The Cheapening of the Comics is a speech given by Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) at the Festival of Cartoon Art, at Ohio State University, on October 27, 1989.
He starts the speech by praising the classics — Peanuts, Pogo, and Krazy Kat:
Peanuts was my introduction to the world of the comic strip, and Peanuts captured my imagination like nothing else. Because it was the first strip I read, its many innovations were lost on me, and I suspect most readers of Peanuts today have forgotten how it single-handedly reconfigured the comic strip landscape in a few short years. The flat, simple drawings, the intellectual children, the animal with thoughts and imagination — all these things are commonplace now, and it’s hard to imagine what a revolutionary strip it was in the ’50s and ’60s. All I knew was that it had a magic that other strips didn’t.
A lot of the magic for me is in those deceptively simple, stylized drawings. For me, the few lines that make up each character, their faces, and gestures are remarkably expressive. Two dots with parentheses around them have become the cartoon shorthand for eyes looking uneasy or insecure. When Charlie Brown’s eyes do that, you know his stomach hurts,
Peanuts has held my interest for many years because the strip is very funny on one level and very sad on another. Charlie Brown suffers — and suffers in a small, private, honest way. Schultz draws those quiet moments of self-doubt: Charlie Brown sitting on the bench, eating peanut butter, trying to work up the nerve to talk to the little red-haired girl — and failing. As a kid, I read Peanuts for the funny drawings and the jokes, and later I realized that the childhood struggles of the strip are metaphors for adult struggles as well.
Peanuts is about the search for acceptance, security, and love, and how hard those self-affirming things are to find. The strip is also about alienation, about ambition, about heroes, about religion, and about the search for meaning and ‘happiness’ in life. For a comic strip, it digs pretty deep.
Of course, the strip has a flair for weird humor, too. Snoopy in goggles, his doghouse somehow riddled with bullet holes, yelling, ‘Curse you, Red Baron!’ is, I submit, as bizarre an image as anything ever seen on the comics page. Peanuts defined the contemporary comic strip.”