We had prepared for the arrival of our first child in all the usual ways. We’d converted the spare bedroom to a nursery, picked out the perfect co-sleeper crib, and stocked up on pristine white babygrows.
With my wife deep into the third trimester, there was just one time-honoured task outstanding. We still had to select the cover of a Peanuts reprint collection so it could be enlarged, framed and hung on the wall of the nursery.
Peanuts has been a lifelong obsession of mine. My collection of Schulzian bric-a-brac includes a shelf of some 60 or so paperbacks accumulated from jumble sales, village fêtes and second-hand book stalls.
Published in the UK by Coronet, these little books reprinted the American Fawcett Crest series: the longest-running series of Peanuts collections, published from the early 1960s to the 1990s.
Most of the covers created for this series used a limited colour palette and bore names apparently conceived by a random Peanuts title generator: You’re an Adjective Noun, Charlie Brown.
Faced with a plethora of appealing candidates, my wife and I arranged all the books on the floor, to start whittling down our options.
You’re a cover star, Snoopy!
This image was going to hang on the wall during the formative years of my firstborn’s life, so the cover needed to serve a dual purpose. It had to look attractive, and the title needed to communicate something important and useful about life, in the manner of a zen koan or Platonic aphorism.
After removing the generically named volumes (Fun with Peanuts, Charlie Brown and Snoopy), we quickly eliminated those with titles that felt inappropriate (Think thinner, Snoopy), too grownup (How romantic, Charlie Brown) or obscure (Jogging is in, Snoopy).
Others titles were simply too harsh (You’ve done it again, Charlie Brown), too melancholic (It’s raining on your parade, Charlie Brown) or excessively pessimistic (You can’t win them all, Charlie Brown).
There were a number of books with positive titles that seemed worthy for consideration in the final reckoning, ranging from You’ve come a long way, Snoopy all the way to Don’t give up, Charlie Brown.
But ultimately it came down to two final candidates, in which we found the perfect union of art and aphorism: We’re all in this together and That’s life, Snoopy.
Up the creek or up a tree?
The cover for We’re all in this together features Snoopy urging his ‘Beagle Scouts’ to paddle with all their combined might. (No matter that the rafting is taking place in a bird bath.)
It offered a lot of visual interest for the bedroom and a very positive and uplifting message for our progeny. Teamwork makes the dream work!
That said, the cover image lacked the simplicity and the striking, limited colour palette of many of the other Coronet editions. It didn’t seem entirely in the spirit of the endeavour.
That’s life, Snoopy spoke more directly to our goals.
The cover image had a classical simplicity: Snoopy and Woodstock hang from the branch of a tree, looking a little startled by this unnatural turn of events.
Their situation seemed to speak to the absurdity of existence; the slings and arrows that a human (or beagle, or a bird) might face throughout their lives.
This is how life is, the picture seemed to say. Don’t be surprised if sometimes, unexpectedly, you find yourself upside down hanging from a tree branch. There will be difficult situations to figure out. With any luck you’ll have a friend with you.
If I had just one opportunity to summarise existence for an impressionable child, and if my message was confined to the genre of 1970s Peanuts paperback reprints… Well, our search was over.
That’s Life, Snoopy was plucked from obscurity to become The Chosen One. An unremarkable 1978 edition with a title page annotated in cramped blue cursive: This Book Belongs to Brian Davis.
Not any more it doesn’t, Brian.
Getting crabby about kerning
Less than a month after we framed and hung the picture, our daughter arrived.
Those weary months and years of early parenthood flew by. I spent countless hours in the nursery waiting – often impatiently, occasionally with monkish serenity – for my little girl to go to sleep. I had considerable time to contemplate our choice of cover, from a variety of angles.
For a former magazine editor trained to take a fastidious approach to design, this purgatory arguably presented me with too much time to think.
After a while, I discerned some slightly troubling kerning in THAT’S – between the A and the second T. It was a blemish that wasn’t obvious until the image had been blown up to roughly 1,600% its original size. I began to wonder why the graphic designer at Coronet hadn’t spotted this some 38 years earlier. Maybe, like me and my wife, that harried professional simply found themselves with too many Peanuts covers to process at once.
Sometime later I also identified a typo in the subtitle: Selected Cartoons from Thomson is in Trouble, Charlie Brown Vol. 1). This sloppy error insults the memory of Thompson, one of the most obscure characters in Peanuts history.
But perhaps the cover of That’s life, Snoopy was never meant to bear this level of scrutiny? I bet Brian Davis never stared at it that much.
The bottom line is: when we selected this image, my wife and I never realised we would spend more time gazing at it than would our child.
You’re upside down, Snoopy
My daughter is five years old now and I can’t remember her mentioning her bespoke Peanuts wall art to me at any point during her lifetime. Its presence is just an abiding fact of her life: the only bit of wall art she’s ever known, in the only bedroom she’s ever had.
A few days ago, I asked her if she liked the picture. Sitting on her bed and glancing over it, she confirmed that she did.
I asked her what she thought was going on in the image. She studied Snoopy for a moment and then proclaimed: “He’s upside down, like a bat!”
This alone was an encouraging development, because she nailed the punchline of the strip without even having read it.
I risked probing the topic a little further. “What do you think it means: That’s life?” But this was an existential question too far for a five-year-old mind.
So I explained what the words and the picture meant to me: that, sometimes in life, strange and unexpected things happen. You might find yourself upside down in a tree!
As I talked, she rearranged herself on the bed, so that she was supine, with her neck flopped over the edge of the mattress.
Now she was facing Snoopy and Woodstock but with her head upside down, and her long mousy hair trailing down to the carpet below.
“Daddy, it looks the right way around for me, right now!” she observed, with a grin.
One of the earliest posters I had on my bedroom wall – bear in mind this would have been late 70’s/early 80’s – was Snoopy cursing the Red Baron rendered in binary ones and zeros on computer printout paper (thereby perhaps lies the inspiration for a later pointillist catastrophe ;)). My mum still has a large collection of the Coronet volumes as indeed I have a few of my own. That heartbreaking final Peanuts strip with Snoopy typing farewell was when the 20th century truly ended.
The fourth issue of Joe Casey and Ashley Wood’s criminally underrated series Automatic Kafka (2002) is a sardonic but ultimately touching homage to Charlie Brown et al, which I’d probably include among my favourite comic books ever.