The Beat poet of the playground

The Complete ''Peanuts": The Definitive Collection of Charles M. Schulz's Comic Strip Masterpiece, 1953 to 1954
Fantagraphics, 360 pp., $28.95

When a great popular artist passes away, there's usually an immediate taking stock, a sense of final assessment now that the parenthesis is closed. Whether the field is music or literature or painting or film, the boxed sets and special editions hit the shelves quickly. Lists of key works, critical essays -- all part of repackaging the once vital for historical consumption.

For a number of reasons, this didn't happen when Charles M. Schulz died. First, his chosen medium -- the comic strip -- has never received serious cultural respect and probably never will, no matter that ''Peanuts" was perhaps the most pervasive pop artifact of the second half of the 20th century. (What's the competition? Elvis and the Beatles, probably, but nothing else.)

Second, the sheer bulk of Schulz's output makes the notion of somehow containing it hurtful to the brain. ''Peanuts" ran every day from Oct. 2, 1950, to Feb. 13, 2000, for a total of 18,170 strips. No wonder Schulz died just hours before his final set of panels ran; after five decades of angst and whimsy tugging at each other, Schulz was ''Peanuts," ''Peanuts" was Schulz, and one could not exist without the other.

That leads to the third reason no one has really taken stock until now: Schulz's triumph was daily and thus invisible. Yes, everyone loved Linus and commiserated with Charlie Brown and cringed when Lucy held the football and bought every piece of merchandise Snoopy appeared on -- and it was that very ubiquity that kept us from noticing the achievement. Week in, week out, ''Peanuts" was part of the air we breathe, and how do you stand apart from air?

All this is by way of preface to the second installment in Fantagraphics Books' ''The Complete 'Peanuts': The Definitive Collection of Charles M. Schulz's Comic Strip Masterpiece," covering 1953 to 1954. The scope of this project is heroic: With two fat volumes a year, each volume compiling two years of daily and Sunday strips (the latter in black and white, unfortunately), it will be 2029 before we see the final installment. The packaging and jacket art are impressively chic, designed to render Schulz newly attractive to 21st-century hipoisie; introductions so far have been penned by Garrison Keillor and Walter Cronkite; you can buy the first two volumes, covering the years 1950 through 1954, in a nice, covetable boxed set.

But the most startling aspect of ''The Complete 'Peanuts' " is that it takes you back to the beginning -- long before Schulz jumped the shark with Woodstock and Snoopy's dad and increasingly woolly plot lines -- and reminds you how radically bleak this strip once was. Hilarious too, of course, but the humor bled from insecurity and gnawing doubt, and if it was nice to have an emotional mirror of our times, who expected to find that on the funny pages?

The very first ''Peanuts" is famous for the way it instantly subverted the clich of 1950s kiddie innocence, with Shermy saying, ''Here comes ol' Charlie Brown . . . Good ol' Charlie Brown . . . How I hate him!" But it's the strip from Nov. 14, 1950 -- a month and a half into the 50-year run -- that most coolly captures the pre-K existentialism Schulz was after. Shermy and Charlie Brown sit on a curb, staring blankly at the street. For three panels, they say nothing, don't even move. In the fourth panel, Shermy simply deadpans, ''Yup! . . . Well . . . That's the way it goes!" Imagine reading that over your Post Toasties in 1950 and having it fester throughout your day. It's why Garry Trudeau called ''Peanuts" ''the first Beat strip."

If you're under the age of 30, you probably don't remember Shermy, or Patty, or Violet -- all three, with Charlie Brown and the resolutely doglike Snoopy, the main characters of the strip's first years. As he gained in skill, Schulz phased them out in favor of more idiosyncratic souls, each new character starting small and silent but within weeks developing tics that would serve them for decades.

First there's a baby named Schroeder; four months after he arrives, Charlie Brown sits him down at a toy piano, the kid plays Beethoven, and off we go. A little later, there's an oddly wide-eyed toddler who likes to cause trouble for her father, and shortly thereafter she's recognizably Lucy. Snoopy first ''speaks" on May 27, 1952; not surprisingly, his opening line is ''Why do I have to suffer such indignities?" Linus appears as Lucy's much-abused baby brother, already exuding gentle thoughtfulness.

Thus the main cast is in place by Volume 1; the only new character in Volume 2 is Pigpen, who never really rose above the status of utility outfielder. The second book, covering the years 1953 to 1954, is the more illuminating read, though. Because the strip had become an established success, Schulz was free to experiment with tone and narrative, to try out different graphic approaches, and to hone his timing. It is in these pages that ''Peanuts" becomes ''Peanuts."

Not everything worked. A frizzy-haired, loudmouthed girl named Charlotte Braun came and thankfully went in late 1954. When Schulz attempted a story arc unfolding over several Sundays -- about Charlie Brown entering Lucy in a golf tournament -- it went nowhere and ended limply. The man's forte was the contained daily joke, with its call-and-response set-up and payoff.

He tinkered with surrealism: The never-seen but apparently vast interior of Snoopy's doghouse is first referred to in January of 1954, and there are a number of strips about Linus blowing square balloons. During this time, Schulz fooled around with sight gags, language gags, character gags, running gags, variations on a gag, and he started to create Sunday pages that are small miracles of gutbusting farce.

The best strips have an awareness of late-20th-century neuroses that was unprecedented at the time, which is a fancy way of saying Schulz was able to put his insecurities into the mouths of babes. Sometimes with impatience: One of the most inexplicably funny daily strips features Lucy listening to a recording of a song that starts ''Mary wore her red dress red dress red dress, Mary wore her red dress all day long," and drily commenting, ''That poor girl was out of her mind."

More often, the pain is personal and internalized by good ol' Charlie Brown, who came to suffer for everyone else in ''Peanuts." His discombobulation when Lucy insists that an entirely new sun rises each day is played for comedy. The pit he gets in his stomach when Patty wins all his marbles is less funny. And there's no escaping the hopelessness of a strip like the one where he tells Schroeder, ''When people first meet me they dislike me . . . then after they get to know me, they hate me!"

From first to last, the through line was dignity -- mostly lost, occasionally gained, in some characters (like Snoopy) genetically encoded, for Charlie Brown forever out of reach. Dignity was important to Schulz, and he seems to have always felt on the outs with it. Even the name of the strip -- imposed at the start by a comics syndication editor -- was a disappointment that never ceased to rankle. It's that gap between the desire for simple dignity and the world's refusal to accord it that fueled ''Peanuts" for 50 years.

Not that the shy Minnesotan would articulate it as such; the long, insightful 1987 interview that closes Volume 1 makes clear that Schulz just put the stuff out there without getting overly analytical about it. He knew better. ''I don't know anything, frankly," he insisted. ''I think it's all a total mystery."

Yup. Well. That's the way it goes.