Peanuts: How Charles M Schulz created Charlie Brown and Snoopy

Artist wrote and drew all 17,897 comic strips himself over 53 years, articulating inner concerns of American youth with wisdom, humour and Midwestern modesty

Apple has acquired the majority rights to cartoonist Charles M Schulz’s Peanuts back-catalogue as its latest gambit in the battle of the streaming giants.

The downbeat adventures of Charlie Brown, his beagle Snoopy and their neighbourhood pals distilled the essence of post-war America from the late 1940s to the turn of the century, when the series’ creator passed away at 77.

Schulz, who wrote and drew every one of the 17,897 comic strips himself and is thought to have earned $32m a year from his extraordinary industry, was hailed at the time as the country’s greatest humourist since Mark Twain by the BBC’s Alistair Cooke, an astute observer of the national character.

Peanuts was syndicated in more than 2,600 newspapers around the world at the peak of its popularity, drawing a readership of 355 million people from 75 countries. Its animated seasonal TV specials A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966) and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973) are still repeated every year as a matter of custom.

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1922, “Sparky” Schulz had been a timid boy and would later channel his adolescent anxieties into his adored protagonist. “Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask: ‘Why me?’ And a voice answers: ‘Nothing personal, your name just happened to come up’,” says Charlie Brown, an utterly characteristic utterance.

Profoundly affected by the death of his mother Dena in February 1943, Schulz went to war and served with a machine gun squad in Europe (without firing a single round, of course). He subsequently returned to his home state and entered the comics business as a letterist for the Roman Catholic periodical Timeless Topix.

His own first strips, known as Li’l Folks, appeared in The St Paul Pioneer Press between June 1947 and January 1950 and led to his work being picked up by The Saturday Evening Post. These first forays into gentle observational humour featured child characters who were essentially the Peanuts gang in draft.

The United Feature Syndicate company subsequently accepted Schulz’s work in 1950 and began serialising it on a daily basis across nine city newspapers, The Washington Post, Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe among them. It was here that the title “Peanuts” was added, much to Schulz’s chagrin: he later stated he found it meaningless and undignified.

As the 1950s advanced, the popularity of Peanuts snowballed. Schulz added several of the series’ favourite characters, from Lucy and Linus to Woodstock, Peppermint Patty and Schroeder, as well as several of its finest tropes, notably Snoopy’s doghouse fantasy of being a First World War fighter pilot on the tail of the Red Baron.

Much of what the wider world understands of post-Norman Rockwell American youth, from $1 lemonade stands to baseball, can be traced back to Schulz.

While the strip was primarily concerned with the growing pains of the perennially-troubled Charlie Brown – adults seldom featuring at all - the turbulence of the Sixties could occasionally intrude.

Schulz introduced Franklin, his first African-American character, at the height of the Civil Rights movement in 1968 after receiving an impassioned letter from a fan, Los Angeles school teacher Harriet Glickman, addressing the whiteness of his cast.

Glickman expressed her belief that introducing a black friend would help white children to see beyond the racial boundaries that had so viciously divided society for their parents. Like Fred Rogers on TV, Schulz saw that, with the right steer, his young audience were the key to realising a more harmonious future for America. Franklin duly appeared, telling Charlie Brown his father was away serving in the Vietnam War.

A recent social media controversy about Franklin’s place at the Thanksgiving dinner table in the aforementioned TV special is as dangerously misguided as it is tone-deaf to Schulz’s sensitivity.

As the 20th century drew to a close, new challengers emerged, notably Jim Davis’s Garfield, while the amount of space newspapers dedicated to comics began to shrink. The artist’s own failing health also became a cause for concern. He underwent heart-bypass surgery in July 1981 and received a call from President Reagan wishing him well. He was later diagnosed with terminal colon cancer.

Schulz signed off his final strip, printed on 13 February 2000, a day after his death, with a letter to his fans direct from Snoopy’s typewriter:

“Dear Friends,

I have been fortunate to draw Charlie Brown and his friends for almost 50 years. It has been the fulfilment of my childhood ambition.

Unfortunately, I am no longer able to maintain the schedule demanded by a daily comic strip. My family does not wish Peanuts to be continued by anyone else, therefore I am announcing my retirement.

I have been grateful over the years for the loyalty of our editors and the wonderful support and love expressed to me by fans of the comic strip.

Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy... How can I ever forget them?”

He never did let Charlie kick a football without Lucy moving it, a conclusion he would ultimately regret, on the brink of tears.

“There are no happy endings in my stories because happiness isn’t funny,” he once said, sticking to this philosophy to the last.

The most recent attempt to revive Peanuts was a 2015 animated feature film, which sacrificed Schulz’s distinctive thick line drawing style for ugly CGI. Apple would be well advised to return to basics if it hopes to recapture the simple brilliance of Schulz’s conception.

As Alistair Cooke observed, comics before Peanuts presented the conventions and cliches of family life but the Minnesotan’s genius lay in interrogating these dynamics much more rigorously, acknowledging childhood neurosis and the fact that, “Kids have to handle just the same curve-balls as adults. They know it but the adults don’t.”

Linus going away to summer camp and worrying that his parents will have moved away when he returns is treated with all the due seriousness it deserves.

As for Schulz’s hero, “Good grief Charlie Brown, what’s the matter with you?” is surely the unanswerable question lying at the core of us all.