Child's Garden of Reverses

In a decade that has seen much of the fun leak out of the funnies, a Popsicleset Punchinello named Good Ol' Charlie Brown has endeared himself to millions of newspaper readers with a quietly wistful brand of humor that is both fresh and worldlywise. Supported by an all-moppet cast and a flop-eared dog named Snoopy, Charlie Brown is the moonfaced, star-crossed hero of the fast-rising Peanuts strip. Less than eight years old. the seven-days-a-week strip is carried by 355 U.S. dailies and some 40 foreign papers, and has overflowed into such profitable sidelines as a series of children's comic books and four $1-a-copy collections for grownups that have sold 570,000 copies.

A passion for Peanuts unites such varied readers as Poet Carl Sandburg, General Motors' President Harlow Curtice, and a dozen Navymen at the South Pole who crowd around a bulletin board each day for their Peanuts ration. The sparely drawn strip is included as a comment on mid-century mores in a historical textbook published by George Washington University. Peanuts earned its paterfamilias, Minnesota-born Artist Charles Monroe Schulz, the Cartoonists' Society's annual Reuben Award. Last week the editors of Yale's humorous monthly Record twined ivy in young (35) Charles Schulz's laurels by naming him Humorist of the Year.

Human Soil Bank. The appeal of Peanuts lies in its sophisticated melding of wry wisdom and sly oneupmanship. Unlike such funny-page small fry as Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace or Jimmy Ratio's Little Iodine, its characters are disingenuous and uncute. Charlie, whose peanut-bald head is surmounted by a single dispirited curl, is a junior-grade Walter Mitty, whose highflying dreams of popularity crash in endless ignominies. Charlie's characteristic lament: "Good grief!" The chief scorpion in his child's garden of reverses is a promising young termagant named Lucy, who, with apprentice-shrews Violet and Patty, sharpens her talons on Charlie's ego. "Good Ol' Charlie Brown," purrs Violet as Charlie passes. "Nobody hates him, everybody likes him . . . What a wishy-washy character!"

Lucy, in turn, is heartlessly rebuffed by Schroeder, a kindergarten longhair who dotes only on Beethoven and practices interminably on a toy piano. Sighs she: "I'll probably never get married." Other Peanuts regulars: thumb-sucking Linus, who battles grimly for the security of a tattered blanket; a mud-caked urchin called Pig-Pen ("A human soil bank," sniffs Violet); and Snoopy, a pooch of many talents, few of which are appreciated by his peers.

Charlie's Alter Ego. No one is more awed by Charlie Brown's newspaper popularity than lanky (5 ft. 11 in.), crew-cut Charlie Schulz, who makes $90,000 a year from the fictional brood. Artist Schulz feels that he is not only young Charlie's creator but also his soulmate. A St. Paul barber's son who somehow graduated from high school after flunking algebra, Latin, English, physics--and, he says, dating--wartime Machine Gunner Schulz was coasting happily along as a $65-a-week correspondence-school art teacher when a sheaf of his cartoons landed him a contract with United Features in 1950. He neither drinks,* smokes nor cusses, teaches Sunday school at St. Paul's Fundamentalist Church of God. Schulz confesses that many a notion for Peanuts is planted by his own four youngsters (a fifth is on the way) and a retriever as droopy as Snoopy.

Nonetheless imaginative and deft. Artist Schulz manages to turn out Peanuts in 25 hours a week and has launched a new thrice-weekly strip, based on adult foibles, called It's Only a Game. To letter writers who impute deep psychological compulsions to his charges, he insists that the strip is only "funny pictures." On the other hand. Charlie Brown's alter ego has never recovered from the shock of learning that United Features had fastened so "insignificant" a name as Peanuts on his handiwork. To this day, when asked what he does for a living. Artist Schulz replies loftily: "I draw a little comic strip about a guy called Charlie Brown."

* Though San Francisco tosspots have named a drink the Charlie Brown. Ingredients: chocolate-flavored vodka, hot coffee, a whipped-cream float.

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