by Paul Wallis

Created on: April 20, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

CHARLES SCHULZ- HUMANITY IS SOME KIDS YOU KNOW

If anyone ever made the human race look human, it'd have to be Charles Schulz. Rather than indulge the usual verbiage and psychoanalysis of Peanuts, which is at spam levels, I'd like to be a bit more penetrant, and hopefully much less verbose. Maybe even in context with the world he worked in, too, for once.

It's hard to imagine anyone starting a cartooning career against the kind of professional competition Schulz encountered from day one in the mid 1950s. There were real giants of black and white cartoons, Wallace Wood and Bill Elder, doing the original MAD magazine. The heyday of The New Yorker artists was in full surge, including Chas Addams. Disney was at its height, and the really iconic Looney Tunes cartoons were just coming out.

The early Peanuts was a lot different from the later version. Charlie Brown was drawn pretty much conventionally, Snoopy was much more of a dog, both as an image and as a character, and the Peanuts gang were much more kidlike. Printed on pulp, image quality was less than terrific. At this point Schulz was at about early Thurber level for art, a pretty thankless place to be for someone who wasn't Thurber.

This material was strong enough to survive, though. Even MAD acknowledged it with a send up, pointing out cynically the joys of small fonts and four-frame cartoons. Given the incredibly high standard of the old MAD art, this would have been a relatively friendly jibe, from people who could see what was wrong with the format.

I first met Peanuts as the "new" Peanuts, and accidentally, since it wasn't yet in mainstream syndication in Australia, and certainly not getting the acclaim it did later. Two books, which I still have, (forty years later) "You're You, Charlie Brown", and "It's Your Life, Charlie Brown", and I was a lifetime fan of Schulz. Brilliant wit, pathos, humor, and a grandiose Beagle The Beagle I could follow. I had a genius dog of my own, so it made perfect sense to me.

Took me years to notice that the kids had become a real community and find out how they'd developed from pulp-dom to that stage I first met them. In terms of technical writing, regarding character development, Peanuts should be taught in colleges before anyone goes anywhere near writing for media, for all our sakes. Real "character development" was more of a jingle then, even than it is now. If you look at characters in the early-mid 60s media, human beings were basically walking story lines. Sitcom style,

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