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Charles M. Schulz visionary and humanist: Part One

When Charles M. Schulz died in February 2000 after a battle with cancer, he was already famousand richer than any other comic strip artist in the world. He had achieved this phenomenalcommercial success after a quiet start and became the highest paid newspaper cartoonist in thehistory of the medium. Over the course of fifty years till his death at the age of 77, Schulz hadgrown into a cultural icon of his era along with his creationPeanuts, reaching the peak of

recognition between 1965 and 1982. The licensing agency United Features Syndicate Inc. earnsbillion dollars every year fromPeanutsmerchandise and paraphernalia. Schulz is the onlyAmerican comic strip artist who was honored by Louvre with a retrospective show in 1990 a rarehonor for a cartoonist, keeping in mind that comic strips are generally considered as a trivial artform and hence not taken seriously by connoisseurs of art.Peanutshas introduced some of themost loving fictional characters of the twentieth century and is considered to be amongst thegreatest comic strips of all time. While this strip has primarily dealt with the daily conflicts,complexities and torments of human life through a filter of innocence, the deeply insightful workcannot be tagged just as a bleak representation of every day reality. Schulzs intention was todeliver dignified humor to his readers; he wanted to see them happy. He gradually developed asensitive but highly personal language that spoke with absolute integrity and depth. His simple

looking art was able to connect with his worldwide readers emotionally, equally charming innocentchildren and complex adult minds. The central theme of Schulzs art was relationship a timelesssubject having a universal appeal.

Schulz had a rare ability to overcome all sorts of professional constrains and obstacles rising fromthe contradictions of a profit driven industrial-commercial production cycle. Instead of falling toits prey he had excellently converted them into his advantage. His artistic efforts and humanisticstyle has deeply inspired and influenced many of his fellow travelers who have passionatelyadmitted to be greatly indebted by him for expanding the possibility and dimension of the artform. One among them is Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau. While paying a warm homage,Trudeau explained how Schulz had, ... completely revolutionized the art form, deepening it, filling

it with possibility, giving permission to all who followed to write from the heart and intellect.

The creative journey of Charles M. Schulz started in 1947 withSparkys L'il Folks, a single-panelweekly comic strip. United Features soon changed the strips title intoPeanuts which made itsdebut in seven newspapers on October 2, 1950. All through his life Schulz never ceased to loathethe new title imposed on his strip as he always considered it as the worst title ever thought up fora comic strip. However, the production manager from United Features who was responsible forthe title later tried to justify himself with the claim that he had to name the strip without actuallyseeing it! The four panel format carrying Schulzs highly expressive drawings ran everyday on2,600 newspapers in seventy-five countries and reached to more than 355 million readers. Thestrip got translated into twenty-six languages and was merited to be the worlds most widely read

comic strip during its heyday. Even today,Peanutscontinues to appear in most of the newspapersthat was publishing the strip when Schulz was active and alive. According to the United Features

website, the strip consistently ranks at the top of newspaper readership polls worldwide.

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The foremost appeal ofPeanuts is certainly its unique visual style. The extremely funny, simplelooking yet highly sensitive drawings have always provided a rare freshness to the 17,897 stripsthat Schulz had created during his lifetime, all by his own hand. One can imagine how difficult it

was to create a comic strip each day for fifty long years the never-ending burden of having to dosomething day after day after day, to regularly generate new ideas and maintain a high level ofquality. Schulz had to repeat his motifs and few basic themes time and again but was largelysuccessful to preserve the magical quality of his strip all the way through. This is undoubtedly aphenomenal achievement.

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It is well-known that Schulz had worked on every part of the strip alone, carrying out all thedrawings with lettering, inking the backgrounds and writing the immaculate dialogues. He evendrew the sheet music in the strips by hand. The apparent ingeniousness of his child-like drawingsis in fact extremely sophisticated and formal in nature. Lucy leaning on Schroeders toy piano,Linus holding his security blanket, Charlie Brown hitting or pitching in his game outfit, a running,dancing or flying Snoopy, Peppermint Patty snoozing on her school desk, the typical somersaultsand falls all look fairly simple as a form but not really easy to draw. Schulz succeeded as a

pictorial storyteller because his eyes were able to recognize the minimum clues that can expressmaximum message.

