‘Only What’s Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts’ (review)

Written By Chip Kidd
Photographed by Geoff Spear
Introduction by Jeff Kinney
Preface by Jean Schulz
Contributions by Paige Braddock
and Karen Johnson
Published by Abrams ComicArts

Everyone still knows Charles Schulz and Peanuts, right?

Charlie Brown and Snoopy? Linus and Lucy? Marcie and Peppermint Patty? The flying doghouse, the security blanket, the Great Pumpkin, the little red-haired girl, Beethoven’s birthday, the cat next door, quaffing root beers with Bill Mauldin? All the TV specials and movies, and, of course, half a century of brilliant daily and Sunday newspaper comic strips?

Everything seems so temporary these days but I’d hate to think that anyone could ever forget Charlie Brown. Maybe Shermy, Frieda, and Five, but certainly not Good Ol’ Charlie Brown.

Award-winning designer Chip Kidd has done more than his part to make certain that Peanuts is remembered. He’s compiled and published a couple of amazing books about Peanuts and the late, great Charles Schulz. Only What’s Necessary is the latest of these books and 2025 is the third time it’s been issued, with each edition slightly different.

In relatively recent years, Fantagraphics, of course, managed to print the entire run of all 17,897 daily and Sunday Peanuts strips in multiple volumes I wish now I had bought. There have also been a number of biographies on Schulz himself at this point, some controversial, including several reviewed here at Forces of Geek. So why should one need this book?

The way I look at books like this is that they’re like the extras on a DVD. All the behind-the-scenes stuff, the mistakes, the stuff you were never meant to see, is here. All the specialty drawings, promotional artwork, penciled strips, and the book and magazine covers are here. A nice selection of the coolest toy and collectible tie-ins can be found herein as well. When one considers just how much merchandising there was in Schulz’s lifetime — just for Snoopy alone! — one realizes that needs its own book.

But no, what’s here is the good stuff, and it’s all showcased perfectly in the layouts of master designer Chip Kidd, along with his frequent collaborator, photographer Geoff Spear. Page after page of big, beautiful scans of the artist’s actual penciled, lettered, and inked originals make portions of this book comparable to an Artist’s Edition for a newspaper strip.

We’re given highlights from every era of Peanuts’ fifty-year run, in roughly chronological order, from Sparky’s earliest ideas to create a strip to his final, shaky exit strip, prepared weeks earlier but ironically published just one day after his death.

These days, the gentle, wise humor of Charlie Brown and Lucy and the gang seems out of fashion, and yet every time I revisit it, in any form, I’m sucked right back in to its utter genius. Admiring Schulz’s completely simple but assured lines in the original art on view here underscores his innate talents in ways no other book has, at least for me. That self-assuredness remains even as his deteriorating health sadly led to shakier lines as time went on. During the run of the strip, I didn’t much care for that period, but looking at the art from that time now, he can still instinctually get to where he wants to go with a minimum of linework. This, of course, is where the book’s title comes from—Only What’s Necessary.

While 90% of the book is as described above, there are also a few essays, an Introduction, and a number of quotes from various people affected in one way or another by the artist and/or his creations. There’s even a Foreword, carried over from the original edition, by Schulz’s widow, Jean.

Despite all the rest of this volume’s cartoony goodness, I think my favorite section might be Kidd’s own Preface, also from 2015, in which he declares, “To say I am a Peanuts nerd is putting it mildly, and I declare it with pride.” I love it! As long as we have people like Chip Kidd, a genius in his own right, I don’t think we have to worry about Peanuts being forgotten.

Only What’s Necessary might just be the perfect book to get for friends and relatives this year when Beethoven’s birthday rolls around.

Booksteve recommends.