It’s hard to imagine a setting in which one can become more fully immersed in the life’s work of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz than the exhibit “Charles M. Schulz: His World in Art and Objects” which is currently on display through November 15th at Wake Forest University’s Charlotte and Philip Hanes Art Gallery.  In addition to the exhibit itself, there will be several guest speaker events throughout October, the first of which occured just before the official opening last night.

The evening began at 6:00 pm in an adjacent art department lecture hall with a talk by Derrick Bang, author/editor of a number of Peanuts-related books, including “50 Years of Happiness: A Tribute to Charles M. Schulz” and the L’il Folks collection.  Bangs began his speech by recounting his efforts that lead up to his involvement in the “50 Years of Happiness” project, including his exhaustive three year search through the University of California’s (at Davis?) microfiche newspaper collection in order to catalog what strips, up to that point in the nineties, had been collected and reprinted and which had not.  He then gave a brief overview of Schulz’s pre-Peanuts cartooning career, both pre- and post-WWII– an area of his life that Schulz himself rarely discussed.  Finally, he showed a number of side-by-side comparisons of early L’il Folks one panel gag strips and later Peanuts strips in which Schulz had reworked the same gag into the four-panel newspaper strip format.  This last bit was by far the most interesting part of the lecture; through it, you can see Schulz beginning to really master the rhythm of the four-panel strip while simultaneously developing the graphically pared-down drawing style that became the aesthetic backbone of Peanuts.

Although there was a smattering of twenty- and thirty-somethings in attendance as well as a handful of Wake Forest students, the crowd at this event skewed heavily toward the cotton-top set, with I’d estimate maybe 65% of the crowd over sixty years old.  This is interesting to me particularly given the current local tempest in a teacup regarding the Winston-Salem Journal’s decision to stop running old Peanuts strips and instead run the current–and admittedly somewhat “dark”–pantomime strip Lio.  In response to this move, a group of local bluenoses have initiated a letter-writing campaign to get the paper to dump Lio and return to Peanuts reruns.

After the lecture, the crowd moved into the gallery area for the opening reception which featured a nice hor d’oeuvres spread, an open wine bar, and a live jazz band playing–you guessed it–Vince Guaraldi tunes.  Notably making the rounds in the crowd was a giant costumed “Snoopy” as played by Judy Sladky, who has been portraying the character both on dry land and in the ice skating rink since the late seventies.  Attendees young and old were having their pictures taken with the giant dog, while the younger set seemed to delight in hanging on to the poor creature’s tail.

As for the exhibit itself, the centerpiece–at least as far as I’m concerned–was the amazing collection of original strips on display, which in at least rarity and sheer quantity, surpassed the pieces on display at the Masters of Comic Art exhibit I recently saw in Milwaukee.  The pieces were all in the downstairs section of the gallery and arranged along a mostly continuous wall, thus set up to be viewed in a rough order.

The first item in the sequence was an informative timeline of the important events of Schulz’s life.  While everyone there last night had just been given most of this info at a lecture, the timeline seems a nice way to contextualize the pieces in the exhibit for those who’d be seeing it later.  Directly following the timeline were several pages from magazines and newspapers including a published L’il Folks strip or two, a page from the Saturday Evening Post with a Schulz strip, and a whole daily comics page from the Chicago paper featuring the very first Peanuts strip.

Following these introductory items, though, are forty-eight beautiful Schulz originals, both daily and Sunday strips, including maybe four or five original L’il Folks strips as well.  One nice feature of the exhibit is that under some of the originals, there are blown-up reproductions of published strips of particular interest.  In one case, a L’il Folks original is displayed that features a gag about the “What are little girls made of” rhyme in which the punch line involves a little girl punching a passing boy in the eye (you know, kind and gentle humor, not like that dreadful Lio!).  On the original, one can see a note written in non-photo blue, presumably by Schulz himself, saying “show black eye.”  Underneath the original is a reproduction of a later Peanuts strip that uses the same gag, but with the black eye now shown.  The majority of the Peanuts originals on display were from the mid- to late-fifties, which I was really surprised by, as these are some of the rarer and least seen (at least until the recent Fantagraphics reprint series) strips.  I’d guess that maybe 65-70% of the strips shown were 1959 or earlier, although there were a number of mid-sixties strips and maybe one or two each of strips from the seventies and eighties.

The tail end of the original art on display featured some “Peanuts-inspired” paintings and the like, but after viewing nearly fifty Schulz originals, I, like most folks, weren’t paying much attention to these pieces, and the area was serving mainly as a place for people to pose with Snoopy.

Upstairs (which I almost missed entirely) was a gallery area filled with an unimaginable quantity of Peanuts memorabilia.  I can’t even begin to accurately recount the majority of this stuff, but some items I remember were: Peanuts records, from the “Snoopy vs. The Red Barron” to the 80s “Flashbeagle” record featuring Snoopy dancing in legwarmers (Good Grief!); some of those Russian stacking egg-within-an-egg things featuring hilariously off-model drawings of Peanuts characters;  tons of old editions of Peanuts collections in English as well as in Japanese, Hebrew, German, etc.; the much-coveted Snoopy phone; a very cool Snoopy doll in a space suit; and pencil sharpeners, teething rings, key chains, and tons and tons of other Peanuts gewgaws.

Coming back down the stairs, I was delighted to see a bookshelf of Peanuts books free for the reading.  Included were a number of older editions of Peanuts collections as well as all of the to-date published Fantagraphics editions, and an assortment of other odds and ends, including the exhibition catalog/book from the Masters of Comic Art show.

Also near the book case was a big-screen TV showing Peanuts-related stuff.  When I had been looking at the original artwork, the TV appeared to be showing some documentary footage of Schulz, including time-lapse footage of a strip being drawn.  By the time I was coming back from the upstairs area, though, it was showing footage from some of the animated TV specials.  I couldn’t tell exactly what TV special in particular was being shown, though, since there was a crowd of kids that had gathered to watch it, each of them perched about three or four inches from the screen.

Later in the month will be lectures by Tom Everhart, the only painter officially commissioned by Schulz to use the “Peanuts” characters (I’ll probably pass on this) as well as a talk by Schulz’s widow, Jeannie Schulz on October 28th, which I plan on attending.

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Above: The downstairs area of the gallery, where the original art was displayed.

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Here’s Katherine and Snoopy. Note Snoopy subtly giving some kid the shove out of the way to make for a better photo op. That’s the mark of a pro.

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Upstairs, there were several display cases of stuff on the floor, and other items mounted on all the walls

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As you can see here in the case of this girl, anyone who showed up without a silly hat was immediately transformed into a zombie.

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Here’s more stuff from the upstairs area. On the left is an issue and some pages from an issue of Giant Robot featuring Peanuts-inspired art. Various editions of strip collections are above, and some newspaper Sundays are mounted below for reading.