Peanuts is known for its heartwarming, gentle humor – which is why it might surprise fans to learn that creator Charles Schulz was incredibly competitive by nature. This led him to view the comic industry as a “fight” to dominate the attention of newspaper readers on a day-to-day basis, something he did for much of the five decades Peanuts was in publication.

David Michaelis’ comprehensive account of the artist’s life and work, Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, details Schulz’s surprisingly adversarial stance toward other cartoons, and cartoonists. It also proposes that his criticisms of other artists stemmed from the same origin as his own motivation to consistently produce the best work possible.

As much as Peanuts can be considered the greatest comic strip of all time, its legacy is a result of Schulz’s unrelenting drive to make every single strip the best it could be. At the same time, his need to be the best resulted in him viewing the medium through an intensely competitive lens.

Charles Schulz Considered Every Day A “Fight” For Readers’ Attention

The Funny Pages Were A “Competitive Arena”

David Michaelis’ Schulz and Peanuts is expansive, in the manner of the best biographies. It effectively immerses readers in its subject’s story, crafting an in-depth account of Charles Schulz’s worldview, while also deftly navigating how he was perceived, and how he projected himself to others. A great example comes from the book’s description of the artist’s view of the comic industry, in which it is stated that he:

…regarded the comic pages as a competitive arena where, as he saw it, “each cartoonist fights for attention.

This may surprise some readers, considering the content of Peanuts, but it goes far toward explaining Charles Schulz’s decades of dominance in the comic medium.

Michaelis then quoted author Cathy Guisewite, who spoke to how Schulz approached other comics, who said:

He read his rivals’ strips “the way all cartoonists do, looking to see if they won, if they beat everyone else that day,” recalled cartoonist Cathy Guisewite, who once watched Schulz study the Sunday funnies in the San Francisco Chronicle. “He liked to win on the page.”

It is interesting that Schulz’s fellow author attributes his attitude toward his peers as something common to “all cartoonists.” However, other passages throughout Schulz and Peanuts make it clear that it was also, to a large degree, an extension of the artist’s personal competitive streak. Charles Schulz was a pioneering figure in the comic medium, but when others started to find similar success along the trail that he blazed, he became defensive of his position at the top of the industry.

This defensiveness made him a harsh critic of many other cartoons, and resulted in a complicated relationship between Schulz and many of his contemporaries, even the ones that he had a mentor-like relationship with to some degree or another. As described in Schulz and Peanuts, the artist had become accustomed to being the top cartoonist in the country during Peanuts first several decades. When he began to have serious competition for readers’ attention, it was from a generation of creators raised on his work, grateful for his influence, and often seeking his guidance – which he was at times hesitant to give.

Charles Schulz Deeply Competitive Nature Shaped Charlie Brown’s Character

A Proxy For His Creator’s Fear Of Failure

For Charles Schulz, “winning” was not just a matter of commercial success, nor was it about establishing Peanuts as the all-time greatest in the medium. Instead, it was a daily battle – a competition that could be won or lost with every single comic strip he produced. As explained in Schulz and Peanuts:

It was not enough that he had “revolutionized the art form, deepening it, filling it with possibility, giving permission to all who followed to write from the heart and intellect,” as Garry Trudeau pointed out. It did not matter that he achieved a success of dreamlike dimensions, or that Peanuts had been the most popular comic for years in newspaper readers’ polls. Schulz had to get the better of everyone else on the comics page every day.

Victory, in other words, was a matter of being the best strip on the page any given day – and to Schulz, he was the ultimate arbiter of quality when it came to newspaper comics.

Michaelis further quoted Schulz as stating: “In the thing that I do best, which is drawing a comic strip, it is important to me that I win.” To Schulz, there was nothing subjective about what he did, and the winner and loser of a day’s comic page seemed like a clear-cut matter to him. It is a way of looking at art that does, admittedly, seem at odds with the worldview of Peanuts, the one that afforded Schulz the success that he would later so fiercely protect. However, upon closer examination, Schulz’s drive to succeed is evident in the strip in subtle ways.

After all, in order to succeed, it is often necessary to have a deep-seated fear of failure –something that, for Charles Schulz, manifested on the page in his protagonist Charlie Brown, one of the most iconic failures in literary history. Though he worked diligently to give Peanuts a “timeless” and “innocent” quality, Schulz’s anxieties, feelings, and ideas about life were regularly filtered through the lens his characters, and his aversion to failure is among the most potently represented across the corpus of Peanuts as a whole.

Charles Schulz’s Creative Determination Led To A Five-Decade Career

He Refused To Quit

Schulz and Peanuts author David Michaelis effectively sums up the unyielding nature of Charles Schulz’s artistic drive by highlighting that, at a certain point in his career, he didn’t need to keep drawing Peanuts. Michaelis wrote:

As the creator of the most widely syndicated cartoon on the planet, read by 5 percent of the world’s literate population and watched in animated television specials by more than 4.4 billion viewers over the previous twenty-five years, [Schulz] could have maintained his presence at the top just by hiring a team of assistants to ring changes on his themes, but instead he made a strict point of getting himself to the drawing board every morning and consciously striving to be a better cartoonist.

Not only did Schulz resist giving up direct creative control of Peanuts, he was constantly “consciously striving to be a better cartoonist,” even at the height of his game. In essence, this was what kept him operating at such a high level for so long.

It was this constant impulse to be at the top, for Charles Schulz, that gave his career meaning. Had he not approached cartooning with such a competitive mindset, he might very well have retired from cartooning decades before Peanuts ended with his death in 2000. The strip could have continued in his absence, but it wouldn’t have been what it once was – and that was something Schulz could not abide by. Not when he felt he could still out-perform every other comic artist in America.

For Peanuts fans, learning about Charles Schulz’s competitiveness offers added context for understanding his work. Whatever the disconnect between the art and the artist might be, it is worth exploring the creative mind that produced one of the most influential, long-running serial works of fiction of the past century. Knowing that his motivation was often to stay ahead of his “rivals” casts a new light on the humor Peanuts, allowing it to be revisited and reinterpreted from a different perspective, something that is always worthwhile.

Source: Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography