An excerpt from Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson on the Charles Schulz comic strip:
Comic strip cartooning requires such a peculiar combination of talents that there are very few people who are ever successful at it. Of those, Charles Schulz is in league all his own. Schulz reconfigured the comic strip landscape and dominated it for the last half of its history. One can scarcely overstate the importance of "Peanuts" to the comics, or overstate its influence on all of us who have followed. By now, "Peanuts" is so thoroughly a part of the popular culture, that one loses sight of how different the strip was from anything else 40 and 50 years ago. We can quantify the strip's success in all its various commercial markets, but the real achievement of the strip lies inside the little boxes of funny pictures Schulz drew every day.
Back when the comics were printed large enough that they could accommodate detailed, elaborate drawings, "Peanuts" was launched with an insultingly tiny format, designed so the panels could be stacked vertically if an editor wanted to run it in a single column. Schulz somehow turned this oppressive space restriction to his advantage and developed a brilliant graphic shorthand and stylistic economy, innovations unrecognizable now that all comics are tiny and Schulz's solutions have been universally imitated. Graphically, the strip is static and spare. Schulz gave up virtually all the "cinematic" devices that create visual drama: there are no fancy perspectives, no interesting croppings, no shadows and lighting effects, no three-dimensional modeling, few props and few settings. Schulz distilled each subject to its barest essence, and drew it straight-on or side view, in simple outlines. But while the simplicity of Schulz's drawings made the strip stand out from the rest, it was the expressiveness within the simplicity that made Schulz's artwork so forceful.
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