Today marks the 75th anniversary of Charles Schulz’s first Peanuts comic strip, featuring “Good Ol’ Charlie Brown.” I’d submit that this makes it a good day to revisit my 2022 tribute to Schulz on what would have been his 100th birthday:

Drawing a daily comic strip really well is an exceptionally demanding art. Cartoonists don’t have the luxury of waiting for inspiration; there has to be a new idea every day. Schulz came up with 17,897 of them over the course of 50 years, laying down his pen only when dying of colon cancer at 77. . . . Yet Schulz never went through the motions. He sustained his creative prime for three decades, through the social tumult of the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies. In his later years, he was still introducing new characters, finding new sources of humor and pathos even as he struggled with a shaky hand that made cartooning a chore.
The constraints of space and form in a comic strip are as inflexible as those of a sonnet or a haiku. . . . In this environment, every stroke of the pen must carry meaning, and no word of dialogue can be wasted. Schulz was a master of economy, an expert at packing recognizable emotions into a turn of the lip or a few lines around the eyes. . . . Unlike cartoonists who turned their characters into a brand to be carried on by others (sometimes under their name), Schulz took great pride that nobody else ever drew a single stroke of Peanuts or wrote a single line of its dialogue. Syracuse University professor Robert Thompson dubbed Peanuts “arguably the longest story ever told by one human being.”