Some of Peanuts´ more complex strips can ¨only be fully understood in theological terms.¨

The first Charlie Brown strip, 1950.

The tension between despair and hope.

The first kick at the football.

Oddly but somehow fittingly, Charles M. Schulz died only hours before the last of his Sunday Peanuts episodes arrived on America's collective doorstep. With this one-two punch in February 2000, we lost an artist who, for a half-century, bared his soul to readers on a daily basis yet still remains an enigma.

We also lost an institution that stretched back through our collective memory and reached across barriers of age, race, gender and class, perhaps the last remaining pop cultural icon about which that can be said.

By the time the last Peanuts daily installment appeared on Jan. 3, 2000, Schulz's strip was syndicated in 2,400 newspapers in 68 countries. Americans, in short, weren't the only ones left bereft.

Schulz also felt the loss. In his farewell strip to readers, he wrote, "Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy É how can I ever forget them?"

As it happens, people have not forgotten Schulz, nor have they abandoned comics and print animation, which are experiencing a major revival all over the world.

Peanuts itself is enjoying a second life. Though Schulz kept his strip's integrity intact by forbidding anyone else to draw it after his death, he surely didn't imagine that "classic Peanuts strips" would continue to be syndicated nearly as widely as when he was alive. In addition, one of the pleasant surprises on last year's hardcover bestseller list was The Complete Peanuts, 1950 to 1952 (Fantagraphics), the first in a monumental 25-volume series that will, over the next 12 years, reprint all 18,000 of Schulz's strips on 7,500 pages.

That series is now on its fourth volume , with this month's publication of The Complete Peanuts, 1957 to 1958 (Fantagraphics, 344 pages, $28.95), and sales continue to be brisk.

Another sign of Charlie-mania: the first full-scale biography of Charles M. Schulz, Schulz , by David Michaelis, will be published by HarperCollins in 2007. Finally, this holiday season will mark the 40th anniversary of CBS' first airing of A Charlie Brown Christmas , which has become a phenomenon in and of itself.

Why the enduring attachment to this little strip about a group of little people? The answer, or answers, to that question may be as simple, and as complicated, as the Peanuts' creator.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Nov. 26, 1922, Charles Monroe Schulz was the only child of parents who both quit school by the third grade. His father (like Charlie Brown's) was a barber and, for a period of time, the family lived above the barbershop. From the cradle, Schulz acquired the nickname "Sparky," after Spark Plug, the horse in Barney Google, the most popular comic strip of its time (an omen of his own calling and his own unrivaled fame). For the rest of his life, no one called him Charles, Charlie or Chuck. He was "Sparky," even to relative strangers on the street, and even as an old man. Though an affectionate nickname, it may have had the effect of infantilizing Schulz in the eyes of the public, thus making it easier to miss the deeper, darker elements to his art.

For all the loving remembrances of him -- and he was generous to a fault -- Schulz was also a peevish and secretive man, given to nursing old slights and licking old wounds. Michaelis said he never got over the pain of an awkward, friendless adolescence.

"To the end of his life," Michaelis said, "he remained baffled that the editors of the high school yearbook had rejected a batch of his drawings."

Schulz was also unhappy in love. He once said, "I never had a date in high school, because I thought, 'who'd want to date me?'" His 1974 divorce from his first wife, Donna Johnson, sent him into a deep hermitic funk. Melancholic by nature, he was beset by chronic bouts of depression throughout his life. Michaelis quotes a relative who said, "He always felt that no one really loved him. He knew his mom and dad loved him but he wasn't too sure other people loved him."

Even as his success reached unprecedented levels for a cartoonist, Schulz never overcame this profound sense of inferiority. At age 65, he told one interviewer, "I'm beginning to wonder if I hadn't wasted my life."

He made $62 million in 1988, but according to an earlier biographer, Rheta Grimsley Johnson, "He has spent a lifetime perfecting failure."

Charles M. Schulz was not a deep thinker but he may have been a genius. His genius was like Franz Kafka's -- forlorn but bemused, deceptively simple. And, like Kafka's stories, Peanuts has been interpreted by theologians and religious leaders for their own purposes.

Was Peanuts a religious strip, with a subtle evangelical mission. That question has dogged the strip since 1965, when Robert Short's The Gospel According to Peanuts , became a bestseller. Was Schulz really trying to inject some Christian theology into his comics?

The 40th anniversary of A Charlie Brown Christmas this holiday season will, no doubt, raise these questions anew. Even as a cartoon figure, Linus and his recitation of the Nativity story is one of the most touching moments in the history of television broadcasting, capable of bringing tears to the eyes of even non-believers. This is due, in large part, to Schulz's extraordinary achievement. That is, he created Linus, with his sheer unflappable goodness, and he created that scene in the Christmas play. Yes, it's a purely Christian story, but it is also the act of a decent little boy who feels compelled to silence the tormenters of his friend, Charlie Brown for what they, with their smug and overcommercialized eyes, see as his less-than-stellar directing job.

