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I'm Ben Saunders and I'm a professor of English at the University of Oregon. This exhibit has been made possible with
the very generous
support of Jean Schulz
and the Charles Schulz museum in Santa Rosa, also the Oregon Humanities Center
which provided fellowship support for this, and of course, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum itself.
What we have here is just a tiny sliver
of the vast output
from Charles Schulz's career as
the creator of "Peanuts."
Twenty-five pieces -- five
from each decade that he did the strip.
One of the the things that I wanted to do was for people to see
snapshots of the key changes
sort of the rise and fall of certain character
ideas and the grander trajectory of the strip over that half-century.
One of the most interesting things about following the development
of the strip from its early days is the way
that the character of Snoopy changes.
The thing that you can see very clearly in this very early example of the strip from its first year
is this cute little dog
is a dog. He goes around on all fours and he chases after the kids for dropped food
and he doesn't think.
He's an animal.
And this will change
and change quite dramatically, by the late 1950s.
Actually, I love this example
because it's very 1980s.
This is Snoopy as a lawyer,
he takes on progressive, different identities
throughout the later days of the strip.
And here he's represented as
the greedy
lawyer who is less concerned with the truth of the case
than he is with winning.
It's something of a cliche
of "Peanuts" studies
to identify
Schulz with his most famous creation, which is Charlie Brown.
And to see him as a kind of
typically depressive artist figure.
And I think one of the things that I feel quite strongly now after having
read
fifty years' worth of this material
and studied his life and having met his widow
and read other pieces by his family members,
I think that he strikes me as one of the most
psychologically healthy artists that you could have hoped to encounter in the late 20th century.
Schulz isn't usually thought of as a political cartoonist but he did come down
strongly in his quiet way
on the right side of what is perhaps the most important political
issue of the late 1960s and the struggle for civil rights.
He introduced his first African-American character to the strip -- a little boy named Franklin
in the summer of 1968. The strip would have been drawn
probably just within a few weeks of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.
He did receive some
pushback from newspapers in the South for doing this. He said that he actually received
a letter from an editor saying
that he didn't mind if he introduced a black character in the strip but please don't show them in
school together. We have here a series of
digital galleries, which we created to supplement the exhibit
itself. When someone has
a career as long as Schulz's
it's almost impossible to do adequate coverage.
18,000 strips -- almost 18,000 strips. So here I have ...
So I created a series of digital galleries
which you can access
at the touch of a finger. For example, a number of
the football gags -- we have about 12 of the 36 Lucy-with-the-football jokes
that Schulz did over the course of his career, which people can scroll through and see if they want to compare them to the example we have in the exhibit.
This is a very late strip
and actually before I was doing my work on
this exhibition
I had not read it. And when I first read it
I started to cry -- it really moved me.
It's one of the last
six Sunday pages that he ever did.
It features almost exclusively Peppermint Patty
with a little appearance by Marcie down here.
And Patty is very much in the role that we used to see Charlie Brown in
in the early days of the strip,
insisting that everyone should keep playing the ball game,
it's a football game
as opposed to a baseball game
despite the rain
and not realizing
that she's
playing all by herself.
Charlie Brown is conspicuously absent for the entire strip.
Instead,
Patty is talking to him off camera, as it were, but he's not there
and then she learns that
everyone's gone home
and Marcie says "you should go home, too, it's getting dark."
and of course this is
very late in Schulz's life
I find that
"it's getting dark" quite resonant at that moment.
And she says, "we had fun, didn't we?"
That need for reassurance still coming through here
and "yes, we had fun."
I just thought it was poignant
and really beautiful
and almost like a farewell from the artist
to his characters and to his audience.
And as I say, there really were only a few more. This ran in the
newspapers
less than eight weeks before Schulz passed away.