But interspersed among these everyday scenes are the kind of situations for which Peanuts would become known. Charlie Brown tells Patty about his heroics in a game of football, but it turns out it never happened – the other kids wouldn’t let him play. In another strip, world-weariness is to the fore when Patty tries to reassure Charlie Brown not to be frightened of the future.
“You’re young and full of life… you’ll probably live for another sixty years…”
“That’s what frightens me.”
These early strips would be recognisable as Peanuts to anyone familiar with Schulz’s work from later years. They might note that lines are thicker, eyes are mere dots, Snoopy doesn’t walk upright, and Charlie Brown’s head is strangely flattened – more the shape of an American football than the pure roundness for which it became famous. But it’s clearly Peanuts.
Compared to his ‘mature’ work, these early strips didn’t hold my attention as a child. I read them repeatedly anyway – of course I did – but they were lacking something. Perhaps the characters were too anonymous, their individuality still in development; perhaps I recognised that the drawings, while already extremely skilful, lacked the authority of later years – Schulz had, understandably, yet to develop his extraordinary ability to depict complex emotions with a single squiggle.
But for all that, there are early signs of originality and boldness. All four drawings in the strip published on 14th November 1950 are identical: Shermy and Charlie Brown sitting in silence on the sidewalk, each staring at a different point in front of them. In the fourth, Shermy, without looking round, merely says “Yup! … Well,… that’s the way it goes!”
And while Charlie Brown already exhibits the traits for which he would later become known – insecurity, loneliness and quiet despair – in a very few of them, there appears a strange, alien concept. Charlie Brown is… confident… and, dare one say it, popular.
In one strip, Patty asks Shermy: if he’s stronger, older and smarter than Charlie Brown, “Why don’t I like you more than I like Charlie Brown?” Charlie Brown’s beam of pleasure is pure and simple, untainted by any undertow of disappointment and disillusion.
It couldn’t last.