The Four Color Media Monitor

A writer at Quillette spoke about the history of cartoonist Charles Schultz's Peanuts comic strip, 25 years to the time it originally ended:

The thirteenth of February 2025 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the last printed Peanuts comic strip, a closure which eerily coincided with the death at age seventy-seven of its author, Charles M. Schulz, on the same day. In hindsight, Peanuts was not just another highly successful cultural product but one of the last single-authored cultural products to be internationally successful on a grand scale.

Schulz’s drawn characters—along with their catchphrases like “Good grief!” and “You blockhead!”—have become as immortal as Waiting for Godot’s Vladimir and Estragon, Catch-22’s Yossarian, and Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp. But his real achievement lies not in any single comic strip or character, but in the sheer extent of his fifty-year body of original work. Between October 1950 and December 1999, Schulz drew almost 18,000 unique Peanuts episodes, in addition to innumerable Peanuts posters, calendars, greeting cards, and advertisements. Peanuts is a modern saga, or, as illustrator Ivan Brunetti put it, “an epic poem made up entirely of haikus.” A handful of other twentieth- and twenty-first century works have enjoyed a similar longevity, but few or none of them have stemmed so exclusively from the creativity of one individual, and yet become so familiar, day by day, over a period of five decades.

Peanuts was a popular cartoon for fifty years, from 1950–2000—a period that spanned two English monarchies, five popes, and ten US presidencies—a duration that appears almost inconceivable in our contemporary media environment. There are numerous corporate entertainments that have been around for what feels like forever—e.g. American television’s Saturday Night Live, which premiered in 1975 and still airs weekly in 2025—but these are the exception, and their prominence is generally less the result of their quality than of their marketability as intellectual property, as witnessed by the constant stream of new movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien fantasies, or on superhero adventures first published before World War II. Unlike these works, every new Peanuts strip was generated by Schulz himself, rather than by an army of successors, licensees, and exploiters.

Schulz’s key innovation in Peanuts was not the easy gag of making little kids speak adult language, but his ability to afford deep insights into adult concerns like identity, faith, unrealised dreams, and unrequited love, by distilling them down to the level of little kids. Peanuts offered parables of existential angst and longing, described not through philosophical treatises or spiritual quests, but through small stories about the small affairs of small people. Millions of readers identified with the figures in Schulz’s troupe, seeing the complexities of their own private lives reflected in lives that were outwardly, predictably simple. How many of us have kites that never fly and footballs we have never kicked? How many of us dream of Valentines we’ve never received? Who doesn’t have their own unattainable little red-haired girl?

[...] Peanuts’ readily legible lines contrasted with the cluttered frames of older comic strips, and clearly steered the form in the direction of such works as Garfield, Cathy, and Calvin and Hobbes, whose recurring images are as recognisable as national flags or corporate logos.

Yet daily newspapers are now a fading medium, and the syndicated fillers that ran in their back sections—which also included advice columns, horoscopes, crossword puzzles, trivia quizzes, and bridge or chess analyses—are almost a lost art. Many of the Suns, Stars, Times, Tribunes, and Heralds which once ran Peanuts have folded, and hardly any surviving printed news outlets cater to the nonpartisan demographic spectrum to whose collective taste Schulz appealed. Readers today might find the Peanuts universe as fantastic as any sci-fi setting: an expansive neighbourhood of parks, single-family bungalows, leafy pathways, frozen ponds, and low brick walls, where children no older than eight or nine meet and converse casually on sidewalks, drop in on each other’s homes, and organise their own baseball games, all without adult supervision. An unleashed dog enjoys his own shelter in a large yard, a boy practises Beethoven on the piano, friends have meditative conversations under trees, and siblings plop down together in front of big television sets. Such a world may once have been more or less naturalistic, but for North Americans born after about 1975, it’s an unreal dreamland.

Well, that's a great question if today's readers would find Peanuts appealing. It depends what audience it is we're talking about, and the college/university students of today who're indoctrinated with far-leftism might not appreciate it at all. Nor for that matter are they likely to appreciate figures like Stan Lee, recalling there was a time when college students would enjoy his past writings in Spider-Man, Dr. Strange and Fantastic Four. But that's all in the past now, much like some of the newspapers that once carried Peanuts and other strips, but have now gone out of business, as Marvel and DC are destined to do one day too. But something fortunate regarding Peanuts' ending as a newspaper strip is that:

But with Charles Schulz’s death 25 years ago, his single-handed masterpiece—for, unlike Walt Disney, Jim Henson, and many other well-known cartoonists, he never farmed his work out to employees or collaborators—could be appreciated anew. And now, in 2025, the very idea of a one-man masterpiece, wrought panel upon panel, word balloon upon word balloon, missed football upon missed football, has itself become an emblem of an irretrievable past.

See, Schultz did the right thing to draw his famous strip to a close, rather than risk having it all dumbed down by the wokery of modern times. That's why it's proven far more durable, because as a newspaper strip, it wasn't taken over by PC writers and artists who could've watered down what made it so charming. That said, if Marvel/DC do shutter their publishing one day, which'll be for the best, it will be possible to tidy things up by determining what's best retained or discarded from valid canon, should a better owner come about later. But for now, it's very good that Schultz did the right thing to put a clause in his publishing contracts that Peanuts would end as a newspaper strip upon his passing. As a result, it's held up far better than many corporate-owned products of the modern era.

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