Football Dreams and Ottim Liffs

A version of this essay first appeared in The Comics of Charles Schulz: The Good Grief of Modern Life (University Press of Mississippi), edited by Jared Gardner and Ian Gordon.

"There's something about Peanuts that reminds me of Krazy Kat." — Carl Sandburg

Officer Pupp sees a football on the ground but doesn’t notice the string attached to one end. He takes off running. Foot goes out; the string tightens and the ball pulls away. Pupp lunges skyward and lands hard — three stars of pain. Ignatz emerges from behind a brick wall, blowing smoke rings from a mouse-sized cigar.

          “Lost your equilibrium, Officer Pupp?” Ignatz asks.

            The scene from George Herriman’s comic strip Krazy Kat first appeared in newspapers on the day after Christmas, 1932. At the time, ten-year-old Charles “Sparky” Schulz was a funnies-loving student at Richards Gordon elementary school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Yet Schulz likely didn’t see this strip. The Minneapolis Tribune had once carried Herriman’s comics, but by 1932 William Randolph Hearst’s King Features syndicate had no Krazy Kat customers in the Twin Cities. Young Schulz might have known the name “Krazy Kat” from early-1930s animations that screened at the nearby Park Theatre, but those were nothing like Herriman’s comics.

            Herriman’s football gag continued through the week. One day, Krazy tries and fails to kick the ball, and goes flying. Another day, Pupp gives the ball a kick and discovers it’s made of stone. The series ends when Pupp hits the ball with his billy club and the ball explodes in a torrent of ink.

            At week’s end, the football story was finished. Herriman moved on to other gags. It would take the young student from St. Paul to expand the football prank to a years-long epic of one child’s dreams and another’s trickery.

 * * *

“A cartoonist is someone who has to draw the same thing day after day after day without repeating himself,” Charles Schulz once said. Few artists ever approached Herriman’s ability to draw and write these same things, day after day, so wondrously. As critic Gilbert Seldes wrote in 1922, the “variations are innumerable, the ingenuity never flags.”

            The story structure of Krazy Kat might seem simple enough. Krazy Kat loves Ignatz. Ignatz is obsessed with beaning Krazy Kat with a brick. Officer Pupp is duty-bound to jail Ignatz and also harbors affection for the Kat. Yet Krazy Kat is also a meditation on love and fate, good and evil, and even language and reality. It was uniquely nuanced in a golden era of newspapers when there was more page space for nuance.

            Herriman was typically modest, telling others that his job amounted to turning out comical pictures to amuse Hearst’s readers over their morning eggs and coffee. Yet the depth of purpose and clarity of vision in Herriman’s work indicate he knew otherwise. With Krazy Kat, Herriman brought all he had to the comics page, creating a deeply personal work that pushed open door after door for any artist hoping to test the limits.

            The work also reflected a unique biography. George Joseph Herriman was born to a mixed race family in New Orleans in 1880. When George was ten years old, the Herrimans fled Jim Crow South for Los Angeles, choosing to improve their economic chances by “passing” as white. George Herriman would live out the rest of his life as a white man, working in an industry that did not yet include African-Americans, laughing along with friends and co-workers when they called him “George the Greek.”

            Around his twentieth birthday, Herriman set off to to New York City to join a small legion of ambitious young artists who were busy inventing the American newspaper comic. Thirteen years later, he created Krazy Kat and began slyly using the strip to communicate the unique perspective of a New Orleans black Creole in a white world. He relocated the strip to Coconino County, a restless landscape he assembled from the buttes, mesas and sandstone monuments of northern Arizona and southern Utah. The slapstick gag of throwing a brick propels the stories of Krazy Kat, but the strip also serves as a character study of a Kat of an uncertain racial or sexual identity whose love for a tormentor increases with each knock.

            It all perplexed Hearst’s readers to no end. Even in the early 1920s, when Krazy Kat was at the height of its popularity, editors waged battles with their business managers just to keep the strip in the paper. This happened in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where the business office wanted to replace Krazy Kat with Billy DeBeck’s more popular Barney Google. (The paper eventually found room for both strips.)

