Next it’s the moon, then an ice cream cone that’s a ball. In one series of strips, Charlie Brown awakens to see the sun rising as a giant baseball. As a child, Schulz played on and ran a sandlot team, which preoccupied him. No sport proves more present or more resonant than baseball. Schulz famously uses football as metaphor through action-Lucy yanked the pigskin away from Charlie Brown once a year, every year, from 1952 to 1999- and also through words: “I thought I had life solved,” Charlie Brown says, “but there was a flag on the play.” Snoopy, in turn, plays the Masters and outdrives Sam Snead and Ben Hogan Charlie Brown is his caddy. Schulz’s father buried soup cans in the lawn so that young Charles could practice putting. Both of these players, it emerges, can also drive a Zamboni. In Peanuts we see Snoopy at times as a goalkeeper and other times as a hard-checking skater doing battle with Woodstock on the frozen-over birdbath. Active as an amateur hockey player and organizer, Schulz was inducted into the U.S. “And no more long-distance phone calls!” Charlie Brown warns.) And that distillation holds true in the arena of sports. (Not long after a phone bill reveals to Schulz’s wife, Joyce, that he is having an extramarital affair, Charlie Brown prevents Snoopy from canoodling with a girl beagle. The events and relationships in Peanuts are for the most part events and relationships distilled from Schulz’s life. In the fourth Charlie Brown blurts out, “Why couldn’t McCovey have hit the ball three feet higher?” It’s a movable lament for baseball fans: Why couldn’t Buckner have fielded that ground ball in 1986? Why couldn’t Bartman have backed off in 2003? In a strip drawn after the Giants’ narrow loss to the Yankees in the 1962 World Series, Charlie Brown and Linus sit silently and glumly on a curb for three frames. The reason the sports stuff works so well is that sports, by and large, compels a part of us that has never grown up. The simple genius of Peanuts lies in Schulz’s ability to get to the heart of large matters (unrequited love, loneliness) and critical life questions (is there a Great Pumpkin?) through the lens of emotionally precocious children. Thousands of Peanuts panels are filtered through Schulz’s love of sports, a collective subcategory that perhaps more than any other delivers the essence of his work. Over five decades of solitary and deeply personal work, Charles Schulz drew 17,897 Peanuts comic strips, producing a body of work that constitutes not only the richest achievement in comic strip history, but also the most resonant sports strip of all time. The following is excerpted from LIFE ‘s new special issue Peanuts: The World’s Greatest Comic Strip, available at newsstands and here, online:
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