Peanuts and the cult of newspaper comic strips | Little White Lies

Long Read

Peanuts and the cult of news­pa­per com­ic strips

14 Dec 2015

Words by Nick Pinkerton

A smiling man in a suit and tie, holding a trophy or award, against a geometric backdrop of diagonal lines.
A smiling man in a suit and tie, holding a trophy or award, against a geometric backdrop of diagonal lines.
With Snoopy and Char­lie Brown back in cin­e­mas, Nick Pinker­ton explores the lega­cy of Charles M Schultz and oth­er inno­v­a­tive cartoonists.

A few years before the Death of Cin­e­ma dis­cus­sion reached a deaf­en­ing din, there was the Death of the Com­ic Strip. Rather than com­pe­ti­tion from the small screen, the issue was dis­ap­pear­ing page real-estate, stuff­ing more and small­er pan­els into an ever-con­tract­ing lay­out to ser­vice an ever-shrink­ing audi­ence. Per­haps the medium’s most elo­quent eulo­gist was also one of its last uni­ver­sal­ly-esteemed artists, Bill Wat­ter­son, the cre­ator of Calvin and Hobbes’, who declared his cause lost and retired, his final strip run­ning on New Year’s Eve, 1995.

In March that same year, Berke­ley Breathed, who’d also bemoaned the slow smoth­er­ing of the fun­ny pages”, began the first of what would be a series of retire­ments, wrap­ping up his Sun­day strip, Out­land’, a sequel of sorts to his remark­able Bloom Coun­ty’, which first appeared in 1980. Even Gary Lar­son, whose sin­gle-pan­el The Far Side’ seemed best equipped to sur­vive the Great Shrink­age, closed up shop on New Year’s Day, 95. Over the course of a sin­gle year, the bright­est lights of a gen­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can news­pa­per car­toon­ists went dark.

It’s just a page of inky blur that only a 10-year-old’s eyes could focus upon,” Breathed told an inter­view­er in 2001 of the state of the art. It’s the bug­gy whips of this mil­len­ni­um: quaint and eclipsed.” It hadn’t always been so. Once, said Breathed, com­ic heroes were America’s first celebri­ties, known coast to coast.”

The com­ic strip and the motion pic­ture, in their mod­ern forms, are rough­ly con­tem­po­raries, two emis­saries of a new mass media visu­al cul­ture born at the dawn of the 20th cen­tu­ry which, through a process of cre­ative cross-fer­til­i­sa­tion, togeth­er draft­ed and refined a vocab­u­lary for graph­ic sto­ry­telling. The Yel­low Kid, gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered the first break­out com­ic star, first appeared in Richard F Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley’ on 17 Feb­ru­ary, 1895 – the year usu­al­ly giv­en as the birth­day of motion pic­tures for the lack of any more viable can­di­date. (The sta­tus afford­ed the Yel­low Kid reflects a ten­den­cy to view com­ic strips as a Yan­kee inven­tion, though England’s Ally” Slop­er appeared in the pages of Judy’ as ear­ly as 1867 – and first appeared in a live-action film in 1898.)

Outcault’s ini­tial out­let was Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World’, though the Yel­low Kid char­ac­ter proved so pop­u­lar that William Ran­dolph Hearst’s New York Jour­nal’ hired he and the Kid, short­ly before that paper began, in 1897, to run Rudolph Dirks and Harold H Knerr’s Katzen­jam­mer Kids’. That same year the Lubin Film Com­pa­ny of Philadel­phia released a cash-in short titled Yel­low Kid, with the Amer­i­can Muto­scope Company’s The Katzen­jam­mer Kids in School from 1898 arriv­ing hot on its heels.

Mean­while, out west, a young artist who was hon­ing his drafts­man­ship at the Cincin­nati Com­mer­cial Tri­bune, Wind­sor McCay, saw a demon­stra­tion of Thomas A Edison’s Vitas­cope at a dime muse­um on Vine Street. Soon he would be head­ed off to join the staff at James Gor­don Ben­nett, Jr’s New York Her­ald’, where his work would briefly appear along­side Outcault’s new strip, Buster Brown’, and where he would con­tin­ue to dream of the new pos­si­bil­i­ties afford­ed by Edison’s invention.

