Good Ol' Charlie Brown

By David Gallaher
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Though disguised by inane antics of comic sadism, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts offered a social subtext that dealt with issues of insecurity, broken trust and irrational hope, which resonated to the triumphs and tragedies the readers' faced in their everyday lives, in effect, creating a new cultural mythology.

In his seminal masterpiece, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell relates how the use of archetypes can help enhance a reader's connection to the lives of fictional characters, "The first work of the hero is the retreat from the world scene of secondary effect to the casual zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i.e. give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C.G. Jung has called 'archetypal images.'"

The story of Charlie Brown takes on an entirely different light when we see ourselves reflected in the mirror that the character provides, we are no longer mere voyeurs peeping into a simple two-dimensional, four-colored world, but are in fact, active participants in this new reality far removed from our own - we become Charlie Brown because we understand his struggles.

Infusing his own personal failings and inadequacies into the strip, an uncanny autobiographical parallel exists between Schulz's early adolescence and the childhood life of Charlie Brown, so striking are the similarities that once could hardly consider it is coincidence.

A childhood prodigy, young Schulz, nicknamed ‘Sparky’ by his friends, was skipped ahead a few grades levels by the school he was attending. Shorter and less physically mature that his peers, the stress of fitting in, eventually became to great for Schulz, the end result was failing grades in nearly all of his academic classes. Enrolling in the Art Instruction School’s correspondence course work, Schulz learned art as a trade skill, only to have his sketches and illustrations rejected for the high school senior yearbook.

Young Schulz found himself alienated and alone - not unlike Charlie Brown does in this excerpted monologue from You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown!:

I think lunchtime is about the worst time of day for me, always having to sit here alone. Of course, sometime mornings aren't so pleasant either - waking up and wondering if anyone would even miss me if I never got out of bed. And then there is the night too. Lying there thinking about all of the stupid things I have done during the day and all of those hours in between when I do all of those stupid things. Well, lunchtime is among the worst times of day for me.

Returning to the Art Instruction School in Minneapolis, after his service in World War II, Schulz became an art instructor. It was soon there after that Schulz fell in love with a cute-little-red-headed girl by the name of Donna Johnson. After a long courtship, Charles proposed only to be brutally rejected for another man.

Fellow cartoonist, Chris Eliopoulos, creator of Desperate Times, commented that Charles Schulz will be remembered for "the simple emotions that everyone feels he tapped into … Sometimes we feel like talking to the red-headed girl, but can't get up the nerve. Sometimes we put our trust into others and they just pull the football away, but Schulz stays optimistic enough to have Charlie Brown think that he wouldn't get burned this time."

In the first strip ever to run in print, Charles Schulz began to establish readers' connection to his character in the following manner:

Added to the fact that Charlie Brown seemed to be universally hated by nearly everyone in his world [and nearly everything if you include the Kite-Eating Tree] … He had the inability to succeed at anything. He is not the model young children aspire to, in fact, if anything - Charlie Brown is the proto-typical model of mediocrity and failure that we should all aspire to never become, were it not for the fact that Charlie Brown, loser as he may be, is never a quitter. Jeer after jeer, loss after loss, Charlie Brown still continues to lead his baseball team with an unending, unrelenting optimism - as demonstrated in this scene from You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown!:

LUCY:What's the sense of our playing when we know we are going to lose? If there were even a million to one chance that we were going to win, it would make some sense.

CHARLIE BROWN: Well, there might not be a million to one chance, but I'm sure at least that there is a billion to one chance!

It was this tone that reverberated inside Eliopoulos, "[when] I had gone back and read those old [strips] years later [I] saw something I didn't as a child - emotions. I had always found the humor, but only with semi-adult eyes did I discover the human feelings before those gags. I related with those feelings of loneliness, awkwardness and feeling like the whole world is against you. It made me want to know the man who seemed to know what I was feeling as an adolescent."

"I never realized how many Charlie Browns there were in the world. I thought I was the only one," Schulz once said marveling at the appeal of his alter-ego in People, but the truth of the matter is Charles Schulz wasn't the only one.

James Poniewozik, in his article The Good and The Grief, notes that, "Most of us will lose more often than we win. That's the joke of Peanuts. Schulz made it funny with characters who faced a Sisyphean suburban world of kite-eating trees and yanked-away footballs with resilience and curiosity … His life work is a reminder that self-awareness and a refined sense of irony do not mean affectlessness, that being a loser does not mean being defeated."

If Charlie Brown is a reflection of the archetypal "Everyman" hero, then would it not also stand to reason that each of the Peanuts character in some regard is a different representation of the varying aspects of the modern human psychological collective unconscious condition?

Metaphorically speaking, the Peanuts supporting cast are symbolic representations of varying aspects of our daily struggles, and given that they were modeled after ‘real-people’ for Schulz’ childhood, it only makes sense that they were meant to help illuminate the darker corners of the modern human psyche and allow the human spirit to triumph over adversity - and it was through Peanuts that people are able to mentally deal with the Lucys, Schroders and Sallys of the world while still trying to win the heart of our own Cute-Little-Red-Headed-Girl.

