Jean Giraud, aka Moe­bius, was a com­ic book artist who com­bined blind­ing speed with bound­less imag­i­na­tion. He shaped the look of Alien, Empire Strikes Back and The Fifth Ele­ment. He reimag­ined the Sil­ver Surfer for Stan Lee. And he is an acknowl­edged influ­ence on every­one from Japan­ese ani­mat­ing great Hayao Miyaza­ki to sci-fi writer William Gib­son.

In 1996, the Mex­i­can news­pa­per La Jor­na­da pub­lished a lec­ture giv­en by Moe­bius called “Breve man­u­al para his­to­ri­etis­tas”  – a brief man­u­al for car­toon­ists – which con­sists of 18 tips for aspir­ing artists. If your Span­ish isn’t up to snuff – mine cer­tain­ly isn’t – then there are a cou­ple trans­la­tions out there. Some­one called Xurxo g Penal­ta cranked out a direct ver­sion in Eng­lish, but to get the true nuances of Moe­bius’ wise words, famed illus­tra­tor William Stout’s excel­lent anno­tat­ed ver­sion is best.

For instance, Moebius’s first tip is “When you draw, you must first cleanse your­self of deep feel­ings, like hate, hap­pi­ness, ambi­tion, etc.”

Stout ampli­fies this with the fol­low­ing:

These feel­ings are typ­i­cal­ly emo­tion­al prej­u­dices that func­tion as a block to cre­ativ­i­ty.

This was some­thing I learned from draw­ing and hang­ing out with anoth­er French­man, the bril­liant car­toon­ist-illus­tra­tor (and reg­u­lar Atlantic Month­ly con­trib­u­tor) Guy Bill­out, when we were trav­el­ing togeth­er in Antarc­ti­ca and Patag­o­nia back in 1989. Until I spent time with Guy, I had no idea how many pre-con­ceived notions and assump­tions I held with­in me regard­ing peo­ple and sit­u­a­tions and what a block they were to the flow of my cre­ativ­i­ty.

Divorc­ing your­self from such emo­tion­al­ly blind­ing pre-con­cep­tions allows you to see things with fresh eyes. Solu­tions and ideas then flow with much greater ease. I have noticed with all the cre­ative genius­es I have met that they all share a child­like delight with what­ev­er or whomev­er they encounter in life (they can even find amuse­ment in life’s vil­lains). For them, all cre­ative bar­ri­ers are down; life and cre­ative prob­lem solv­ing for them is like con­stant­ly play­ing. They gush great ideas all day long like a foun­tain.

All of Stout’s anno­ta­tions are like this. It should be required read­ing for any­one even vague­ly inter­est­ed in visu­al sto­ry­telling. Below are Moe­bius’ orig­i­nal obser­va­tions. Stout’s thoughts on Moe­bius can be found here.

1) When you draw, you must first cleanse your­self of deep feel­ings, like hate, hap­pi­ness, ambi­tion, etc.

2) It’s very impor­tant to edu­cate your hand. Make it achieve a lev­el of high obe­di­ence so that it will be able to prop­er­ly and ful­ly express your ideas. But be very care­ful of try­ing to obtain too much per­fec­tion, as well as too much speed as an artist. Per­fec­tion and speed are dan­ger­ous — as are their oppo­sites. When you pro­duce draw­ings that are too quick or too loose, besides mak­ing mis­takes, you run the risk of cre­at­ing an enti­ty with­out soul or spir­it.

3) Knowl­edge of per­spec­tive is of supreme impor­tance. Its laws pro­vide a good, pos­i­tive way to manip­u­late or hyp­no­tize your read­ers.

4) Anoth­er thing to embrace with affec­tion is the study of [the] human body — it’s anato­my, posi­tions, body types, expres­sions, con­struc­tion, and the dif­fer­ences between peo­ple.

Draw­ing a man is very dif­fer­ent from draw­ing a woman. With males, you can be loos­er and less pre­cise in their depic­tion; small imper­fec­tions can often add char­ac­ter. Your draw­ing of a woman, how­ev­er, must be per­fect; a sin­gle ill-placed line can dra­mat­i­cal­ly age her or make her seem annoy­ing or ugly. Then, no one buys your com­ic!

For the read­er to believe your sto­ry, your char­ac­ters must feel as if they have a life and per­son­al­i­ty of their own.

Their phys­i­cal ges­tures should seem to emanate from their character’s strengths, weak­ness­es and infir­mi­ties. The body becomes trans­formed when it is brought to life; there is a mes­sage in its struc­ture, in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of its fat, in each mus­cle and in every wrin­kle, crease or fold of the face and body. It becomes a study of life.

5) When you cre­ate a sto­ry, you can begin it with­out know­ing every­thing, but you should make notes as you go along regard­ing the par­tic­u­lars of the world depict­ed in your sto­ry. Such detail will pro­vide your read­ers with rec­og­niz­able char­ac­ter­is­tics that will pique their inter­est.

