LITMIR.BIZ

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in the business at hand—the

      one celebrated in this volume. It’s the business I made my

      own not much after the above detour in preadolescent

      entertainment choices, and Charles Schulz’s characters

      played a role, not surprisingly. To be in cartooning is to

      really be in “charactooning”—my term (I have no idea

      where “car” came from). The comic strips—or movies, or

      TV shows, or plays, or novels—that slip from memory

      do so for one simple reason that you may test at will: The

      personalities that inhabited these ephemeral vehicles were

      forgettable.

      Character doesn’t just count in comic strips; character

      is everything. Making even just a few of them distinct, fun,

      separate, and memorable when you only have four tiny

      frames each day is a herculean feat. Making dozens and

      dozens of them so is something else. Sparky Schulz did that.

      Consider just one from Peanuts: my

      favorite, Lucy. From the position of a

      male writer who does this for a living,

      I can tell you that it’s hard to create a

      female character without stumbling back

      on cliché. Lucy was wildly, wickedly

      free from the usual feminine banalities

      that girl characters attract like dumb

      lumbering bears to honey. She was the

      primary female character in Peanuts

      and by far the most complex in the

      whole gang. When Sparky invented the

      very simple allegory of the held (and

      inevitably withdrawn) football from the

      ever-hopeful Charlie Brown, he brought

      comic strips—and their real place in literature—into a

      larger world where complex character, as it should, rules.

      They gave Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize but neglected Charles

      Schulz. That’s almost a punchline.

      Peanuts wasn’t a collection of gags (like most comic

      strips). It was an assemblage of personalities poured

      happily from the mind of one that very skillfully hid his

      creative, jubilant schizophrenia behind a genial smile and

      a straightforward heart. In 1986, I lay in a hospital bed

      with a broken spine after cracking up a small plane . . .

      and I opened a package that included a very rare Peanuts

      original strip, signed: To Berkeley with friendship & every

      best wish—Sparky.

      “With friendship.” I’d never met him. Character counts,

      indeed. In Sparky’s case, his characters—in all their flaws

      and passions and idiosyncrasies—gave a collective voice

      to his own character of deep and undisguised humanity.

      Explore them here in The Complete Peanuts Family Album

      and marvel, like me, that they all came from one creative id.

      I wish I’d known him better when I had the chance.

      This volume may be the next best thing.

      above: Outland strip by Berkeley Breathed | opposite: Design by Cameron + Co

      I

      went as Charlie Brown for Halloween this past year.

      At age fifty-six, I got a few sideways glances. My beard

      and glasses with my Charlie Brown bald wig made me look

      more like Sigmund Freud Charlie. But I didn’t care. The

      whole universe of Peanuts characters that Schulz created is

      sacred to me. I remember being in my pajamas as a four-

      year-old watching the Christmas special when it first ran

      on TV. I read every Peanuts book I could. I identified with

      Charlie Brown’s insecurities. I was amazed at the secret,

      adventurous world of Snoopy. I was inspired by the spiri-

      tuality of Linus and that he could endure the fussbudgetry

      of Lucy! I coughed on the sidewalk and then stomped on

      the germs. Schulz’s work is in my artistic DNA now. He has

      many lessons for us.

      Peanuts is such an interesting mix of emotional angst

      and surrealism. Somehow the two go together. Who among

      us hasn’t felt that the world becomes surreal during times

      of angst? I’ve taken that Schulzian idea into my cartooning

      and animation career, which includes twenty-three years as

      a story artist and screenwriter at Pixar.

      In graduate school at Purdue University, I drew a

      daily four-panel strip called Loco Motives for the Purdue

      Exponent Newspaper. There, I was exploring the angst of

      university life but overlaid with a surreal set of characters

      including a herbivorous plains-dwelling antelope who just

      happened to live with two dudes on campus. Blitzen, as I

      called him, could talk, and his antlers (much like Snoopy’s)

      could reshape and reflect his emotions. There was no

      reason for putting this character in, but I was inspired by

      how Snoopy’s surreal world of flying aces and bowling

      alleys in his dog house paired nicely with a normal round-

      headed boy who found the world mean and indecipherable.

      This duality also inspired me on movies like Up, which

      is a mix of the grief of Carl Fredriksen and the surrealism

      of talking dogs (“Squirrel!”). The two balance and clarify

      each other. It seemed like the lower we took Carl in grief,

      the more outlandish we could go with Dug and the rest of

      the dog pack. Carl’s grief stood out in stark contrast. His

      character was clear.

      Which is another Schulz lesson: clarity and contrast of

      character—we all know what Lucy or Schroeder or Sally

      would say or do in any situation. It’s what we in storytelling

      grapple with, and I am daily inspired by Schulz’ mastery of

      it. In Monsters, Inc., we spent a lot of time at the beginning

      just trying to define how Mike Wazowski would contrast

      Sulley. As an exercise,

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