Like many of us, Charlie Brown and his not entirely devoted dog, Snoopy, were always looking for ways out of the difficult and sometimes ugly world they lived in, through fantasies of sports stardom (such as actually winning, for once, a Little League game) and World War I dogfights with the Red Baron conducted from the top of a bullet-riddled kennel. As Blake Scott Ball argues in his perceptive survey of the longest-running individually drawn and written comic strip of all time, the success of Peanuts had something to do with a quality it shared with “good ol’” Charlie Brown himself: “wishy-washiness.” “I lean over backwards to keep from offending anybody,” Schulz told a reporter near the end of his remarkable 50-year run. The daily enjoyment of reading Peanuts (unlike reading Walt Kelly’s Pogo or Trudeau’s Doonesbury) often felt like a collective national retreat from irksome American reality.
The strip, one critic has pointed out, never provided a “topical home” for the national traumas of Schulz’s lifetime: “Hippies, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, CIA spy scandals, impeachments, elections.…” Peanuts existed in a hazy zone between Schulz’s imagination and the world that he and his readers actually lived in. It joyously provided a free space in which to play and laugh even when the real world didn’t seem very playful or funny at all.
For most of his career (until a series of Snoopy-as-soldier D-Day remembrances in the mid-1990s), Schulz rarely depicted or made references to the perilous world we live in; instead, he focused his narrative eye on topics that might existentially stress out children (and their parents) but wouldn’t physically harm them all that much. For all the angst and ennui they suffered—lying awake in the night wondering about past failures and future possibilities—nobody in the Peanuts gang ever suffers from serious disease, poverty, debilitating war wounds, or painful separation from loved ones—unless that separation leads to a quick and eventual reunion. (See: Snoopy, Come Home!)
And yet for all Schulz’s reticence about addressing significant world events, his readers couldn’t seem to stop finding special significance in Peanuts, whether they saw in it feel-good, Hallmark-card–like philosophy (à la Happiness is a Warm Puppy) or religious parable, or a reflection of the author’s views on war, feminism, and abortion rights. Garry Trudeau (famous for Doonesbury, a strip that wore the political world on its sleeve, which Schulz “despised”) felt that Schulz’s vision “vibrated with ’50s alienation,” and at least one reader claimed that Charlie Brown represented “the existential situation of the Beat Generation.” After all, like many lost souls, poor beleaguered Charlie Brown often wondered about his purpose in life. Some regarded this anxiety as the fate of any intelligent human being; others saw it as a commentary on what one historian called the “age of fear and suspicion.” Peanuts had to mean something. Didn’t it?