#chrisware

Even the least critical reader can sense falseness and fakery on the part of an unskilled—or, worse, dishonest—cartoonist. And, because the comic strip is a valueless throwaway, the cartoonist must win the reader’s trust without benefit of critical backing, museum walls, and monied collectors. The best comic strips present the cartoonist laid bare on the page; they are a condensed sum-uppance of the artist’s notions of, ideally, what makes life funny, but also of what makes it worth living. This artistic effort has to occur not over a career punctuated by a handful of masterpieces but every single day. The skeptical reader arrives cold to a little slice of comic-strip newsprint and gives the cartoonist four, maybe five, seconds: “O.K., make me laugh.” It’s no wonder that Charles Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,” woke up feeling funereal, or like he had a term paper due every morning. Or, as he also said, “In a comic strip, yesterday doesn’t mean anything. The only thing that matters is today and tomorrow.”

It’s not the skill of the drawing, or the lines, or the lettering, or the funny words that make a strip work. Timing is the life force of comics. Without a sensitivity to the rhythms and the music—a.k.a. the reality—of life, a comic strip will arrive D.O.A., nothing more than a bunch of dumb pictures. When the comic-strip reader moves through those four panels containing those little repeating hieroglyphs, the characters must come alive on the page with as much ferocity and resonance as the people in one’s own life and memory. The reader doesn’t just look at Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, and Snoopy but reads them as musical notes in a silently heard composition of hilarity, cruelty, and occasional melancholy.

Due to an essential tremor in Schulz’s drawing hand, as the result of a quadruple-bypass surgery in 1981, this distillation felt shakier in later years; he sometimes even steadied his drawing arm with the other, to reduce the tremors to a minimum. But this difficulty did not change the strip’s essence, or Schulz’s devotion to drawing it: “I am still searching for that wonderful pen line that comes down—when you are drawing Linus standing there, and you start with the pen up near the back of his neck and you bring it down and bring it out, and the pen point fans out a little bit, and you come down here and draw the lines this way for the marks on his sweater, and all of that . . . This is what it’s all about—to get feelings of depth and roundness, and the pen line is the best pen line you can make. That’s what it’s all about.”

Schulz’s mind, and then hand, transmuted the “Peanuts” characters onto the paper and then into the eyes and minds of millions of readers, and he knew those readers trusted him to “make the best he could make.” He never gave up on them. Besides, no one else could have done it; despite the deceptive simplicity of a “Peanuts” drawing, faking one—let alone four of them in a row—is impossible. If there is one accomplishment in the art of cartooning for which Schulz should be credited, it’s that he made comics into a broader visual language of emotion and, more importantly, empathy. For this, all cartoonists—especially those of us who have attempted “graphic novels”—owe Schulz, well, everything.