The bleak brilliance of Peanuts

The numbers are extraordinary. Charles M. Schulz, whose centenary falls next week, spent nearly 50 years of his life producing daily comic strips for Peanuts. Between 2 October 1950 and his death in February 2000, he drew a staggering 17,897 of them. He retired in December 1999 after a series of strokes and a cancer diagnosis; he died the day before his farewell strip was published.

It’s not just the longevity that is remarkable. At its peak, Schulz’s work had a daily global audience of some 355 million. More than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries carried his strip. Meanwhile, the licensing industry created around his characters was introducing 20,000 new product lines annually. The property as a whole was turning over $1.1 billion a year.

Conventional wisdom has always had it that this wholesale commercialisation of Peanuts devalued and degraded the work itself. One of Schulz’s first big commercial coups was to license his characters to Ford in November 1959. Two months later the Newspaper Comics Council, a trade body, organised an event titled, ‘How Greedy Can You Get?’

Schulz responded to such attacks by arguing that his work was only a product to begin with. ‘How can they criticise a commercial enterprise for being commercial?’ he said. ‘It’s just a plain old comic strip that helps to sell newspapers.’ But to understand why people were so vehement in defence of Peanuts we have to look to the appeal of the strip in the first place.

When Peanuts launched in 1950 – in just seven newspapers – no one had much faith in Schulz’s creation. It was sold as a space-saver: four small panels, each about 40mm high – the size of an airmail stamp, Schulz later recalled bitterly: ‘I was forced to draw the world’s smallest comic strip.’

But Schulz turned the weaknesses into strengths and made aesthetic virtues of the restrictions he faced.