[This was originally posted in June 2002, and at some point disappeared from the archives, so I'm reposting. --Amp]
A friend of mine told me she didn’t like Peanuts better than Garfield. At first I assumed I had heard her wrong; then I assumed she was joking.
Why is Peanuts a better strip than Garfield? It’s hard not to feel ridiculous addressing this question (”why is ocean wetter than desert?”), but I’ll try.
1) Originality. Most of the best aspects of Peanuts were new when the strip started. In contrast, the main elements of Garfield are not only unoriginal – they’re usually taken from Peanuts. The basic idea of a smart pet dominating a loser owner, for instance, and the formal device of having pets “speak” in thought balloons, were both Peanuts originals that became the basis for Garfield.
2) Peanuts is a humane strip, whereas Garfield is cruel.
Not that Peanuts lacked for cruelty. The world shown in Peanuts is usually cruel — or, at least, it usually was before 1972, before the strip lost much of its vigor. But Peanuts never asks its readers to be cruel. Schulz may torture Charlie Brown, but he still wants us to sympathize with Charlie Brown’s predicament, nor are we meant to be thrilled by Charlie Brown’s failure. Compare this to the delight Garfield readers are meant to get from Jon’s humiliating rejection when Jon flirts with the pretty vet.
The reader is meant to feel superior to Jon — who is, after Garfield himself, the most important character in the strip. In contrast, readers are not invited to look down upon any major Peanuts characters; we’re supposed to feel their losses, not feel above them.
3) Emotional life. Because Schulz sympathizes with his characters, he was able to take their inner lives seriously. The result is that Peanuts at its two-decade-long peak had a much deeper, richer emotional life than Garfield — or almost any other daily strip.
Consider Linus: so insecure that he can’t go a minute without his security blanket, yet facing down bullies at school without hesitation (using his blanket as a whip). His home life is a perpetual losing war against an older sister who never gives him a moment’s peace, and he has an abiding but constantly frustrated faith in the Great Pumpkin. And at the same time, he’s a sincere Christian, whose faith is seldom talked about but usually evident in his serenity.
No character in Garfield is as multilayered or interesting as Linus. What, after all, is Garfield’s emotional life? He enjoys eating Lasagna; he dislikes Mondays (for no discernable reason, since he doesn’t have to go to work); he squashes spiders. Think of Linus’ ongoing struggle, against the scorn of all his unbelieving friends, to maintain faith in The Great Pumpkin. Can you imagine Opie having a crisis of faith?
Linus is only one of four equally well-developed main characters in Peanuts (Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and Lucy are the other three), plus several supporting characters have inner lives almost as complex (especially Peppermint Patty and Sally). I’m not saying, of course, that Peanuts should be read like an Anne Tyler novel; it’s a gag strip. We should read it for the gags and laugh. But having characters with inner lives not only makes the strip cozier to read, it makes the gags funnier, because the best humor is based in character.
Although the team of cartoonists who create Garfield honestly try to entertain, the strip is structured around disdain for the dreams of the main characters. Sure, you can wring endless gags out of that formula; but you can’t wring an interesting emotional life out of it, or any real connection between their readers and the characters.
4) Sexism. Peanuts is, I would argue, one of the least sexist dailies ever; despite being created before the modern feminist movement began, Schulz created some of the strongest, most memorable female characters in the dailies — Sally, Peppermint Patty, Marcy, and especially Lucy. Both Peppermint Patty and Lucy constantly refuse to fit into 1950s ideals of what girls should be — in Lucy’s case, by being too powerful a character to squeeze into the meek ideal even as she wanted to fulfill it, in Patty’s case by being serenely oblivious.
Garfield, created after feminism should have made us all know better, nonetheless manages to be almost perfectly sexist: there are no important female characters, and the few females that exist are drawn as ridiculous caricatures of femininity (I once attended a lecture by Alison Bechdel in which she made a good case that the female characters in Garfield are actually bad drag queens), and are in the strip only so the guys can have girlfriends to chase after.
5) Grace. I’ve never found a vocabulary sufficient to discuss grace in comics drawing. It’s the way the lines all fit together purposely, pulsing with life, no line out-of-place and no line too studied. It’s all I love, visually, in comics: grace makes Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes look great, while lack of grace is why Cathy looks like shit. Every line drawn in Peanuts is perfectly placed, without ever being lifelessly mechanical. That combination of rendering skill and artistic soul is found in all the best comics — from Love & Rockets to Dykes to Watch Out For to Krazy Kat — and it is rarely done as well as Schulz did it.
“Lifelessly mechanical,” on the other hand, is an apt description of Garfield’s art. Mainly, I’d guess, this is because Garfield’s creator Jim Davis stopped drawing the strip personally many years ago. It’s now drawn by cartoonists who are obliged to slavishly reproduce Jim Davis’ style; and artists trying to look like someone else can’t allow the least spark of spontaneity or individuality in their drawings. But even in the first few years, Garfield’s visuals always had more skill than life. You can always see the draw-a-circle-than-draw-two-small-globes-embedded-in-it formula that goes into drawing the characters; all of their movements look staged rather than natural.
6) Peanuts is just plain funnier than Garfield. You remember the one where Lucy buried Linus’ blanket, and Linus desperately digs up the whole neighborhood looking for it? How about the one where an giant icicle appears above Snoopy’s doghouse, and Snoopy’s too terrified to leave? The one where Lucy runs back and forth at her “advice five cents” stand, being both customer and advisor? It’s hard to think of a dog in goggles standing upright on a bullet-ridden doghouse roof yelling “Curse you, Red Baron!” without getting a giggle.
I could go on forever, but I’m beginning to feel bad for picking on Garfield. Even for a strip as mediocre as Garfield, comparing it to Peanuts is unfair; only a handful of daily strips have ever been in Peanut’s class.
But still. Man. I know there’s no accounting for taste, and it’s all subjective, and to each her own and all that…
But still…
How could anyone not see that Peanuts is better than Garfield?
The mind boggles.
There’s obviously a lot more to a comic than the art (particularly to someone as non-visual as me). For me, the most satisfying part of the comic were the dream sequences, which were pretty much perfect. I’ve always liked Joss’s dream sequences and this worked particularly well. I liked the idea of dreamspace - and like every other geek who owns this comic I’ve spent considerable time identifying what’s in the cubes (definitely Joss by the way) . 
Still, there is one strip - kinda halfway between being a gag strip and an adventure - which inarguably had “pure genius” in its peak years. And although I can’t say for certain, I don’t recall any talking (or thinking) animals. 