In the ear­ly years of the movies, when fram­ing still large­ly fol­lowed the mod­el of the the­atri­cal prosce­ni­um arch, com­ic artists were exper­i­ment­ing with the panoply of cin­e­mat­ic” tech­niques in strips that now appear as fore­run­ners to the sto­ry­board. Ini­tial­ly, how­ev­er, the news­pa­pers were tapped for con­tent, for char­ac­ters and sce­nar­ios with proven appeal. Ear­ly film pio­neer Edwin S Porter, of The Great Train Rob­bery fame, direct­ed Buster Brown shorts for the Edi­son Man­u­fac­tur­ing Com­pa­ny, as well as a 1906 film from McCay’s Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend’ series, which depict­ed tem­pes­tu­ous night­mares brought on by the con­sump­tion of Welsh rarebit before bed.

Best known as the cre­ator of the Lit­tle Nemo in Slum­ber­land’ strip, McCay’s illus­tra­tions of dream states would lead some to label him a pro­to-sur­re­al­ist – a gag from Rarebit Fiend’ recurs in Luis Buñuel’s 1930 short, L’Age d’Or – although his lega­cy in motion pic­tures is tied up with his role as a pio­neer of film ani­ma­tion. Inspired by his son Robert’s flip books, McCay self-financed 10 ani­mat­ed shorts between 1911 and 1921, includ­ing 1911’s Lit­tle Nemo and 1913’s Ger­tie the Dinosaur, both of which he incor­po­rat­ed as inter­ac­tive ele­ments of his vaude­ville act, before Hearst buf­faloed him away from flights of fan­cy and into edi­to­r­i­al work.

Cartoon strip with characters from Peanuts comic strip in a snowy setting decorating a Christmas tree

Soon it became de rigueur for char­ac­ters to shut­tle between screen and print­ed page, with Hearst and his King Fea­tures Syn­di­cate lead­ing the way in mul­ti­me­dia brand syn­er­gy. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat’ got the ani­mat­ed treat­ment in 1916, as did Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff’. (Also, begin­ning in 1911, the basis for a series of one-reel­ers from David Horsley’s Nestor Come­dies’.) Felix the Cat, who first appeared in a series of ani­mat­ed shorts around 1919, got his own strip for King in 1923. EC Segar added a sailor with bal­looned for­ceps to the cast of his Thim­ble The­atre in 1929, and four years lat­er Max and Dave Fleischer’s Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios pro­duced the first Pop­eye the Sailor Man shorts. In his Minute Movies’ strip, car­toon­ist Ed Whee­lan, using a recur­ring com­pa­ny of invent­ed mat­inée idols, illus­trat­ed the movies in his own mind.

Car­toons became com­ic strips, com­ic strips became ani­mat­ed shorts, and strips became live-action films. The 1920’s brought strip-to-live-action crossover acts includ­ing 1926’s Ella Cin­ders, Bring­ing Up Father, and Harold Teen (both from 1928), but the great­est dual-medi­um suc­cess of the era was undoubt­ed­ly Blondie, cre­at­ed in 1930 by Chic Young and car­ried by King, which spun off a grand total of 28 films star­ring Pen­ny Sin­gle­ton and Arthur Lake as Blondie and Dag­wood Bum­stead. Those who want­ed to see still more of the Bum­steads could turn to any num­ber of Tijua­na Bibles”, illic­it under­ground comics which imag­ined promi­nent fig­ures of the day as they engaged in (usu­al­ly quite ver­bose) episodes of explic­it con­ju­gal bliss. Com­ic strip fig­ures were pop­u­lar sub­jects, as were stars of the sil­ver screen – see for instance Lau­rel and Hardy in Doing Things, William Pow­ell and Myr­na Loy in Nuts to Will Hays, or Char­lie McCarthy in Using a Wood­en One.

Lim­it­ing our­selves to cas­es of adap­ta­tion, how­ev­er, we will bare­ly get at the para­mount impor­tance that com­ic strips had in shap­ing the imag­i­na­tions of gen­er­a­tions of film­mak­ers. A few exam­ples: Georges Méliès, ear­ly in his career, was a polit­i­cal car­toon­ist. José Guadalupe Posa­da, a pro­lif­ic print­mak­er who con­tributed to the pen­ny press – the Mex­i­can nation­al equiv­a­lent to the com­ic pages at the turn of the last cen­tu­ry – cre­at­ed an entire iconog­ra­phy for rep­re­sent­ing his native land, drawn on by Sergei Eisen­stein in ¡Que viva México! and by the film artists of the com­ing Cine de Oro. (The con­joined his­to­ry of Japan­ese cin­e­ma and man­ga prob­a­bly deserves its own stand­alone piece.)

Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, a devo­tee of Amer­i­can strips like Hap­py Hooli­gan’, eked out a pal­try liv­ing in Flo­rence as a teenag­er by sell­ing sketch­es to the satir­i­cal week­ly 420’, and remained an invet­er­ate doo­dler through his life. Sam Fuller also dab­bled, illus­trat­ing his World War Two com­bat jour­nals with draw­ings in the style of Bil­ly DeBeck. (His broth­er, Ving, was the staff car­toon­ist at the lurid New York Evening Graph­ic’ where Sam had been a teenaged crime reporter.) Between 1983 and 1992, poly­math David Lynch con­tributed a strip called The Angri­est Dog in the World’ to the week­ly LA Read­er’, always of the same four pan­els, three depict­ing the tit­u­lar tor­pe­do-shaped dog strain­ing at its leash dur­ing the day, one the same scene at night, and the same omi­nous pro­logue: “…He can­not eat. He can­not sleep. He can just bare­ly growl…”

Alter­na­tive week­lies like the Read­er’ were incu­ba­tors for inno­v­a­tive new tal­ents work­ing in the strip for­mat, includ­ing Mark Bey­er and Matt Groen­ing, though movie pro­duc­ers paid lit­tle heed to these devel­op­ments. The Jazz Age boom of strip adap­ta­tions was nev­er repeat­ed, but Hol­ly­wood would con­tin­ue to peri­od­i­cal­ly test the public’s col­lec­tive nos­tal­gia for the Gold­en Age of Car­toon­ing, pro­duc­ing the box-office deba­cle of Robert Altman’s live-action Pop­eye in 1980, John Huston’s Annie in 1982 and Den­nis the Men­ace in 1993, a bowd­leri­sa­tion of Hank Ketcham’s strip which was part of a post-Home Alone bumper crop of movies star­ring awful chil­dren. These films appeared dur­ing the Indi­an sum­mer of news­pa­per car­toon­ing as a pop­u­lar art, the era of Breathed, Lar­son, and Wat­ter­son none of whom had any impact on cin­e­ma, per se. Breathed and Lar­son tried tele­vi­sion shorts, while Wat­ter­son was a car­toon­ing-as-car­toon­ing purist who refused to license out his cre­ations – among the sub­jects dis­cussed in Joel Allen Schroeder’s 2013 doc­u­men­tary Dear Mr Watterson.

Charles Sparky” Schultz, the dean of Amer­i­can car­toon­ing from the mid-cen­tu­ry onwards, nev­er had any such com­punc­tions about cross-pro­mo­tion, lend­ing his Peanuts’ char­ac­ters to a series of well-loved tele­vi­sion spe­cials pro­duced in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Bill Melen­dez, begin­ning with 1965’s A Char­lie Brown Christ­mas. While the best and bright­est Boomer tal­ents aban­doned ship, Schultz held on until 2000, when he essen­tial­ly died at his draw­ing table, hav­ing turned out dis­cur­sive, dot­ti­ly-charm­ing, and increas­ing­ly gag-free Peanuts’ strips to the end of his days.

With this, the field was ced­ed to hacks whose work had lit­tle to lose from for­mat­ting changes that deval­ued drafts­man­ship, as the smart phone and com­put­er screen deval­ue mise-en-scèné. After the great abdi­ca­tion, the rulers of the bar­ren king­dom that the fun­nies had become were Scott Adams, with his postage-stamp-frame Dil­bert’, and the hack­i­est of them all, Jim Davis, whose end­less­ly repet­i­tive Garfield’ strips were an after­thought in his Paws, Inc mer­chan­dis­ing juggernaut.

Of course, Davis would even­tu­al­ly get his paws into fea­ture films with 2004’s Garfield: The Movie, whose mix­ture of com­put­er ani­ma­tion and human actors is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a 21st cen­tu­ry cin­e­ma that has made firm des­ig­na­tions like live-action” and ani­ma­tion” prob­lem­at­ic. The film’s Garfield, with his every orange-and-black hair artic­u­lat­ed, epit­o­mised a new dif­fi­cul­ty in strip-to-screen trans­la­tion – the CGI hyper-real­ism ruins the line, a cartoonist’s sig­na­ture and the source of what­ev­er charm his cre­ations have. (The less said of 2010’s Mar­maduke, the better.)

Pre­lim­i­nary glimpses of Bly Sky Stu­dios’ forth­com­ing The Peanuts Movie sug­gest great pains have been tak­en to retain Schultz’s style, though whether the film will embody what car­toon­ist Ivan Brunet­ti called Peanuts’ sim­ple, beau­ti­ful, empa­thet­ic glimpse into the human con­di­tion” remains to be seen. What­ev­er the case, when trac­ing over the work of an Old Mas­ter, we’re very far removed from the once-live­ly dia­logue between strip and screen.

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Char­lie Brown and Snoopy: The Peanuts Movie is released 21 December.

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