Even the least critical reader can sense falseness and fakery on the part of an unskilled—or, worse, dishonest—cartoonist. And, because the comic strip is a valueless throwaway, the cartoonist must win the reader’s trust without benefit of critical backing, museum walls, and monied collectors. The best comic strips present the cartoonist laid bare on the page; they are a condensed sum-uppance of the artist’s notions of, ideally, what makes life funny, but also of what makes it worth living. This artistic effort has to occur not over a career punctuated by a handful of masterpieces but every single day. The skeptical reader arrives cold to a little slice of comic-strip newsprint and gives the cartoonist four, maybe five, seconds: “O.K., make me laugh.” It’s no wonder that Charles Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,” woke up feeling funereal, or like he had a term paper due every morning. Or, as he also said, “In a comic strip, yesterday doesn’t mean anything. The only thing that matters is today and tomorrow.”

It’s not the skill of the drawing, or the lines, or the lettering, or the funny words that make a strip work. Timing is the life force of comics. Without a sensitivity to the rhythms and the music—a.k.a. the reality—of life, a comic strip will arrive D.O.A., nothing more than a bunch of dumb pictures. When the comic-strip reader moves through those four panels containing those little repeating hieroglyphs, the characters must come alive on the page with as much ferocity and resonance as the people in one’s own life and memory. The reader doesn’t just look at Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, and Snoopy but reads them as musical notes in a silently heard composition of hilarity, cruelty, and occasional melancholy.

In 1950, the comics page was a more or less settled territory into which very few new features could be shoehorned, and, from the get-go, “Peanuts” was marketed as a space-saver. The strip was created out of four equally sized panels, which allowed it to run horizontally, vertically, or stacked two by two. The simple, almost typographical reduction of the “Peanuts” characters—the inflated heads and the shrunken bodies—not only saved editorial-column inches but created room for the words in the strip to be legible. This requirement, nearly alchemically, also enabled the transplanting of the children of “Peanuts” out of a seen, external world of people and places and into a minimalist, abstract, remembered, and internal world. Who would’ve thought that such a hard-nosed commercial decision would catalyze one of the greatest works of popular art of the twentieth century?

Indeed, the earliest “Peanuts” strips almost seem to take smallness as its peeved raison d’être, a sort of humiliation that the characters must suffer in a space unaccommodating to their bigger ideas, urges, and emotions. The “Peanuts” characters evolved rapidly right before readers’ eyes during the first two years of the nineteen-fifties. Schulz instinctively allowed just the tiniest bit of realism back into their proportions and postures, and somehow, I think, ineffably shaped them within the idiosyncrasies of his own handwriting. By 1954, Schulz was so masterfully intuiting and internalizing his characters that they seemed to burn the page, modulating between whispers and cataclysmic eruptions so violent that the panels could barely contain their fury. The blank, everyman Charlie Brown of the earliest strips gave way to a self-doubting loser; Lucy developed into a tormentor, while her younger brother, Linus, eventually became the strip’s philosopher.

Whereas the daily strip enabled the characters’ personalities to mature, the Sunday iteration—double the size and number of panels, and in color—allowed for an expansion of the strip’s time and space. Here Schulz drew what, by contrast, were redolently realistic suburban settings. This longer form also allowed him to develop his “music,” orchestrating more complex, extended moments than the shorter daily strips permitted. A choice example of a finely tuned “Peanuts” Sunday strip might be the March 20, 1955, episode where Charlie Brown and Schroeder are playing marbles and Lucy invades their game, getting angrier and angrier at her missed shots (“rats . . . Rats! RATS!”) and then improbably and violently (“What a STUPID GAME!”) stomping all of their marbles flat (STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! STOMP!). The penultimate panel shows her angrily stalking away, a scribbled skein of lines in a balloon above her head—a skein that the reader “hears” as the endnote of the zigzaggy musical composition that precedes it.

By contrast, just nine months earlier, in May, 1954, Schulz had produced a multi-part Sunday sequence that is one of the weirdest hiccups in the strip’s development: Lucy, with Charlie Brown’s encouragement, enters an adult golf tournament. Now, it’s odd enough that these kid characters would even play golf, let alone play in a tournament, but the fact that Schulz would place Charlie Brown and Lucy next to adults—yes, actual adults appear in the strip—feels very, very wrong. The four-week sequence is full of clunkers and disharmonies, producing a queer sense of dislocation and falseness. It’s almost like the strip has the flu. Indeed, even Schulz seems to be aware of the problem—one panel shows Charlie Brown and Lucy through a forest of adult legs, he admonishing her to “just try to forget about all these people . . . just forget about ’em.” While the experiment proves Schulz’s willingness to test his strip’s limits, it cemented the primary rule of the “Peanuts” cosmos: adults might be talked about (sports legends, Presidents, Charlie Brown’s father), or even soliloquized (Linus’s infatuation with Miss Othmar), but they must always, quite literally, be out of the picture.