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Pathos in a Line. Other Peanuts characters pop up from time to time. Lucy has several fuss-budget understudies: Patty, Sally, Violet and Frieda. Pig-Pen is a "human soil bank" who raises a cloud of dust on a perfectly clean street and passes out gumdrops that are invariably black. Mop-haired Schroeder is always banging out Beethoven on the piano or gazing soulfully at a bust of the master ("I picked Beethoven," says Schulz, "because he is sort of pompous and grandiose. I like Brahms better"). Lucy is in love with Schroeder, but he is too busy with Beethoven to care. She gets revenge. She invites Schroeder to play at a "dinner party," and Schroeder finds himself serenading Snoopy over a bowl of dog food.
By economizing on words and lines, Schulz produces a lean, spare, dryly witty strip that avoids the archness and sentimentality of most comics that deal with children. With the barely perceptible wriggle of a line, he can convey a pathos and tenderness beyond the reach of most of his colleagues. The dots at either end of Charlie's mouth sum up six years of concentrated worry. So subtle is Schulz's drawing that some of his best panels are wordless —as when the Peanuts are gathered to observe somberly the first snowflake of winter.
"The Peanuts characters are good mean little bastards," says Al Capp, "eager to hurt each other. That's why they are so delicious. They wound each other with the greatest enthusiasm. Anybody who sees theology in them is a devil worshiper." Maybe so. But there is no doubt that Schulz, a fervent Bible reader, is aware of original sin. He owns up to making his Peanuts mean because he believes that kids are born mean. But by making his characters cruel on occasion, he has also made them believable. They have a dignity and a formality that is touching; children are people, too, Schulz seems to say. "I want to remind adults of the pressures children are always being put under."
There is, in fact, a lifetime of observation encapsulated in Charlie Brown, although Schulz is at once serious and casual about it all: "Of course, there is lots of meaning. But I can't explain it. What the people see in it, that's what's in it."
Nice Boys Lose. Certainly much of Schulz's own life is in the strip: the harrowing little frustrations, the countless near-misses. "I guess I'm 100% Charlie Brown. Sixty million people read about the dumb things I did when I was little." Born in Minneapolis in 1922, Schulz was dubbed Sparky (after the rambunctious, blanket-draped horse in the strip Barney Google) when he was two days old, and the name stuck. As a boy, Sparky avidly read the comics, sketched illustrations of Sherlock Holmes stories and of his own dog Spike (Snoopy's model). "He was," says Schulz, "the most intelligent dog there ever was. You could say 'Spike, go get a potato,' and Spike would go down to the cellar and come back with one. When I was about 16 I used to chip nine-iron shots to him from about 25 feet away and he never missed catching them in his teeth."