Cute Revolution in Popular Art

...Comic strips like Peanuts have obviously eliminated the vulgarity of the older comic strips' content—the racial caricature and free-for-all blood-lust...

...The most unhappy result of this attitude is his rather tedious commitment to knowing little jokes about childhood traumas and fixations, Lucy is a fuss-budget: Linus has a blanket fetishism...

...Or of neurotic adults disguised as children...

...The total result is a vacuum world as tenuously connected to adult reality as the drawing-style is to the richness of traditional cartoon technique...

...jokes which do not reflect the adult world-at-large...

...George Herriman used the apparent carelessness of his drawing as a counter-weight for the keen-eyed nastiness of his Yiddish ironies...

...By the same token Skippy and Just Kids were funny or moving, mostly as a kind of outlandish comment on the adult world (Skippy's mock-solemn observations on loyalty, goodness, etc...

...as they did—so monotonously at times—in Skippy and Just Kids—but which portray a sort of sliding scale on which the kids' point of view is frequently interchangeable with that of the comic strip creator...

...Oh, good grief...

...Such fantasy is realized through a pseudo-naive drawing technique which reduces the simplifications of earlier cartooning to a kind of bargain-basement primitivism...

...As represented by Peanuts, which seems due for a good-any-time pass to the next edition of Gilbert Seldes' Seven Lively Arts, the trend mixes do-it-yourself cartoon work (the characters frequently seem to have been stencilled from a cartoonists-school textbook) and an inflexible commitment to a bland level of unassuming good manners...

...The most delicate and original fun of Peanuts ensues from Schulz's treating his characters, not as ready-on-call comedians, but as bewildering elf-children like those of the good second-level British writers, Saki and Walter de la Mare...

...You have to keep asking yourself: Is he making fun of child psychology...

...Real vulgarity consists in great part of valuing the tools and skills of any achievement beyond the lasting power of the achievement...

...Or of children who think they are peculiar...

...Or of children who are "peculiar...

...The basic vulgarity—the good vulgarity—that Peanuts has displaced consisted of the lunging, fending spontaneity with which trouble-shooters like Billy De Beck and Fred (Happy Hooligan) Opper sought out any sort of contact with the audience which they intermittently sensed, but which was always too fluid and fickle to let them accept it permanently...

...Charles Schulz may be the most accomplished master of blankness in contemporary art since Mark Rothko drifted onto the scene with his filets of Grand Canyon...

...The reason, I think, for Shirley's appeal was the regular insistence of her movies on Shirley as a doll—far less human than the innumerable wax dolls manufactured in her name—who parodied in a perfectly sweet and safely incredible way the agonies and joys of the adult world...

...Just Kids and Baby Take a Bow regarded childhood as a rather dirty, but charming, vestibule to the adult world, lacking any autonomous reality...

...Its chief advantage over the nice-nellyism of another day is its proponents' ability to outfit their conventionalism with the platitudes and attitudes of quasi-intellectual ready-to-wear, as represented by the Saturday Review and Harper's...

...Even while he enjoins his audience's appreciation of the kids' grace and humor, Schulz levels this light-weight geniality against the nonchalance with which he treats subjects like childhood neurosis, bullying and so on...

...Schulz is expert, too, at punctuating this blankness: with shrieking repetitions of some catch-line like "Good old Charlie Brown...

...The trouble, I think, lies in the fact that the good-taste kick is merely a cut-rate puritanism...

...He can fluff out an almost gagless strip with dogs and children doing tumble-weed dances...

...Schulz uses his off-handedness as a counter-weight to nothing in particular except a church-social blandness...

...Probably the basic weakness of Peanuts—delightful as it often is—is that to aim head-on at gentility requires from any artist that he hold still for considerable stretches of time...

...I would guess, neither as funny nor as prevalent as nostalgic night-club columnists and other sentimental sponsors make it out to be...

...Frank Baxter and Shirley Temple...

...The good-taste fetishism which saturates Peanuts shows up in the oh-nothing-much philosophy which underlies this display of wit and skill...

...Schulz is funniest and most individual when he answers "Yes ' to the last question, as in the episode about the rained-out baseball game, when the outfield comes floating by on a raft...

...This has produced some of his funniest panels: those featuring his best character, Charlie Brown's dog, Snoopy...

...I WRITERS and WRITING Cute Revolution in Popular Art By Donald Phelps DONALD PHELPS is a free-lance writer whose last article, "Satire With Its Fingers Crossed," appeared here July 6. CHARLES SCHULZ'S Peanuts is probably the most successful—and also, in certain peripheral ways, most depressing—example of the current Cute Revolution in comic strips...

