Sundays were the reason I fell in love with Peanuts.
During my formative years, it was always Sunday in Charlie Brown’s world.
My initial impression of Peanuts wasn’t formed by encountering the daily strip in the newspaper or by catching a rare UK showing of a Peanuts TV special. It wasn’t even shaped by the smaller black-and-white collections of daily strips that I would later collect.
My love affair with Snoopy & Co began with the full-colour Sunday strips, collected into big hardback albums.
In the 1980s, a comic strip collection was something you could buy as a respectable birthday gift, for a child or adult. Newspaper comic strips were still big business, and these anthologies were a desirable commodity. In this era, people would actually travel to see an exhibition of contemporary comic strips.
Really, this happened.
If I spotted a comics collection sitting on someone’s shelf I’d eagerly grasp the opportunity to flick through it. Garfield, B.C., The Wizard of Id – the quality didn’t matter. In the analogue era, any little snippet was gold dust.
Garish but great
This backdrop helps to explain why my first Peanuts collection came second-hand. The cover leaf still bears a 1981 birthday dedication to its original owner, my aunt. I became so enamoured of the volume during my visits with her that she soon passed it on to me.
You’re a Good Scout Snoopy was one of a small series of albums, published by Hodder and Stoughton in the UK, that collected Sunday strips from the 1970s.
These albums are a nightmare for the Peanut purist. The strips were garishly coloured, re-lettered and presented out of order.
But what these volumes lacked in presentation, they made up for in pure heft and quality.
Plus, they were funny: Peppermint Patty fruitless fishing for compliments; Linus suffering a peanut-butter kiss in the eye; Woodstock convinced that a grape can be used as a jack-o’-lantern.
At the weekend, I would sit and snack and pore over the volumes at the dinner table. Eventually I discerned the shape of a narrative intent in the utterly random ordering of the strips.
These albums educated me not only about Peanuts but also the wider world. Between those covers I first encountered unfamiliar names and concepts: Fay Wray, CB radio chatter, pagodas, French toast and – after the joke was patiently explained to me – ambidexterity.
When my parents decided to host friends and family for a barbecue one summer, the invites were sent out via photocopies of an appropriately themed strip from September 1975.
The expendables
There’s a very strange aspect to the Sunday strips, though – something antithetical to how we think about Peanuts.
Writing in 2001, shortly after Schulz’s passing, author George Saunders explained the genius of the daily black-and-white daily comic, which usually ran to just three or four panels:
If art is seen as a constant battle between freedom and constraint, then Peanuts was great not because it was joyfully unconstrained, but because it managed to be so joyful under constraint. Peanuts comprised a killer introduction to minimalism, to the idea that, to cover vast emotional territory, art need not be catalogic or vast.
The Sunday strips were very different. Not just because they were published in colour, but because they were published in a 10×14 inch format in US newspapers. They weren’t vast, but they weren’t minimal either.
The half-page format meant that the comic had to be three tiers tall. Yet because of space constraints, in some syndicated papers the first tier of the comic might be removed to create space for an additional strip to run.
Therefore each Sunday comic is designed so that it can be read without its opening tier. That part of the strip had to be functionally extraneous.
For this reason the first tier of ‘prologue panels’ often consisted of a symbolic image, a little bit of ambient scene-setting or some extraneous chit chat.
A daily Peanuts strip is utilitarian. Not for nothing was Chip Kidd’s 2015 retrospective titled Only What’s Necessary.
Those prologue panels, because they are designed to be expendable, only serve to give the strip its sense of atmosphere and place.
This is, to use a popular phrase in its original sense, the ‘liminal space’ of Peanuts: a meaningless zone of pure transition.
Crucially, as a child I had no idea about the byzantine syndication considerations that forced Schulz to create those expendable panels. I was as detached from that process as today’s digital natives are from the mechanical origins of the Qwerty layout.
But I wasn’t oblivious to the strangeness of it all. If anything, I was fascinated by it.
Phil Everum, in the guise of The Microphones, has written beautifully about this kind of youthful analogue obsession.
When you’re younger every single thing vibrates with significance. Gazing at the details in the artwork of a 7″, devouring every word in a zine … Meaning gets attributed wherever appetite bestows a thing with resonating glowing.
As I reread these albums over countless weekends, the strange, quiet panels made the world of Peanuts feel larger and even more wistful.
Sure, you could remove the first tier of the strip and still savour the trademark economy of Schulz’s writing, but something would be lost in that edit.
Explaining the success of their long-running three-panel webcomic, the creators of Penny Arcade remarked that often their punchline appears in the second panel. This leaves opportunities for awkward humour in the third panel: “We come in at the middle, show you the punch, and then leave the camera on a little too long.”
Peanuts on Sunday reverses that idea. Schulz gets his camera rolling a couple of panels early, before the joke gets going.
It’s a detail that meant a lot to me. It expanded Charlie Brown’s world, and mine as well.