            Krazy Kat’s dense language, shifting desert landscapes and equally shifting identities confounded readers — especially Herriman’s choice to make Krazy both male and female. Movie director Frank Capra came closest to getting an explanation. “… I realized Krazy was something like a sprite, an elf,” Capra reported Herriman saying. “They have no sex. So that Kat can’t be a he or a she. The Kat’s a sprite – a pixie – free to butt into anything.”

* * *

Soon after Charles M. Schulz’s birth in 1922,  he received a lifelong nickname: Sparky. It came from the horse Spark Plug in Billy DeBeck’s Barney Google — the same strip that Iowa newspaper bean-counters had once tried to sub in for Krazy Kat.

            Like many children growing up between the World Wars, Schulz eagerly followed adventure comics such as Tim Tyler’s Luck and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. He also read Walt Disney’s funny animal stories and Elzie Crisler “E.C.” Segar’s Popeye, the latter especially influenced by Herriman. During this time, however, Schulz remained unaware of Kat and Mouse and Pupp.

            Shortly after high school — at the same age when Herriman was breaking into the New York newspapers — Schulz tried to interest Disney and others in his comics. Unlike Herriman, he enjoyed no early luck. After jobbing around Minneapolis and St. Paul, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. By the time Herriman died in 1944, Schulz, nearly 22, had risen to the rank of Buck Sergeant. Schulz returned home the following year and continued sending out his work, including to Herriman’s old syndicate, King Features. He finally found a job at the local Art Instruction, Inc., where he graded student submissions. In 1947, he placed Li’l Folks, a comic about children, in local newspapers. Three years later, the comic was picked up by United Features syndicate and was re-titled, against Schulz’s wishes, to Peanuts.

            Yet something besides a name change happened on the road from Li’l Folks to Peanuts: Schulz discovered Krazy Kat. In 1944, when the poet E.E. Cummings learned of Herriman’s death, he convinced his publisher to release a book of Krazy Kat strips, along with a Cummings essay that praised Herriman’s comic as a “meteoric burlesk melodrama, born of the immemorial adage love will find a way.” Among those who read Cummings’ words was Schulz. “After World War II, I began to study the Krazy Kat strip for the first time,” Schulz later recalled. “A book collection of Krazy Kat was published sometime in the late 1940s, which did much to inspire me to create a feature that went beyond the mere actions of ordinary children.”

            In appearance alone, Peanuts and Krazy Kat might seem dissimilar, even polar opposites. Schulz, well aware that he had to tell his story no matter how large or small his comics might be reprinted, used a bold, fluid line for an elegant comics minimalism. The central images in Peanuts are large, expressive children’s faces balanced on disproportionately small bodies. Where Herriman drew darkly shadowed desert vistas, Schulz’s backgrounds are either bright interior spaces of couches, lamps, rugs and televisions, or Midwest-inspired landscapes of grass or snow, trees, sidewalks and picket fences. Schulz usually limited his language to speech or thought balloons that might occupy the top third of a panel, except for the occasional “AAUGH.” Instead of filling his margins with little animal sideshows, as Herriman once did, Schulz nearly always staged his action on a single stage.

            Yet Herriman’s influence can be detected throughout Peanuts visually as well as thematically — including in Peanuts’ most iconic image. Herriman travelled extensively through northern Arizona, and among the many ideas he adapted from Navajo artists were the bold zig-zag stripes seen in rugs and other Navajo art as symbols of lightning. Although Schulz’s former girlfriend Donna Wold would recall the cartoonist wearing a grey shirt with a black zig-zag pattern, Schulz himself subscribed to the idea that Herriman’s drawings played a part in Charlie Brown’s shirt. Mutts cartoonist Patrick McDonnell, both a Herriman scholar and a Schulz friend, recalled a conversation in which they discussed the zig-zag stripe. Schulz said it wasn’t a conscious homage, but added that it seemed to come from his reading of Krazy Kat — the kind of influence that would naturally result from one cartoonist’s deep admiration and close study of another.        