...But, too often, he slaps his character labels on so vehemently that they wind up, not on the characters' psyches, but on the reader's nose...

...or with the flv-specks of facial expression which occasionally enliven the kids' faces—a zig-zag mouth-line (chagrin) or extra eye-circles (dismay), lending the jelly-bean heads that minute activity which invariably fascinates the people who keep watch oven the lobsters in restaurant windows...

...Schroeder is a Beethoven-worshipper...

...Good taste, in this context, means, of course, a dead-level defensiveness against whatever might be considered "bad taste": a creamily civilized, ultra-pious rejection of whatever values will be likely to hurt anyone's feelings...

...Such stuff was...

...and the corollary of puritanism in any area is always a frivolousness toward anything not within the puritans' easy comprehension...

...Or is the whole thing meant only as a pleasant, unpartisan nonsense fantasy about kids who aren't literally kids...

...The taste of either, by any serious standards, could be duplicated by the nearest traffic cop...

...And in the work of the hit-and-run engineers mentioned above, this vulgarity accounted for the intertwined closeness of what was good—ingenuity, self-effacing wit and out-of-the-way delicacy— to what was awful—shoddiness, brutality and the cynicism which encourages any kind of artist to skirt risks and hug advantages...

...Although the constant attacks on "popular culture" as a corrupter of taste at practically any age level make such a conclusion seem unlikely, I should suppose that the Cute Revolution owed its existence to the current plague of "good taste" which has ulcerated every form of expression...

...The very vacuity of the drawing puts over the impression that his attention—and that of his characters—is beamed on some distraction just outside the strip itself, and well worth the reader's attention if he could just catch it...

...but holding still for any time at all is too much for the Wandering Jew existence of the popular arts, which only realize their attainments as they leave them behind...

...Peanuts deals with a clutch of children in the five-to-seven age bracket, but that's as far as any resemblance to the older kid comics goes...

...At any rate, Peanuts and its companions in the Cute Revolution have introduced a Chinese drawing grace and light-footed elan to the shantytown art of comic strips, even though, in doing so, they have helped sandbag the equally genuine—although sloppy and rowdy— insurgence of Katzenjammer Kids, Polly and Her Pals or Little Jimmy...

...The wildcat desperation of almost any Barney Google or Katzenjammer Kids comic strip has been replaced, in Peanuts and its fellows, by the urbane gentility and shot-calling assurance of intelligent dilettantes who have reduced to a super-slick short-hand the stacatto urgencies of early cartooning...

...The main difference between the cuteness hawked by Peanuts and the glucose formerly circulated, on the one hand, by Shirley Temple movies, and on the other, by early vacant-lot comic strip epics such as Skippy and Just Kids, is this: Peanuts interpolates routine kid-comic activities like tumbling, fighting, bawling and perspiring with a view of childhood in general that is much older and more rarefied than that of its predecessors...

...By flouting all the strictures about creating distinctive types and emphasizing facial expression, which cartoon classes have been shovelling down their students' throats for eternity—Schulz has perfected a deadpan listlessness unfamiliar to American comic strips since George Herriman's brilliantly eclectic Krazy Kat...

...The kids in Peanuts are always on tap with jokes about traumas or Beethoven's birthday...

...He posts his characters against great swatches and bandaids of empty space and a little stubbly grass, so that the vapid doodling of figures takes on the deadpan suggestiveness which perked up Buster Keaton's fascination for so many years...

...The constabulary of the new good taste is typified by the TV criticism of Jack Gould in the New York Times and Harriet van Horne in the New York World-Telegram and Sun...

...kids wearing stove-pipe hats and spouting stuffed-shirt protocol jargon...

...But this is certainly not the most important change they have wrought...

...or Charlie Brown's own favorite, usually reserved for the last panel...

...The major strain in Peanuts, Miss Peach and, to a lesser degree, Hi and Lois is its view of childhood—very early childhood—as a sort of island country, retaining its own magical secrets and self-knowledge, detached from the grown-up world and, because of this detachment, obscurely superior to adulthood...

...The most notable comic-strip representatives are Peanuts, Hi and Lois and Miss Peach—"adult" comic-strips for adults who have recently graduated from a progressive school presided over by Dr...

...And although Schulz is never sadistic or callous to any degree, his inexorable good manners seem not far removed from the attitude behind the sick jokes of recent currency: the inability, even on the rudimentary level of comic strips, to admit that ugliness and cruelty are to any degree emotionally "real...