On November 26th 100 years ago he was born Charles M. Schulz, the father of Peanuts, the very famous characters of the humorous comic strip of the same name. Although the most significant date of his life is February 13, 2000, the day following his death, when his last strip is published, in which he communicates «My family doesn’t want Peanuts to be drawn by someone else, so I announce my retirement”. The message is entrusted to one of the protagonists of the comic, the beagle Snoopy, who since 1950, together with a group of children, has animated the imagination of millions of readers, young and old, all over the world.
The first to appear in the cartoons is Charlie Brown, pivot of the stories and emblem of the ordinary man doomed to failure. He has a younger sister, Sally, convinced that the world always owes her an explanation, and an overbearing friend, Lucy, who constantly judges and bullies him. Lucy also has a younger brother, Linus, who will impose himself in the imagination for his blanket, also mentioned in psychology manuals as a symbol of comfort to insecurities. And then there’s Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s dog, who types, walks on two legs and has an unlikely friendship with Woodstock, a yellow bird who expresses himself through vertical lines that only his friend can understand.
Over the course of 50 years, the identity of the comic has never changed. From strip to strip he went on to compose a very long American novel, based on relationships and situations in which every reader could identify. Behind the simplicity of these children’s lives are the complexities of adults: from Lucy’s catchphrase who takes the football away from Charlie Brown 45 times, to Linus’ faith in the Great Pumpkin, up to Charlie Brown’s never confessed love for “the red-haired girl”. Melancholy, desires and anger told with the poetry of the author’s nib who, in the 1992 book Conversation with Charles Schulz, said «I don’t like offending people… I draw something good, but also clean».
Born in Minneapolis in Minnesota, at the age of two his uncle nicknamed him “Sparky” after the Spark Plug horse from the comics. It is his initiation into cartoons, which he shares reading with his father on Sundays. Thanks to his mother, he enrolled in the federal art school by correspondence, where he would then work once he returned from the war. During the years of teaching he draws small ironic characters that he perseveringly presents to the editors. The turning point came in 1947, when the local St. Paul Pioneer Press published its first comic strip. It’s called “Li’l Folks” and is the forerunner of Peanuts. His drawings get noticed and three years after the United Feature Syndicate offers him an exclusive contract to distribute them nationwide. On October 2, 1950, his first four-part cartoons appeared in seven American newspapers, a layout that allowed them to be arranged in a square or in line. Experienced by Schulz as a limitation, this “space-saving” format instead allows him to refine his already minimalist style and to characterize it on the technical construction of the strip in the long run, thanks to the daily outings. Even the name Peanuts (“peanuts”) chosen by the distributor, which referred to the children’s audience, never pleased Schulz who judged it “without dignity”.
But the success is enormous, so much so that over the years the strips have been translated into more than 20 languages in over 70 countries. And the characters themselves begin to rise from the paper and conquer space in the various media.
The first appearance on TV dates back to 1959 in the Ford Falcon commercials, followed in 1965 by “A Charlie Brown Christmas”, the first of a long series – not yet finished – of TV specials, with a jazz soundtrack by Vince Guaraldi. Schulz also collaborates who requires Linus to read a passage from the Gospel: «What would Christmas be without telling the birth of Jesus Christ?», he argued.
The production of cartoons on TV, films at the cinema, video games and merchandising continued and Peanuts established itself as an iconographic universe of world popular culture. The maximum recognition of their notoriety occurs when NASA asks Schulz to be able to use Snoopy as a mascot, initially to reward the best employees of the institution with the Silver Snoopy Award (a silver pin designed by him in 1968), and subsequently by calling «Charlie Brown» and «Snoopy» two spacecrafts of the Apollo 10 space mission of 1969.
Peanuts arrived in Italy in 1961 thanks to the newspaper «Country Evening» who renames them «Pierino». In 1965 the rights passed to the publisher Milano Libri who published them in the new magazine «Linus», where Umberto Eco also appears among the signatures, who already in 1963 had written the preface to the book Arriva Charlie Brown, the first by Schulz translated into Italy, arguing that «these children… are the monstrous infantile reductions of all neuroses of a modern citizen of industrial civilization», and starting the analysis of «Peanuts» by intellectuals. If initially it seemed that Schultz wanted to represent the American dream and the desire to achieve it, then he went further, touching more universal themes and capturing the changes of an increasingly globalized society. So in 1968 Franklin arrives, a new black character, in the 70s Lucy begins to talk about feminist issues and more and more often her “peanuts” comment on biblical passages. In the book La kennel of the philosopher, released recently by Àncora, the author Saverio Simonelli talks about small protagonists who symbolize “the smallness of humanity in the face of the greatness of the mystery that transcends them”. In the traits of the characters and their questions there is Schultz’s personality and his way of conceiving life. His gentle gaze corresponded to Charlie Brown’s good soul, his fantasy matched Snoopy’s imaginary world, doubts about his existence coincided with Linus’ spirituality. For this reason no one could ever replace him after his death. After all, it was he himself who confessed that drawing Peanuts «was the realization of a dream I had since I was a child». And you don’t steal children’s dreams.