            This was just the beginning of similarities between Peanuts and Krazy Kat, however. Under Schulz’s pen, a placid Midwestern landscape might at times spring to sudden Coconino life. Just as Herriman might show a cactus raising or shrugging its branches to comment on the main action, so might Charlie Brown’s fears suddenly animate a tree into a grinning destroyer of kites.

            Not only the strips’ flora become animated. In another series, Sally, Charlie Brown’s little sister, begins talking to her school building. Sally’s adoration of Linus (whom she calls her “Sweet Babboo”) is among the many cases of unrequited love that infect Schulz’s pint-sized population. When Sally tries to introduce Linus to her school as her “boy friend,” Linus erupts with a facial storm of wild eyes and hair, shouting, “Waddya mean, boy friend?!” In an imitation of Ignatz, the school building then drops a brick on Linus’ head. “I’m the jealous type,” says the building. Even more to the point, the school also drops a brick on Lucy, telling her, “We’re all a little crazy, kid!”

            Schulz’s most poignant and expressive use of nature in “Peanuts” is his seasonal depiction of autumn leaves. In the Midwest of Schulz’s childhood, a riotous flash of color preceded winter’s snowy hibernation. In Peanuts, autumn leaves always have their stories to tell. Some are light-hearted: a pile of leaves provides an opportunity for an athletic leap (preferably not while holding a sucker). In quieter moments, melancholic conversations might be accompanied by a single leaf blowing in the wind, not unlike the answer in a song by another Minnesota poet.

            Throughout his half-century with Peanuts, Schulz returned again and again to stories of falling leaves. Some starred Linus, who began talking with leaves, informing Lucy forthrightly, “Leaves need me! I help them through what is really the big emotional period of their lives!” Snoopy (possibly comics’ most sprite-like creature since Krazy Kat) joyfully dances along with a leaf as the wind blows it to the ground, then returns home, saying that the leaves are depressing him so much that he can’t sleep. Even Woodstock suffers a “fear of falling leaves.” Lucy, not surprisingly, is the most blunt. “Stay up there you fool!” she tells a single leaf on a branch and, when it falls, says bleakly, “Now, it’ll be the rake and the burning pile.”

            Schulz’s recurring stories of autumn leaves echo a contemplative series of daily Krazy Kat strips published over six days in November, 1934. The story begins with Krazy Kat noticing a single “ottim liff.” Soon, Krazy is joined by Ignatz and Officer Pupp. The trio sits on a log, waiting for the leaf to drop. Ignatz’s and Pupp’s patience is soon exhausted, but Krazy never stirs, keeping a moonlight vigil, saying that if the leaf doesn’t fall this year, “they is always ‘ottim’ afta next.”    

            On the fourth day, just as Officer Pupp and Ignatz fall to their knees to beg Krazy to end the vigil, the leaf falls with a sudden “plip.” In a coda, Ignatz ties a brick to a branch. “Wot a pleasing pleasure I’m gonna get, wen it falls,” says Krazy, as Ignatz prepares to cut the cord.

* * *

“You know, I always thought if I could do something as good as Krazy Kat, I would be happy,” Charles Schulz once said. “Krazy Kat was always my goal.”

            Schulz had certainly read the “ottom liff” stories when he was just beginning Peanuts, for they were among the daily strips reprinted in Cummings’ collection. The football gags were not among the strips in the book. Yet with the exception of the story of the schoolhouse dropping the brick — which does appears to be a direct homage to Krazy Kat — none of these tales seem to result from a conscious decision by Schulz to honor Herriman. Rather, the connections seem to exist because of the profound similarities between the two artists, however different their lives and eras might have been, and from each cartoonist’s desire to bring something essential about himself into his work.

            Charles Schulz and George Herriman were each as deeply spiritual as they were iconoclastic in their religious beliefs. Schulz grew up a churchgoer and as an adult led Bible studies, but later considered his faith to be an intensely private matter. Herriman was raised in a family of devout Catholics and as a schoolboy learned catechism from Vincentian priests, yet his work is replete with references to seances, reincarnation and especially Navajo spiritual beliefs. Before he died, he instructed that his ashes not be buried in the Catholic cemetery where his parents lay, but be scattered across the Arizona desert.

