Comics: Good Grief

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Whether or not he was right about the name, Sparky was off to a fast start with one of his first strips, which forecast, in a way, all that was to come. In the first two panels, Patty walks down the street reciting the feminist verse: "Little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice." In the third panel, she spots Charlie Brown and slugs him. In the fourth, she continues on her way, finishing the verse: "And that's what little girls are made of."

In his first month of cartooning, Schulz made $90; the second, $500; the third, $1,000; and his pay has gone up ever since. Today he makes $300,000 a year from his strip, plus sales of Peanuts books, pillows, napkins, games and dolls, and the Ford ad for the Falcon.

Some of Schulz's early readers, who formed an almost worshiping cult, contend that Peanuts has gone downhill since Schulz went commercial. But if anything, the strip has improved over the years; both its drawing and satire have sharpened. While Lucy's face is a little fleshier and meaner, Charlie's head is no longer a perfect circle: he is less cute and more pathetic.

Cheerful Sadism. The comics were a long time working up to Peanuts' special style and humor. Conscientious historians like to trace the strips back to Egyptian papyrus, Grecian ceramics, medieval tapestries, or Hogarth's illustrations of 18th century London lowlife; but as a matter of practical fact, the modern comics were not born until the New York newspaper circulation wars of the 1890s, in which crude but funny comics were valued for their hold on readers.

The Yellow Kid, considered by many to be the first bona-fide comic strip, contributed the phrase "yellow journalism" to the language. Wearing a bright yellow nightgown on which words were scrawled (forerunners of later balloons), the jug-eared little tough got away with sadism that is no longer permitted. He bashed his pals over the head with a golf club, pummeled a little Negro boy while a goat nibbled his woolly hair. Other kids followed: the Katzenjammers ("Mit dose kidds, society iss nix"), Buster Brown, Little Nemo, and the long-gone Kinder Kids, a strip exquisitely drawn by the cubist artist Lyonel Feininger.

By 1910, the public had wearied of yellow journalism, and the comics calmed down. There was less jaw breaking, more jawing, though the humor was still basic. Mutt, originally a horseplayer, was soon joined by Jeff, and the pair still quietly swindle each other today. Abie the Agent, an ethnic comic character, often cracked jokes in Yiddish and was not above haranguing a waiter: "It ain't the principle either; it's the ten cents." In Bringing Up Father, Irish-born Jiggs plans desperate stratagems to escape his starched collar and shrewish wife for the solid comforts of Dinty Moore's saloon.