Dennis R. Hoover, formerly of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, has estimated that 10 percent of the Peanuts strips had to do with religion. He said the strip's "complex point of view" can "only be fully understood in theological terms."

Hoover cites Umberto Eco who said, of Peanuts, "These monster-children are capable suddenly of an innocence and a sincerity which call everything else into question É we never know whether to despair or heave a sigh of optimism." Hoover said, "This tension between despair and hope reflected Schulz's traditional Christian worldview. Humanity is fallen and sinful, yet created in the image of God."

But placing this burden on Schulz's shoulders might be what they call projecting in psychology. And, before the fundamentalists, gay-baiters and women-haters start making extravagant claims for Schulz's righteousness during the upcoming holiday season, it may be worth going back to the strips themselves and seeing for yourself whether these claims hold water.

Schulz was what might be described as an idiosyncratic Christian. He was raised in a Lutheran family that seldom went to church. Only after his mother died of cancer when he was 20 did he take an active role in any church, finding solace at a small Church of God in St. Paul. Here, he taught an adult Sunday school class for 10 years and even did some testifying on street corners and in missions, which later filled him with remorse. He told Rheta Johnson, "It always bothered me that here we youngsters were presuming to tell these craggy old guys the Secret of Life."

After he moved with his wife and five kids to Northern California in 1958, he stopped going to a church regularly, which isn't to say that he ceased being "Christian," though his faith was as unconventional. (Schulz loathed televangelists and made much sport of them in Peanuts strips of the 1980s and 1990s). Even his preferred scripture was colored by pain. When asked by a stranger for his favorite Bible verse, Schulz cited Romans 8:26: "Likewise the spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the spirit Himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words."

In 1988, he told Gary Groth of The Comics Journal , "I'm not questing for anything. I don't know anything, frankly. I think it's all a total mystery. I have no idea why we're here and I have no idea what happens after you die."

In this same interview, he said, "I no longer feel I'm in a position to tell anybody anything, so I don't do it É"

Schulz was as naive politically as religiously. He called himself "an Eisenhower Republican," mostly an offshoot of his Midwest upbringing. When asked about his "political leanings" by Groth, he said, "I don't even want to get into that. It's the same as the religious thing." He called his strip's politics "wishy washy" and said "he didn't want to offend people and I don't think it's necessary."

Reading The Complete Peanuts from the beginning of the comic strip in 1950 as it progressed from day to day over the course of a half-century is not the same thing as picking through one of those innumerable Peanuts anthologies that were sold in the mass marketplace while Schulz was alive.

To read it as Schulz drew the comic and wrote it, like a novel from end to end, is to appreciate and understand that the strip was not, first and foremost, funny. Sure, the antics of Snoopy, as vulture, hoofer, tormenter of Linus and his blanket, are laugh-out-loud hilarious. And Patty (no, not Peppermint Patty), Charlie Brown's original, pre-Lucy foil, had her moments of straight-faced comedy ("If I knew you were coming I'd have baked a mud pie!").

Many mysteries are also solved by reading the strips in this manner. Charlie Brown, as it turns out in the early strips, was the real classical music protege, but his violin playing was not up to snuff (this same exact scenario turned Henny Youngman into the King of the One-Liners). He then became the mentor of Schroeder, who is a gurgling infant in diapers when we first see him. You also find out that both Violet and Patty are the original love interests of Charlie Brown and that they are both, of course, unrequited.

The Peanuts strips don't begin to reveal the darkness at the core of Schulz's vision until the mid-1950s, but the twinges are there from the outset.

Which brings us to Lucy. In or through Lucy, one can see the reservoir of pain at the core of this remarkable strip, which, if it didn't anticipate the inner child movement of the 1980s, certainly awakened generations of young readers to the darker echoes within themselves.

Lucy was a little monster, a nasty, browbeating, cruel, insensitive she-beast, the caricature of every mother or wife or teacher who could never be satisfied. Her endless baiting of Charlie Brown, her vicious glee in sticking the shiv in his ribs, in reducing him to head-banging self-loathing are, frankly, weird in a strip that purports to be about and for little children.

These Lucy strips are not funny strips. Reading them, one feels sadness and compassion for their creator; one can't help but ponder the pain he must have endured somewhere down the line to create such a character as Lucy. For, surely, Schulz is Charlie Brown, the good man who is inexplicably beset with woes, the loving man who seems to inspire nothing but hate in his peers.

In the very first Peanuts strip, in fact, from October 1950, Charlie is walking down the street as Shermy and Patty malevolently watch him approach. As he strolls past, Shermy says, "Good ol' Charlie Brown É How I hate him!".

Linus, another less-than-funny character, has always been the linchpin for those who project religious themes on the strip. He was not always saint-like, however; in the earlier strips, he was capable of the same small cruelties as all the others. But, perhaps explaining the enduring appeal of Peanuts, Linus evolved as a character.