"We all have pieces of each [of the Peanuts gang] in us," say Abraham J. Twerski, co-author [with Schulz] of That's Not a Fault … It's a Character Trait, "[but] nobody is a pure Charlie Brown, nobody is a pure Lucy, nobody is a pure Snoopy."

Charlie Brown, the ineffectual Zeus, became the leader of a dysfunctional pantheon of characters who each mirrored elements of the human condition – we all have the propensity to become bossy [like Lucy], wise [like Linus] or imaginative [like Snoopy]. Tony Norman, staff writer for the Post-Gazette, agrees – adding, "As neurotic heirs of a psychological age, we're more than willing to acknowledge a part of Lucy's narcissism as our own. What choice do we have? We'll even own up to Linus' cosmic insecurity if cornered. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't admire Snoopy's pragmatism and the ruthless efficiency of his fantasy life as he 'battles' the Red Baron, only to be 'shot down' over the neighborhood pumpkin patch, his doghouse trailing smoke."

"Peanuts was about loneliness and trying to get through the day with all of these emotions. We were lucky - we had Peanuts to help us get through those lonely days," Eliopoulos remarked.

For generations, the timeless stories of the Peanut gang is what brought families together in the way that only nostalgic pop culture could: The more things changed in our lives - the more things stayed the same in The Peanuts. Memories of Sundays with a bowl full of Corn Flakes as children or our piping-hot cup of coffee as grown-ups … it didn't matter if we were young or old because we never-missed a beat: Charlie Brown was ever-still the inveterate worrier, Lucy was always the same self-serving egoist, and Linus was still dragging around that damned security blanket – but that was the language of the Peanuts.

Every line had a meaning in Peanuts; the simple, rounded pencil and ink work presented a world filled with simplicity and innocence. The more jagged the lines, the more intense the feelings of anger and frustration of the characters became. The more distortion that was added to the background, the easier we could “read” the inner-turmoil surrounding the characters. In essence, these ‘lines’, which represented a person, place, thing or idea, became symbolic additions to our iconic lexicon.



In the above illustration, the ragged lines are used to jolt the reader awake, just as, Linus is being jolted awake by his phone call. As with nearly all of Schulz’s 18,000 Peanuts strips, the Establishing Shots usually portray reason, introspection, or innocence through the used of solid and simple linework. Although Peanuts opens with a degree of blissful innocence, the true humor of the strip lays in contrasting conclusion, which, not unlike "The Scream", portrays deeper emotions that affect the reader on a subconscious, emotive level.

Not unlike Baroque art, Schulz used the ‘common’ experiences as a foundation of his strip. The foundation of commonality pulled the reader into the comic-reality that Schulz created. Once the reader gained access to this fictional world, Schulz would play off that experience transforming them into something different yet still vaguely familiar thereby creating and establishing a wholly different language.

In Schulz’s hands, a mere childhood ‘lemonade stand’ became a ‘Psychiatric help stand’ where Lucy would dispense ‘pop psychology’ clichés for a nickel. Simple experience like, getting a kite stuck in a tree became personified with the development of ‘The-Kite-Eating-Tree’. Components like these, over the duration of nearly 50 years and 355 million reader, developed into phenomena, by which, the elements of the strip found their way into the modern pop culture language. While phrases like, “You are a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” “Joe Cool,” and “Good Grief!” have become commonplace, the most significant contribution Schulz added to the cultural lexicon was the phrase, “security blanket” which, coined after the character, Linus, refers to a ‘buffer to keep one safe from the outside world’.

It is difficult to dispute Schulz’s contribution to the cultural landscape of not only the ‘comic world’ but the ‘real world’ as well. Many modern cartoonists cite Charles Schulz as a major influence in their professional and in their personal lives.

"Charles Schulz helped me to read and later to draw. I would sit for hours copying Snoopy lying on his doghouse on in a dogfight in his Sopwith Camel. Somehow I always knew I wanted to do what this man did,” Eliopoulos remarked.

The legacy of Charles Schulz can be everywhere on the Comics Page of the Sunday paper from Calvin and Hobbes to Doonesberry to Spider-Man, but his impression on the ‘real-world’ should not go without notice. Snoopy and Charlie Brown have found their way to cartoons, lunchboxes, calendars, the Louvre and the Apollo 10 – but more importantly, the characters found their way into our hearts.

The mechanics of how Charlie Brown and the rest of the his gang affected the world’s consciousness may fall under scrutiny, but the fact that something as simple as the loss a comic strip could affect so many people cannot be argued. With his iconic ‘Everyman’ approach to Charlie Brown, Charles Schulz had a staggering effect on millions of readers on a daily basis. Charlie Brown may have never been able to kick a football or win a baseball game, Charles Schulz made a winner out of Charlie Brown … for although, he never won a medal or a trophy – he won our love … and that is something far greater than gold.

If the symbolism used to create to create sequential art can affect millions on such a emotional level would it not stand to reason that the power invoked in their work can create such spectacular life?

With a pound of mud, Hebrew scholars crafted the Golem and with their words, gave it artificial life, does it not stand to reason that with a pound of paper, a cartoonist can create ‘paper golems’ with just a few images and words?

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