Newspaper Comics 101

The AV Club gives a primer on daily comics in newspapers.

From the piece...

Post-Mutt And Jeff, gag-oriented strips largely competed with increasingly complex and gorgeously drawn adventure comics. But the tide began to turn decisively toward humor on the funny pages after World War II. Many of the new breed of cartoonists drew their inspiration from Percy Crosby’s kid-oriented Skippy, a soft, sweet strip about a young boy with an alternately mature and limited understanding of our wonderful, woeful world. When Ernie Bushmiller took over Larry Whittington’s flapper comic Fritzi Ritz, he added a niece character who became the strip’s star, and throughout the ’30s and ’40s refined Nancy into a minimalist masterpiece that both sanctified kid culture and explored the comic possibilities of simplified design. And bestselling children’s book author/illustrator Crockett Johnson set new standards in gentle whimsy with Barnaby, a strip about a kind-hearted 5-year-old boy and his cigar-chomping, trouble-stirring fairy godfather.

But all these strips about children were just laying the groundwork for Peanuts, Charles Schulz’s sensational explication of childhood angst. Peanuts began as a jokey strip about the mischievous Charlie Brown and his tiny-bodied, giant-headed friends. Then Schulz gradually began to deepen his characters, giving them distinctively adult traits: depression, insecurity, crabbiness, fear, etc. He allowed Peanuts to get weirder as well, following Charlie Brown’s arrogant dog Snoopy into wild fantasies. Schulz made jokes about the fads of the day, and like Bushmiller, he developed a style that was deceptively simple. But what’s made Peanuts resonate with so many people over the years is how astutely—and unflinchingly—Schulz described feeling unlovable. In the strip’s ’60s and ’70s heyday, life was always like eating a peanut-butter sandwich alone on an uncomfortable school playground park bench.