So did Snoopy, who was the comedic center of Schulz's little world, and in some ways the most consistently appealing character during the 50-year run of the strip. Snoopy is a master of physical comedy. It's weird to say that about a cartoon dog, but there's no getting around it. The vulture thing, the penguin walk, those hot-foot dances, the head in the water dish, rolling off the dog house roof. He's as hilarious as Charlie Chaplin, whereas Charlie Brown is more reminiscent of Buster Keaton.

As Edmund Wilson has shown, in his profound meditation on this theme in The Wound and The Bow , personal pain has been the source of much great art and great writing. Schulz was capable of both.

Indeed, Schulz's writing is the most overlooked aspect of Peanuts. Some of his panels, if the dialogue were written straight out on the page, read like haiku poetry.

Take, for instance, Snoopy's nocturnal meditation from Nov. 27, 1958: "When I was young I used to howl at the moon every night É I was wild and ignorant in those days É I had a lot of fun, though É Now I don't have any fun and I'm still ignorant."

Or Charlie's nearly existential lecture to Linus, from Aug. 5, 1958: "My Gramma says that we live in a veil of tears É she's right. This is a sad world É this is a world filled with sorrow É sorrow, sadness and despair É grief, agony and woe É"

What makes this strip work is Snoopy, who enters in mid-lecture doing his hot-foot, ear-flapping dance É only to slink into a state of dread-filled paralysis by strip's end. All of this was created in four tiny panels!

Other strips are like Henny Youngman himself, only more jarring, more Dangerfield-like. Take the strip from Oct. 20, 1958. Lucy is telling Linus (who's holding his blanket and sucking his thumb), "When I get big, I think I'll try to be an airplane hostess...Maybe I'll get to fly all over the world! What do you want to be when you grow up, Linus?"

Linus, extracts his thumb, lowers his blanket and earnestly says, "A fanatic."

Some strips only have one line: "It always rains on the unloved."

Or "Those stars are a lot farther away then they look."

But, coupled with the pathos-inducing portraits of Charlie Brown and Linus, they grab at the deepest currents within each reader. And, of course, some strips have no lines at all, like the one where Linus is playing in the autumn leaves or his staring at the stars in an ink-black night sky.

On rare occasions, Schulz tackled topical subjects, like the Sunday installment devoted to Linus' fears of nuclear fallout (it turns out to be a snowfall).

Some simply say it all in one phrase and one gesture: "A person shouldn't have to lose all his pride when he's only 6 years old."

That Peanuts is not strictly funny is not to diminish Schulz's achievement. To admit that is, in fact, to encourage all who've been shaped or touched over the years by this little world of little people to reimmerse yourselves in the strip as it unfolded, as Schulz developed his themes, as he grew as an artist.

Thanks to Fantagraphics Books, this is now possible. Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy ... how can we ever forget them?

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Zippy the Pinhead Talks About Peanuts

Syndicated daily in 200 newspapers, Zippy the Pinhead by Bill Griffith may be the heir apparent to Peanuts. Like Peanuts, Zippy´s exploits are contained in three or four tidy frames. Griffith lives in Hadlyme. He kindly responded to some questions about Peanuts .

AB: How influential was Peanuts on your life and art?

BG: My big comics influence as a kid growing up in the 1950s was Mad magazine and the humor of Mad ´s genius editor, Harvey Kurtzman. I remember my mother buying Peanuts books, so I read an occasional strip from some the early collections, and they seemed smarter than the usual stuff, but they paled for me in comparison to the raunchy, subversive energy of Mad . But, within the past 10 years or so, as I finally gave the strip some belated serious attention, I began to see its low-key brilliance. Peanuts strips are like little Zen koans utterly simple, yet full of depth and wisdom.

AB: Reading the strips in sequence -- years after reading them as a kid -- I get a sense of real pathos and pain and sadness from the strip. Do they strike you this way too?

BG: Peanuts, unlike most other kid strips, dealt with ALL the aspects of childhood and life -- without dumbing it down or going for cuteness. Very few successful daily strip cartoonists explore the darker nature of their characters this was Schulz´s territory. I do believe that most people who treasure Peanuts brush aside (or even don´t see) the central themes of loneliness and alienation, and concentrate on the comparatively lighter nature of Snoopy. Personally, I could do without Snoopy.

AB: Did you ever meet Charles Schulz and, if so, did he strike you as a [person] harboring the sort of darkness found in Charlie Brown?

BG: Yes, I met Charles Schulz on a number of occasions in San Francisco and at his ice skating rink in Santa Rosa. He was anything but alienated or dark in the way he presented himself. He was avuncular and very approachable, without being condescending in the slightest to younger cartoonists like myself. He once told me he enjoyed Zippy and ¨admired my pen technique.¨ That may have been a diplomatic way of saying he didn´t ¨get¨ Zippy, but I was flattered nonetheless.

AB: True or false: Lucy is one of the great monsters in comic strip history.

BG: Sorry, I don´t want to be so reductionist. There are lots of great comic monsters. Myself, I was always very frightened to death of Little Lulu´s mother.