I recently bought the first two volumes of what promises to be the complete edition of Charles Schulz’s Charlie Brown comic strip. Out of respect for Schulz, who hated the name “Peanuts,” I rarely refer to it as that.
I hope to possess the whole set at the end of the 12-1/2 years the publisher says it will take for this project to reach completion.
Having these weighty tomes on my shelf, my thought had been that I would read them from start to finish, like a continuous novel. But I don’t think I will. It doesn’t really make sense, and in particular the early months of the strip are quite scattershot in terms of continuity. I think I will open one of these volumes here and there and read for a bit, then put the book away, as I have done with Charlie Brown books all my life.
With regard to the disproportionate hugeness of the kids’ heads, I can not be the only person to have noticed a similarity between Charlie Brown and The Goops. The Goops, by Gelett Burgess, were among my favorite comic book characters as a kid. The Goops are a bit slinkier than any of the Charles Schulz characters. I’m not saying there was any influence or relationship between Schulz and The Goops, but the similarity, the spareness of the facial espressions and the hugeness of the bald heads, interests me. I’m not aware that Schulz ever commented on Burgess, though he had plenty to say about other comic strip artists.
Every strip has a date, usually in the last panel, indicating what month and date the strip was to be published. Format is usually 11-11 or 10/21. The first 12 strips, however, contain only single numbers for the date. There are also gaps. Strips for October 12-15, 1950, are not present, and there are no Sunday strips in the early weeks and months.
One aspect of the strip for which I always respected Charles Schulz involves Schroeder, the Beethoven-worshipping piano player who somehow plays Beethoven’s most massively difficult piano music on a toy piano with its black keys only painted on.
Unlike many illustrators, the music excerpts Schulz uses are almost always real music, not foofy little half notes meaninglessly floating around. Usually Schulz uses music of Beethoven, but I’ve seen Schumann, Dvorak, Rachmaninoff and others. While many artists use generic, typically meaningless notes not connected to bar lines or to a key signature, Schulz not only uses real music but it appears he did the notation himself. I make this claim because there are mistakes here and there, mistakes unlikely to have come from printed editions. While Schulz’s notations are not always 100% accurate they nevertheless could safely be called the real thing.
The Hammerklavier was a particular fixation for Schulz. Schroeder is often depicted playing that piece, oftentimes after working out at a gym or running cross country preparation for the athletic challenges of that tremendously difficult piece. Here Schroeder is shown sliding in, as if to pounce on the music.
This strip appears to be an exception to Schulz’s usually careful notation, and is an example of the type of musical gibberish that most commonly fills space in illustrations and comics. In the third frame the left hand notes don’t add up to the 2 quarter note beats in the right hand, and I don’t recognize what music this might be — although me not recognizing it proves nothing.
This strip illustrates where it may be appropriate to use musical notes as flowery ornaments, and in this case it serves to dramatize Charlie Brown’s extraordinary whistling abilities:
The complete edition of Charles Schulz’s Charlie Brown series contains a fairly comprehensive index which includes composers’ names when those composers were mentioned by name in a particular strip. But citations of what music appears in these strips is not included. I think it should be.
On the other hand, I’ve always liked being the only one around who can identify most of the musical excerpts in these cartoons.
