IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.4 (2017) 63
Jared Gardner and Ian Gordon, eds., The
Comics of Charles Schulz: The Good Grief
of Modern Life
Charlotte Pylyser
In The Comics of Charles Schulz: The Good Grief of Modern Life, Jared Gardner and Ian Gordon bring together a much-needed body of scholarly work on one of the most influential cartoonists in the history of American comics. Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts (1950-2000), known and loved in the United States, but, as the book makes very clear, also abroad, forms the topic of inquiry of no less than thirteen essays that range across a broad field of disciplines and are gathered in four sections: Philosophy and Poetics, Identity and Performance, Peanuts and History and Transmedial Peanuts. The essays in question are frequently amongst the first to treat these aspects of Schulz’s work as scholarship on Schulz has been exceedingly rare up until now. The introduction to the book takes some time to ponder this matter and in doing so rightfully underlines its own pioneering work. Indeed, the book is the first publication to offer an extended scholarly reflection on Schulz’s work. However, in doing so, the appreciation for Schulz sometimes turns into a defensiveness that unnecessarily and arguably unduly separates Peanuts from other comics forms, such as the graphic novel
The articles which the book gathers frequently and successfully take an original perspective on a strip that seems quite straightforward. A queer reading of Peanuts which productively focusses on the notion of desire precedes an article about sincerity and even one about musical notation for example. The latter article, by Roy T. Cook, stands out because it offers a number of theoretical reflections on comics and (multi) modality and theoretical texts are far and few between in this volume. Cook’s text is doubtless stimulating, but a reference to the notion of grammatextuality, or the poetic function of writing, might have further complemented his thoughts. Ben Novotny Owen’s article about transmedial Peanuts in the form of the A
Charlie Brown Christmas television special likewise stands out. Owen contextualizes the style of limited
animation, which is often associated with modernism, in the 1960s mediascape and interestingly reflects on the way in which it has added to the authenticity and interpretative openness that have made A Charlie Brown
Christmas into an enduring success. The lesser focus on theory doesn’t prevent the essays in question from
providing a great amount of worthwhile information, often more on the historical and/or (media)comparative side. Christopher P. Lehman’s article about the character Franklin provides an interesting overview of
African-Jared Gardner and Ian Gordon, eds
The Comics of Charles Schulz: The Good Grief of Modern Life
Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 192 pages, 27 b&w illustrations ISBN: 978-1-4968-1289-6 (hardback)
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.4 (2017) 64
American (integrationist) presence in American comics history for example and Joseph J. Darowski’s essay reminds us of how strongly comics can connect to the times in his discussion of Snoopy’s role in the Apollo 10 mission. The book further underlines its strength in contextual questions through essays such as “Consuming Childhood: Peanuts and Children’s Consumer Culture in the Postwar Era” and “Charles Schulz, Comic Art, and Personal Value”, which explores the politics of value of the Peanuts art market. The power of the gentle philosophizing which Schulz develops in Peanuts is successfully approached via the role which sports play in the strip and its relationship with the sublime. Gene Kannenberg Jr. ends the volume with an exploration of Peanuts parodies and mash-ups, but doesn’t quite convince on the topic of the relevance of the theoretical frame about visual literature and visual language which he draws up.
Michael Tisserand draws interesting historical and poetical parallels between Schulz and that other great early newspaper comic strip: George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. Krazy Kat, a comic strip that has enjoyed scholarly attention, is also the site for a meditation on the relative scholarly disregard for Peanuts up until now in the introduction of the book. The editors’ explanation that Krazy Kat better fits the fetishization of academic rigor that marks academia may suit the book’s self-admitted status as a Peanuts manifesto, further argumentation on this point would have been welcome. The book runs into trouble with said rigor once more in the essay “Charlie Brown Cafés and the Marketing of Peanuts in Asia”. Although the idea of looking at Charlie Brown cafés is certainly refreshing and the connection between the Peanuts aesthetic and the Japanese notion of Kawaii interesting, an incidental comparison and internet search make for the possibility of only a very limited research conclusion.
The Comics of Charles Schulz: The Good Grief of Modern Life is doubtless a great and necessary addition
to comics studies and will be of value to the many disciplines to which it has recourse. The book favors context over text and is not particularly given to theorizing. This leaves a great many topics up for discussion and the editors, highly aware of this, rightfully consider their volume an “invitation to a new generation of scholars and students” (9).
Charlotte Pylyser is post-doc researcher at KU Leuven.
