Peanuts is something you come back to. You revisit it in progressive stages, as you would an elderly relative; when you’re a child, they’re just a warm, friendly hug and the biscuits. When you’re a teenager they’re somebody who complicates family gatherings and about whom things are said in the kitchen, and then later they become an incredibly fascinating person with a unique life and a hundred stories…which you’ll never hear, because they’ve just passed away.
Peanuts itself passed away on the 13th of February, 2000, just one day after the death of its creator Charles Schulz (he had already written what was intended as the final strip). As a boy, I knew it as a series of sparse comic strips in little paperbacks, a sort of dry, oddball strip to read during those precious childhood hours spent lying on the carpet, exploring the lower shelves of the household bookcases and getting dust up my nose. I liked the dog best.
Grown up, I came back to Peanuts as a result of one of Alistair Cooke’s Letters From America. I was listening to disc three of the boxed set, recorded towards the end of Cooke’s career, when I reached the broadcast from 18 February, 2000:
A great man has died, probably the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain. More than that, when a whole wall of the Louvre was given over to him in 1990, a French curator said, ‘Why not? He is after all the most famous artist in the history of the world.’ You’ll know in an instant who I’m talking about if I say that he had 355 million readers around the world, appeared in 2,600 newspapers, 75 countries and was reproduced in twenty-one languages including three or four that I, supposedly at one time a linguistics student, have never heard of. Charles Schulz is the man; the creator, father and protector of an immortal family of ten kids, two dogs, and a bird.
A little while later, I found that Fantagraphics had started to reprint the Peanuts strips, year by year, in beautifully presented volumes, each of which spans two years of Schulz’s fifty-year career. I’m mentioning this a little late, perhaps—they’ve reached book eight, one third of the way into the projected twenty-four volumes—but now that I’m reviving this blog, I wanted to get in a mention of these wonderful books (which are now being republished by Canongate in the UK).
Now, I know that Peanuts has never exactly been hard to find in the shops, but these Fantagraphics editions are much more that the mere slapping on of a new cover. They’re a methodical, considered presentation of the work of one of the great writers of the 20th century, in context and in a chronological order which shows the changing of ideas and a reshuffling of priorities in a single, cohesive work that stretches over half a century.
And I still like the dog best.
