The Complete Peanuts Family Album. Andrew Farago

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      8 THE COMPLETE PEANUTS FAMILY ALBUM

      FOREWORD

      BY BERKELEY BREATHED

      C

      haracter counts” said my mother all too often, usually

      as a rebuke.

      As always, I underestimated her shrewdness in literary

      matters, although she didn’t know at the time she was being

      brilliant in areas apart from my attraction to dirty jokes at

      age twelve.

      Character is the only thing 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      inevitably withdrawn) football from the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.