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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inevitably withdrawn) football from the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.

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