How the Church helped to bring Snoopy to the world
Matt Thorne says a Catholic editor gave Charles Schulz his first big break
16 January 2009

The annual Macy's Thanksgiving parade in New York City

Schulz and Peanuts
By David Michaelis
Harper Perennial, £11.99

Though his determination and talent would have probably won out eventually, it could be plausibly argued that if it wasn't for the Catechetical Guild Educational Society - a publisher of Catholic teaching aids in downtown Minneapolis - Charles M Schulz might've abandoned his comic writing career and the world would have been denied Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus and the rest of the gang. Before being given a break by Roman Baltes, the editor of Topix, a Catholic comic magazine, Schulz had endured nearly 10 years of submitting comics and having them rejected (a punishment to which he would later submit Snoopy, his frustrated beagle novelist) after the publication of his first cartoon - a drawing of his family dog, Spike, a model for Snoopy - in Ripley's Believe It or Not! at the tender age of 14.

Schulz's job at Topix was to letter the dialogue balloons left blank in English language, Spanish and French editions of a 48-page monthly that featured Prince Valiant-like narratives of saints and martyrs. Schulz confessed to a friend that religious stories didn't suit him, but Baltes sweetened the pill by offering him the possibility of publishing a page of Schulz's original cartoons as a regular feature, giving him the start he needed.

Around the same time, Schulz began to attend the Church of God, a branch of Christianity that resisted being identified as a religious denomination. Calling itself a "movement", it placed no restrictions on membership, embracing all Christian believers. Attending the church, writes David Michaelis in his exhaustive new biography, Schulz felt spiritually at ease for the first time in his life. He'd come to believe that God had shepherded him through the twin catastrophes of his mother's death and his time as a GI in World War II.

Schulz's first cartoon, Just Keep Laughing took place in an academic environment, depicting a professor meeting a new instructor in ancient history. But it would be depictions of children that would make his name.

His motivations for drawing children were pragmatic. "I drew [kids]," Michaelis reports Schulz as saying, "because they were what sold." His first cartoons of children were published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune as "Sparky's Lil' Folks", but after a challenge from a Thirties cartoonist who'd written a strip called Little Folks, he had to come up with a new name. It would be the United Features syndicate who came up with Peanuts, a name Schulz hated.

Michaelis carefully traces the inspirations on the comic strip, from a Jewish dwarf named Freida, from whom, he suggests, Schulz got the idea for the contracted limbs of his strangely shaped children to the three men named Charlie Brown in Schulz's life. He untangles the models behind the Little Red-Headed Girl who caused Charlie Brown such grief in the cartoons and describes the strip as an "epic cycle", tacitly agreeing with the cultural historians who have described the saga of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and Linus as "arguably the longest story told by a single artist in human history" and "a whole different way of telling a story".

Schulz served as an assistant pastor at the Church of God for several years, and in 1957 he was enormously impressed after witnessing Billy Graham preach in Madison Square Garden.

Although he ceased attending church after moving to northern California, he continued to teach Sunday school at a Methodist Church in Sebastopol and contributed a youth cartoon panel every fortnight to the Church of God magazine. He was troubled by the notion of prayer, and came to believe that church ceremonies were empty of the essence of true belief. But he was a great reader of theology and it was inevitable that he would eventually address the subject in Peanuts.

After the publication of The Gospel According to Peanuts, a 1965 book by a Presbyterian minister, using Schulz's characters to illustrate Gospel stories, Schulz insisted that the first cartoon spin-off from the strip, A Charlie Brown Christmas, include a minute of Linus reciting the Nativity story from the Gospel according to St Luke. Battling great resistance from the television company, who believed that religion and entertainment didn't mix, Schulz's determination ensured that the programme was taken seriously by critics who described Linus's recitation as "the dramatic highlight of the season". The other way that Schulz's religious beliefs influenced his comic was a sequence of strips featuring a character called the Great Pumpkin. In an example one of the strip's many lateral jumps, Linus labours under the misapprehension that if he performs a mitzvah on Halloween, an omnipotent pumpkin will appear to serve children as Santa Claus did on Christmas.

In 1965 Schulz received a letter from a religious reader asserting that the Great Pumpkin was sacrilegious. He replied that he was on her side, and that the real sacrilege is Santa Claus, and he'd been trying to show this in his Great Pumpkin strips.

Throughout the book Michaelis illustrates his arguments with Peanuts strips, which works well but underlies one of the problems with this tome: Schulz (as with many writers) lived a relatively dull existence and seems to have communicated far more through his characters than he did to any of the people around him. In a telling detail, Michaelis describes how when Schulz was asked about his kids in an interview he started talking about Charlie Brown and co rather than his own five children.

Michaelis spends time addressing the question of whether we should see the strip as one giant autobiography, and although he decides that this is too simple an approach, it's hard not to see this book as a far less enjoyable treat than sitting down with a volume or two of The Complete Peanuts and viewing the world through the eyes of Charlie Brown, a far more three-dimensional character than Charles Schulz.