I've been re-reading Charles Schulz's Peanuts strips lately.
Schulz was a genius. His strips have the compression and formal mastery of great poetry.
For almost fifty years the strip appeared in the same format: four panels a day, six days a week (with eight to ten panels on Sunday). Under this severe formal constraint Schulz delivered a series of meditative "gags" that possess acute psychological insight and humane wisdom. And they're funny!
The strips are astonishing in the simplicity of their forms, their narrative inventiveness, their staging, and the sheer elan of their cartooning. Shulz is one of those artists whose visual grammer is so clear you can read it at a glance. It's really exemplary stuff.
Taken as a whole, Peanuts strikes me as a major work of 20th century literary art.
Schulz was a genius. His strips have the compression and formal mastery of great poetry.
For almost fifty years the strip appeared in the same format: four panels a day, six days a week (with eight to ten panels on Sunday). Under this severe formal constraint Schulz delivered a series of meditative "gags" that possess acute psychological insight and humane wisdom. And they're funny!
The strips are astonishing in the simplicity of their forms, their narrative inventiveness, their staging, and the sheer elan of their cartooning. Shulz is one of those artists whose visual grammer is so clear you can read it at a glance. It's really exemplary stuff.
Taken as a whole, Peanuts strikes me as a major work of 20th century literary art.
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1 comment:
Hobby,
Very interesting posts.
Curious... what are your thoughts on Calvin and Hobbes? I had always been a big fan and my sister gave me the 'Sunday Pages 1985-1995' book recently. Interesting to see the evolution of the strip and read it's history in Watterson's own words.
Tom
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