            With the exception of Percy Crosby’s Skippy (also a profound influence on Schulz), no comics are filled with so many overtly spiritual ideas and quotations from the Bible as Peanuts and Krazy Kat. Fans of Peanuts are well aware of the lengthy quotation from the Book of Luke offered by Linus in the television special A Charlie Brown Christmas. Indeed, some Peanuts strips are constructed straight from Bible passages, as in the 1970 Sunday comic in which Charlie Brown, being offered yet another turn at kicking the football, cries in anguish, “How long, O Lord?” Says Lucy, holding the football: “Actually, there is a note of protest in the question as asked by Isaiah, for we might say he was unwilling to accept the finality of the Lord’s judgment.” 

            Such meditations on fate are seen again and again in Krazy Kat. “It is the things we don’t see which guide our course in life, ‘Krazy,’” Ignatz says in a 1918 strip. Replies Krazy, “He what guides a brick to my bean each day aint so inwisibil y’betcha.” Herriman, like Schulz, might also turn to the Bible for more whimsical fun, as in a 1939 comic in which Krazy casts a “loafibread” in the water and a fish complains that it’s not buttered.

            Neither brick nor football can put a dent in the optimism of Krazy Kat and Charlie Brown. There is, however, one crucial difference in these spiritual slapsticks. “Happiness does not create humor,” Schulz once said. “Sadness creates humor. Krazy Kat getting hit on the head by a brick from Ignatz Mouse is funny.” This might hold true for Charlie Brown, who lies in anguish after each attempted football kick. But not for Krazy Kat. With each brick, Krazy is far from sad. Instead, Krazy is literally love-struck, believing ever more deeply in Ignatz’s devotion. It is the greatest difference between Charlie Brown and Krazy Kat: When succumbing to fate, Krazy would never utter an “AAUGH,” and Charlie Brown would never be seen lying on the ground after a football prank, swooning in bliss.

* * *

Umberto Eco, writing of both Krazy Kat and Peanuts, described “a constant seesaw of reactions” in which “we never know whether to despair or to heave a sigh of optimism.”

Herriman and Schulz achieved this effect, Eco said, by their “lyrical stubbornness.” Both cartoonists inscribed strict rules for fantastical, self-enclosed worlds, in which they could explore stunningly wide ranges of emotions and experiences. In Coconino County, it’s not just that there are no human beings; it’s that humans are unthinkable. In the neighborhoods inhabited by the li’l folks of Peanuts, adults do live just off-frame, similar to the upstairs neighbors of the Dingbats, an early Herriman strip. But an adult strolling down a sidewalk in Peanuts would be as inconceivable as a human guard standing in front of Officer Pupp’s jail.

            The most poignant similarity between Krazy Kat and Peanuts does not show up until the end of each strip’s run, when the personal connection between creator and creation is felt most deeply. In the last years of Herriman’s life, arthritis and other physical and mental ailments made the act of drawing increasingly painful. The changes can be traced in the final Krazy Kat strips, in which characters and scenery are drawn in a scratchier line, and actions and personalities are communicated in the most minimal of gestures. So too, did Schulz’s late art reflect the effects of his declining health, with a worsening tremor leading to wavier lines. The effect in both strips is both remarkable and moving: a sense of individual suffering is embedded right in the art. It brings a sense of a full and complete life to both Peanuts and Krazy Kat, from whimsical, gag-filled youths through adult meditations to the final marriage of cartoonists and characters, bodies and spirits.

            Until that time arrived, each cartoonist showed up to the table, day after day, to create comical pictures to amuse their readers. For the last word on Krazy Kat and Peanuts, one good place to look is the original Herriman comic that Schulz hung on the wall of his drawing studio. In the 1916 strip, Krazy Kat talks to a pair of hedgehogs who have just witnessed Ignatz throwing a brick.

            Says Krazy: “You rilly must not mind ‘Ignatz,’ he’s only got a great sense of ‘fizzikill humor,’ — thats all.”