Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz’s daily comic, ended on February 13, 2000 after 50 years of publication and approximately 18,000 strips. It was an incredible feat of creativity, but did the author manage to ‘stick the landing’?
Today that phrase has become commonplace to assess whether a successful and long-running story concluded in a satisfying manner.
We say that the TV show Mad Men and Marvel’s cinematic Infinity Saga succeeded in sticking the landing, after years of build-up and audience investment. We do not say the same about the final instalments of Game of Thrones, or the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy.
It may seem a little petty to ask the same question of Peanuts.
How relevant is sticking the landing, when you’ve somehow managed to spin and somersault through the air for half a century? Being subjected to that kind of assessment would be the equivalent of winning the Marathon des Sables and having your performance graded based on your post-race interview.
Still, the ending mattered to a lot of people. Art Spiegelman noted that the announcement of the strip’s conclusion was greeted by ‘an outpouring of grief and affection not seen since Paris buried Victor Hugo’.
In the strip’s final years, that colossal readership remained understandably interested in the resolution of some decade-old storylines. A case in point: whether Charlie Brown would ever be able to kick the football held by Lucy.
Spoiler alert: he wouldn’t. But why not?
Snoopy and the sense of an ending
One could argue that, in contrast to a TV show or a film series, it doesn’t really matter how a newspaper comic strip ends.
After all, you watch an episode of a prestige TV show to be engrossed by the dramatic developments for an hour at a time. You read a four-panel daily comic strip to be pleasantly distracted for 15 seconds.
Yet it’s instructive to compare the final Sunday strip of Peanuts with the famous final strip of another beloved comic focused on an imaginative Middle American childhood.
In contrast with the last hurrah of Calvin and Hobbes – now held up as a pitch-perfect farewell – Schulz simply handed in his notice. Sure, the words are warm and the image of Snoopy typing atop the doghouse is fitting enough. But it has a slightly formal feeling – a beloved founder and CEO publicly stepping down.
What is even more remarkable is that the penultimate Peanuts – the last real comic published – is an unremarkable strip centred around a long-running gag: imagined love letters that never materialise.
That strip could have appeared at any point over the previous three decades without raising an eyebrow. It offers absolutely no sense of occasion or closure.
Forlorn in four panels
The closest we come to an elegy in those final strips is when Peppermint Patty and Marcie make their last appearance.
In a characteristic misunderstanding, Patty tries to continue a game of football amid a torrential downpour. She’s unaware that the other players have all left the field. Marcie arrives and urges her to go home because it’s getting dark. “We had fun, didn’t we, Marcie?” Patty asks.
Marcie offers some reassurance as she walks away. Alone in the rain, Patty delivers the punchline: “Nobody shook hands and said ‘good game’.”
This seems like the perfect moment to end the regular run of strips.
That is, until you consider that it was really nothing special in the grand scheme of things. So many Peanuts strips leave this familiar bittersweet taste. Whether resting on a toy piano, a doghouse, or a pitcher’s mound, a member of the gang is left in wistful contemplation of an unrealised goal.
Schulz treated ‘Peanuts’ as his job, not his calling
In 1985, Schulz explained that this had to remain the case, for the sake of consistency: “For all the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; and the football is always pulled away.”
This melancholic consistency, these repeated and reliably unresolved arcs, helped sustain the strip beyond the lifespan of all its competitors.
The reason why Peanuts could have ended at any random point in time, and why it did end on such an unremarkable note is simple. Schulz treated the strip as his job, not his calling.
The World Famous Author
For 50 years, Schulz ‘fulfilled his duties in a business-like manner.’ With the exception of a single employer-mandated break, he spent seven hours a day, five days a week working on Peanuts.
The decision not to have a neat or poetic ending was the only decision possible
He had an unassailable work ethic, sticking to his routine and punching the clock every weekday. Even when the muse was feeling elusive. Even the strip was making him more money than any normal person could hope to spend in a hundred lifetimes.
The approach is similar to that of Lee Child, another prolific and mind-bogglingly successful writer. Child famously sticks to simple daily routines and maintains an ironclad publishing schedule.
“I never imagine getting into a situation where you finish a book and then you agonise about it,” Child explained to Grantland in 2012. “You finish a book and you just say, ‘That is this year’s book.’”
Years before Child found success, Schulz had the same pragmatic attitude. He maintained it right up to the end: that is today’s strip, no point in agonising over it.
“All you’re trying to do is fill in those squares.” he explained in 1997. “Do something good for Monday, and then do something good for Tuesday, and then you do something for Wednesday.”
Brick by brick by brick. That’s how you end up building ‘arguably the longest story ever told by one human being’.
In this methodical, unromantic context, the decision not to have a neat or poetic ending became the only decision possible.
Good Grief!
Schulz’s decision to finally retire was triggered by continued ill health. “All I care about now is tomorrow; I want to feel better tomorrow,” he explained to Newsweek in late 1999.
Schulz passed away the day before his final comic was published. This led to the slightly misleading notion that he must have been working on Peanuts right up until his death. That he ‘died at his desk’.
It can make his desire to feel better tomorrow seem slightly forlorn. It completes a portrait of the cartoonist as a real-life Charlie Brown, subject to the ironical whims of an uncaring universe.
In reality, Schulz usually worked three months ahead of publication and his final strips were completed in December 1999. That fact that softens the existential blow, if only a little bit.
His professional circumstances, if not his personal ones, fit entirely with his plan. In 1975 Peanuts Jubilee was published, in celebration of the strip’s 25th year. Concluding a detailed explanation of his working life, Schulz opined that:
To create something out of nothing is a wonderful experience. To take a blank piece of paper and draw characters that people love and worry about is extremely satisfying. I hope very much that I will be allowed to do it for another twenty-five years.
Unlike Charlie Brown, he achieved his goal. In doing so, he stuck the landing.
I think you nailed this. That final strip (whether daily or Sunday) may not have the great payoff but one has to consider the milieu in which Schulz worked; that of a professional cartoonist who remained committed to the values he’d always lived by, irrespective of success. Perhaps it’s also a mark of respect to all those jobbing cartoonists who never got to send off their characters in the way they’d have liked (although the ever-enigmatic George Herriman did seemingly kill off Krazy Kat, one of the few to match Peanuts’ feted status (at least critically) in his posthumously published final Sunday). I read somewhere that Schulz himself had never objected to Peanuts continuing under a different creator, but that it was his family’s wish it should finish, which strikes me as entirely consistent with his ethos.