Brian Huggard

in one of his essays gary larson (who drew the far side) describes a time when a newspaper editor tried to get him to make ‘the far side’ as a comic strip, rather than a single panel comic. comic strips have characters, and are thus more marketable. they also fit on the page better. but, he said no. in his estimation, the comic strip format is about “wit”. things happen back and forth, and then there’s a final “joke”. it’s “witty”. he contrasted this to the single panel strip, which he said just depicts a sense of humor. his work is the perfect example of this. what people like about the far side appears to be that it’s really one guy’s bizarre sense of humor that just instantly comes through the comics. each comic is a joke obviously, but it’s not a joke you could port onto a stage (usually) - like many comic strip jokes. it’s like reaching into a strange garden and taking out one plant. then another. then another. i often think about the contrast he painted. comic strips are “wit”, single panels are “a sense of humor”. likewise, jim davis (illustrator of garfield) said in one interview, “people don’t laugh at comic strips because they’re funny, they laugh at them because they’re true”. (jim davis and charles shultz did cross paths, supposedly shultz is the one who had the idea for garfield to stand on his hind legs and initially sketched it out - previously, davis had him sitting and walking like a cat.) i believe these two observations, together, explain the general darkness of schultz’s work. i do not agree with the below characterization that his “late game” work is especially dark. it starts kind of sad and with a very particular view of life right at the beginning, and that runs all the way through it. if you look at and read the first five years of peanuts, it’s already there at full blast. i think it took five years for him to have a year where no new characters enter or disappear - so, even in its nascent and chaotic formative state, you can see a particular view of life come through strongly. his work is great, he’s probably the pre-eminent cartoonist for the twentieth century, so this isn’t about that. but, the universe in there is often very sad. one axis mundi of the peanuts universe is that sometimes things just don’t work out. of course, that’s true - but it’s a central pillar around which the work operates. if jim davis is correct that comic strips are funny to people when they’re true (to them), we can obviously see that this was a large part of charles schultz’s view of life: it was apparently true for him (ironically, it was not true professionally or artistically). i think peanuts is a challenge for illustrators who are into comics because the actual content is not what people think of when they think of peanuts. people think of garfield, and imagine “yeah - garfield hates mondays and loves lasagna”, and, that’s correct. that’s really what’s on the page. that is not the case with peanuts. people imagine the animated specials. the comics aren’t like that at all. my favorite show is ‘king of the hill’. i was working with a guy once, and mentioned this, and he said: i just don’t get it, is it supposed to be funny? and, i thought that perfectly captured it. king of the hill isn’t funny like there are “jokes”, it’s just kind of funny because of the situation. it’s like a generally humorous environment. the worldview comes through indirectly. peanuts is like this. each strip isn’t “a joke”, exactly. it’s more that schultz created a universe that he found funny. but, it’s pessimistic. i would almost say thats its defining quality. the classic literary conflicts (man vs nature, man vs society, etc.) are generally lost by the main characters. this makes it closer to modern literature than most other comic strips.