My Life with Charlie Brown

The Theme of Peanuts

147 The Theme of Peanuts t he initial theme of Peanuts was based on the cruelty that exists among children. I recall all too vividly the struggle that takes place out on the playground. This is a struggle that adults grow away from and seem to forget about. Adults learn to protect themselves. In this day of organized sports for children, we forget how difficult it once was for smaller children to set up any kind of ball game at a playground because so often there were older and bigger kids to interrupt the fun. I have always despised bullies, and even though someone once suggested that I have much psychological bullying going on in Peanuts, I do consciously try to stay away from that sort of thing. As the strip progressed from the fall of the year 1950, the characters began to change. Charlie Brown was a flippant little guy, who soon turned into the loser he is known as today. This was the first of the formulas to develop. Formulas are truly the backbone of the comic strip. In fact, they are probably the backbone of any continuing entertainment. As Charlie Brown developed, so did characters such as Lucy, Schroeder, and Linus. Snoopy was the slowest to develop, and it was his eventually walking around on two feet that turned him into a lead character. It has certainly been difficult to keep him from taking over the feature. There are various origins for the characters. Charlie Brown is supposed to represent what is sometimes called “everyman.” When I was small, I believed that my face was so bland that people would not recognize me if they saw me some place other than where they 148 My arT normally would. I was sincerely surprised if I happened to be in a downtown area of St. Paul, shopping with my mother, and we would bump into a fellow student at school, or a teacher, and they recognized me. I thought that my ordinary appearance was a perfect disguise. It was this weird kind of thinking that prompted Charlie Brown’s round, ordinary face. Linus came from a drawing that I made one day of a face almost like the one he now has. I experimented with some wild hair, and I showed the sketch to a friend of mine who sat near me at Art Institute whose name was Linus Maurer. He thought it was kind of funny, and we both agreed it might make a good new character for the strip. It seemed appropriate that I should name the character Linus. It also seemed that Linus would fit very well as Lucy’s younger brother. Lucy had already been in the strip for about a year, and had immediately developed her fussbudget personality. We called our oldest daughter, Meredith, a fussbudget when she was very small, and from this I applied the term to Lucy. Schroeder was named after a young boy with whom I used to caddy at Highland Park golf course in St. Paul. I don’t recall ever knowing his first name, but just Schroeder seemed right for the character in the strip, even before he became the great musician he now is. One night, over ten years after I began drawing Peanuts, I had a dream in which I created a new character whose name was a combination of Mexican and Swedish. Why in the world I had such a dream and would think of such a name as José Peterson is a mystery to me. Most of the time, things that are a complete riot when you are dreaming are not the least bit funny when you wake up. In this case, however, it seemed like a good idea, so I developed a story about the arrival of José Peterson in the neighborhood, and he has remained ever since, usually playing on Peppermint Patty’s baseball team. Patty has been a good addition for me, and I think she could almost carry another strip by herself. A dish of candy sitting in our living room inspired her name. At the time I was thinking of writing a series of children’s books completely separate from the Peanuts strip, but my schedule kept me too busy to ever get started and 149 The Theme of Peanuts almost a year went by before I decided that I had better use this name, lest someone...