What's your favourite era of Peanuts? I'm torn between the extremely early and extremely late periods, which I feel are more similar to each other than to the stuff in the middle.
Most people seem to like the 60s strips the best, but my preference is solidly rooted in The 1970s. I feel like that’s when Schulz did his best story arcs, like when Charlie Brown goes to the hospital, or when he goes to camp and has to wear a bag over his head (which causes everyone to respect him), or when he has to run away after biting the kite-eating tree and he is sort of adopted by a bunch of smaller kids.
That’s not a knock on the 60s, which is also, obviously, Prime Schulz. I think what I liked about the 70s Peanuts is that it was the decade when he really knew the characters so well that he felt most comfortable going to weird places that I liked. I enjoyed, for instance, when he decided to make Sally’s school building a character with its own thoughts and feelings. His oddball choices in the 70s always seem sharp and hit the correct targets, I think. This was my impression before reading The Complete Peanuts, but the chronological read of the full run reconfirmed it for me.
The 80s are the weakest decade– that seems to be the universal consensus, I’ve never heard anyone argue that the 80s Peanuts were better than any of the other decades. I think the jokes are more hit-and-miss, and there are things like the introduction of Snoopy’s sister, Belle, which seems to be a calculated move so that they could produced a “girl Snoopy” plush doll. Also, I really hate when Schulz changes the Sunday “Peanuts” logo to the blocky one that doesn’t look like his drawing. Why did he do that? The one he used before that was way better, that never made any sense to me.
Spike’s presence in the strip is the main development of note in the 80s– it’s both a good and bad development, I’ll argue. The bad part of this is, I think, obvious– way too many strips devoted to cactus gags and the repetitive joke that Spike is an insane dog who lives in the desert. (His flights of fancy seem sad, in contrast to Snoopy’s, which seem empowering.) The GOOD part is that Schulz obviously just wanted to do a bunch of strips about a crazy dog in the desert with lots of cactus gags, and instead of creating a 2nd strip and diluting his attentions (perhaps hiring assistants to take over some of his duties) he folded his second strip into Peanuts. Every time I read a Spike strip, I am reminded of the fact that Peanuts is Schulz’s main outlet for creative expression, and that he didn’t pass off his comic strip duties to anyone else. This is the strip he wanted to do, and part of that involves him taking frequent side trips to the desert to scratch that particular itch.
90s Peanuts are in some ways a period of further decline– his hand gets shakier, the writing makes less and less sense at times– but I’d argue (and I think most Peanuts fans agree) that the strips obvious flaws at this stage are actually part of what makes the strip great. Sure, Schulz can no longer draw a perfect Charlie Brown head, but it’s still HIS hand drawing the strip 7 days a week. Yes, the strip no longer makes the kind of clear sense that it made in the 50s and 60s, and the premise of little kids speaking in a kind of hip sophisticated way has sort of blurred until it vanished entirely. These LOOK like the same characters he’s always drawn, and they have familiar habits and character traits, but the strip is now essentially about old people. Lucy wears baggy sweatpants like an old woman, and Charlie Brown and Snoopy spend a LOT of time on the golf course.
I have a theory that Charles Schulz wasn’t allowed to have sugar in his final decade, and that’s why Snoopy suddenly becomes obsessed with cookies. After 4 decades of being a multi-layered and complicated fantasist, imagining World War I adventures and countless other personas, Snoopy seems to spend almost all of his time in the 90s thinking about cookies. For a lot of 90s Peanuts strips, Snoopy exists only to deliver a non sequitur about cookies in place of an actual earned punchline. It’s weird.
But the point is: Schulz had already done his 20 to 30 years of classic comic strip perfection, and the last two decades aren’t about that. I doubt that anyone could have done two more decades of the same strip and maintained that level of quality. What makes the last two decades so special is that he kept at it, for better or for worse, and the strip is a chronicle of a great artist fighting the good fight, creatively. And sometimes he still hits it out of the part. It’s inspiring.
There is an argument to be made for calling it quits like Watterson did with Calvin & Hobbes. He has a perfect body of work that fits in a reasonably-sized slipcase, and he got to retire and go off and live out the rest of his life without the hassle of deadlines. Bill Watterson is The Beatles of newspaper comic strips.
Schulz is something else, and I find both examples inspiring. But as much as I admire the perfection of Calvin & Hobbes, I kind of wish we had 50 years of strips, even if he had reached a point where he couldn’t drawn Hobbes as good as he used to. I would have liked to seem him try. (Same with Gary Larson, who also quit The Far Side at the height of its popularity but for some reason doesn’t get mourned with the same intensity.)
That’s the real beauty of Schulz’s full run of Peanuts. You can choose to read only the great stuff, and you’d have plenty to enjoy. But really, the 50-year run which started with little kids being mean to each other in clever ways somehow morphed into something that looked and felt similar but was actually an almost completely different thing altogether.
SIDEBAR: the return of Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County answers the question of whether he is a Schulz or a Watterson. This is his third time resurrecting his classic strip– twice before he has attempted to create a “new” comic strip (Outland and Opus) only to have both of them very quickly morph back into Bloom County 2.0 and 3.0, despite his best efforts. This time is the first time he seems to have accepted that what he wants to be doing is drawing more Bloom County. I think it’s off to a very promising start.
SIDEBAR SIDEBAR: I have read an interview where Schulz is really shitty when asked about Garry Trudeau, saying that he is not a “professional” and shaking his head “no” when asked if he has anything positive to say about Doonesbury. Trudeau is one of my heroes, and I’m happy to report that when I was fortunate enough to spend a few hours with him a few years back, he proved himself to be as kind and smart and funny as you hope your heroes might be if you ever encounter them in real life. A few sabbaticals aside, Trudeau is very much a “Schulz,” and Doonesbury has grown and changed with its creator over the decades.
I mean, to answer your question: the 1970s. But really, the true answer is the whole damn thing.
