The Comics of Charles Schulz
The Comics of Charles Schulz
The Good Grief of Modern Life
With contributions by Leonie Brialey, MJ Clarke, Roy T. Cook, Joseph J. Darowski, Ian Gordon, Gene Kannenberg Jr., Christopher P. Lehman, Anne C. McCarthy, Ben Owen, Lara Saguisag, Ben Saunders, Jeffrey O. Segrave, and Michael Tisserand
The Comics of Charles Schulz collects new essays on the work of the creator of the immensely popular Peanuts comic strip. Despite Schulz’s celebrity, few scholarly books on his work and career have been published. This collection serves as a foundation for future study not only of Charles Schulz (1922-2000) but, more broadly, of the understudied medium of newspaper comics.
Schulz’s Peanuts ran for a half century, during which time he drew the strip and its characters to express keen observations on postwar American life and culture. As Peanuts’ popularity grew, Schulz had opportunities to shape the iconography, style, and philosophy of modern life in ways he never could have imagined when he began the strip in 1950. Edited by leading scholars Jared Gardner and Ian Gordon, this volume ranges over a spectrum of Schulz’s accomplishments and influence, touching on everything from cartoon aesthetics to the marketing of global fast food. Philosophy, ethics, and cultural history all come into play. Indeed, the book even highlights Snoopy’s global reach as American soft power.
As the broad interdisciplinary range of this volume makes clear, Peanuts offers countless possibilities for study and analysis. From many perspectives—including childhood studies, ethnic studies, health and exercise studies, as well as sociology—The Comics of Charles Schulz offers the most comprehensive and diverse study of the most influential cartoonist during the second half of the twentieth century.
This valuable volume of essays on Schulz’s work reminds us of the importance of going back repeatedly to those deceptively simple strokes of the pencil in search of the new insights they can still hold for us.
Over half a century after its debut, Charles Schulz’s deceptively sophisticated Peanuts art continues to impact readers and cultures worldwide. Gardner and Gordon’s The Comics of Charles Schulz treats Schulz’s iconic property with the sophistication and care it deserves. At once insightful and enjoyable, the volume is a valuable addition not just to an understanding of Peanuts but also to comics studies, literary analysis, and beyond.
Charles M. Schulz, many of us believe, was the greatest cartoonist of the twentieth century, but it is inarguable that the characters in his comic strip, Peanuts, have become icons of American culture. Just how powerful and influential they were can be partially measured by the lucid and thoughtful essays in this intelligently edited volume in the Critical Approaches to Comics Artists Series. They set a high standard for the critical analyses and scholarly appreciations sure to follow.
Jared Gardner is professor of English at The Ohio State University. He is author of Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845; Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling; and The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture. Ian Gordon has taught history and media studies for many years at the National University of Singapore. His publications include Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon, Ben Katchor: Conversations, and Film and Comic Books, the latter two published by University Press of Mississippi.