While drawing the strip, Schulz used pencil mock-ups as less as possible only to get the heightsand space right. He drew the faces directly from a 914 Radio crow-quill nib. The inward andoutward pressure of the nib has provided a free linear rhythm and spontaneity to his strikingly

beautiful drawings. As a pictorial composition, the panels ofPeanuts are a spectacle of playful,expressive, polyphonic and tectonic line elements with directional contrasts. Schulz could inject arare energy and grace in his tender and neatly rendered line drawings with remarkable variety,inventiveness and wit. On many occasions these drawings have achieved their expressive extremesto create visual poetry.

The linear tension of a Schulz composition is limited within the boundary of a square or arectangle. These flat formats have an inherent psychological and physical peculiarity. The two-dimensional surface of a square or rectangle has a strange compatibility with the three-dimensional concept of the viewers mind. A diagonal line placed on a flat surface can projectforward and backward depth instantly. When a line or a shape is placed upon a flat surface, the eyeinstead of focusing only on the line or shape is more likely to create a sense of pictorial depth. Thisperceived depth enhances the quality and scope of the given surface and converts it into a livelypictorial space. The perceptual forces are also relatively easy to control within the fixed boundariesof a square of rectangular panel space. Schulz became extremely aware of this phenomenon andcleverly used the perceptual relation between objects, shapes and figures as a structural andexpressive advantage while drawing his strip.

There are some unique features in his cartooning style. Graphic marks are the indispensableproperty of a Schulz drawing. Juxtaposed or detached placement of dots, inverted commas,hyphens, a spiral, a little curve or wavy line became the graphic shorthand of Schulz that couldlucidly express all sorts of human emotion wonder, gloom, happiness, annoyance, grief,adoration or weariness. Most of the panel space is filled by one or two figures and their speech

bubbles. The remaining space is either left empty or divided by using bare minimum props andsettings. In several panels, only a horizontal or vertical stroke of line is sufficient to create theillusion of perspective. Except the speech bubbles, Schulz never required a voice-over narration to

tell his story. A master with an economy of expression, Schulz can magnetize the readers byrepeating a horizontal wall or a fence and two talking heads in every panel of an entire stripwithout being dull for a moment. Through this form of graphic simplicity Schulz continued toproduce funny looking expressions and endearing gestures. A minimalist approach, sensiblemeandering of line, insightful use of pictorial space and a cinematic medium-shot viewpoint, all

with impressive economy, has contributed the trademark visual style of the strip to stand out fromthe rest.

Peanutstook a long time to develop its readers. It also took many years for Schulz to mature froma draftsman to a highly skillful artist. He gradually eliminated all the aesthetic deficiencies fromhis artwork. The enormous round head of Charlie Brown in the early drawings were scaled down

and fine tuned to get the perfect proportion and balance. The forehead of the figures flattened; thebody curves became loose, wavier lines was introduced to enhance the design impact of thedrawings. The beagle Snoopy deformed brilliantly to stand on his hinder legs from a four-leggedsemi-realistic beginning. Schulz later confessed that every time he drew Snoopy he probablychanges a little bit. The naturalistic birds of the earlier strips transformed into Woodstock. The

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personalities of allPeanutscharacters too developed alongside the transformed visual aspects ofthe strip. But under no circumstances did Schulz ever depart from his primary objective of drawingcartoons the objective to draw funny pictures.

Schulz was conscious that he cannot draw the children from an adult perspective and so broughthis viewpoint down to the level with children. His sarcastic humor rose from the everydaystruggles of life as it passed through a filter of innocence. The eminence of sarcasm is noticeable inthe way the strip has depicted the losses, cruelty and rejections of life in an apparently placid tone.

Schulz, who was also a gifted writer of remarkable skill, knew how to effectively express all thecomplex ideas through his eloquent prose. Through words and graphic images he had created anilluminating and aesthetically refined language of his own. Italian novelist and semioticianUmberto Eco has found his prose almost courtly, in a language worthy of Harvard. Eco hascorrectly observed that these children rarely laps into slang or commit anacoluthon.ThePeanutschildren were never seen to use an offensive word stronger than Good grief! whileexpressing their feelings even during the most despondent situations. The use of dignified verballanguage with sparkling laconic wit is an indisputable feature of the strip.

(End of Part One)