When a char­ac­ter dies in a sto­ry, unless the char­ac­ter has had his per­son­al sto­ry expressed some way in the draw­ing of his face, body and attire, the read­er will not care; your read­er won’t have any emo­tion­al con­nec­tion.

Your pub­lish­er might say, “Your sto­ry has no val­ue; there’s only one dead guy — I need twen­ty or thir­ty dead guys for this to work.” But that is not true; if the read­er feels the dead guy or wound­ed guys or hurt guys or whomev­er you have in trou­ble have a real per­son­al­i­ty result­ing from your own deep stud­ies of human nature — with an artist’s capac­i­ty for such obser­va­tion — emo­tions will surge.

By such stud­ies you will devel­op and gain atten­tion from oth­ers, as well as a com­pas­sion and a love for human­i­ty.

This is very impor­tant for the devel­op­ment of an artist. If he wants to func­tion as a mir­ror of soci­ety and human­i­ty, this mir­ror of his must con­tain the con­scious­ness of the entire world; it must be a mir­ror that sees every­thing.

6) Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky says I don’t like draw­ing dead hors­es. Well, it is very dif­fi­cult.

It’s also very dif­fi­cult to draw a sleep­ing body or some­one who has been aban­doned, because in most comics it’s always action that is being stud­ied. It’s much eas­i­er to draw peo­ple fight­ing — that’s why Amer­i­cans near­ly always draw super­heroes. It’s much more dif­fi­cult to draw peo­ple that are talk­ing, because that’s a series of very small move­ments — small, yet with real sig­nif­i­cance.

His counts for more because of our human need for love or the atten­tion of oth­ers. It’s these lit­tle things that speak of per­son­al­i­ty, of life. Most super­heroes don’t have any per­son­al­i­ty; they all use the same ges­tures and move­ments.

7) Equal­ly impor­tant is the cloth­ing of your char­ac­ters and the state of the mate­r­i­al from which it was made.

These tex­tures cre­ate a vision of your char­ac­ters’ expe­ri­ences, their lives, and their role in your adven­ture in a way where much can be said with­out words. In a dress there are a thou­sand folds; you need to choose just two or three — don’t draw them all. Just make sure you choose the two or three good ones.

8) The style, styl­is­tic con­ti­nu­ity of an artist and its pub­lic pre­sen­ta­tion are full of sym­bols; they can be read just like a Tarot deck. I chose my name “Moe­bius” as a joke when I was twen­ty-two years old — but, in truth, the name came to res­onate with mean­ing. If you arrive wear­ing a T‑shirt of Don Quixote, that tells me who you are. In my case, mak­ing a draw­ing of rel­a­tive sim­plic­i­ty and sub­tle indi­ca­tions is impor­tant to me.

9) When an artist, a real work­ing artist, goes out on the street, he does not see things the same way as “nor­mal” peo­ple. His unique vision is cru­cial to doc­u­ment­ing a way of life and the peo­ple who live it.

10) Anoth­er impor­tant ele­ment is com­po­si­tion. The com­po­si­tions in our sto­ries should be stud­ied because a page or a paint­ing or a pan­el is a face that looks at the read­er and speaks to him. A page is not just a suc­ces­sion of insignif­i­cant pan­els. There are pan­els that are full. Some that are emp­ty. Oth­ers are ver­ti­cal. Some hor­i­zon­tal. All are indi­ca­tions of the artist’s inten­tions. Ver­ti­cal pan­els excite the read­er. Hor­i­zon­tals calm him. For us in the West­ern world, motion in a pan­el that goes from left to right rep­re­sents action head­ing toward the future. Mov­ing from right to left directs action toward the past. The direc­tions we indi­cate rep­re­sent a dis­per­sion of ener­gy. An object or char­ac­ter placed in the cen­ter of a pan­el focus­es and con­cen­trates ener­gy and atten­tion. These are basic read­ing sym­bols and forms that evoke in the read­er a fas­ci­na­tion, a kind of hyp­no­sis. You must be con­scious of rhythm and set traps for the read­er to fall into so that, when he falls, he gets lost, allow­ing you to manip­u­late and move him inside your world with greater ease and plea­sure. That’s because what you have cre­at­ed is a sense of life. You must study the great painters, espe­cial­ly those who speak with their paint­ings. Their indi­vid­ual paint­ing schools or gen­res or time peri­ods should not mat­ter. Their pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with phys­i­cal as well as emo­tion­al com­po­si­tion must be stud­ied so that you learn how their com­bi­na­tion of lines works to touch us direct­ly with­in our hearts.

11) The nar­ra­tion must har­mo­nize with the draw­ings. There must be a visu­al rhythm cre­at­ed by the place­ment of your text. The rhythm of your plot should be reflect­ed in your visu­al cadence and the way you com­press or expand time. Like a film­mak­er, you must be very care­ful in how you cast your char­ac­ters and in how you direct them. Use your char­ac­ters or “actors” like a direc­tor, study­ing and then select­ing from all of your char­ac­ters’ dif­fer­ent takes.

12) Beware of the dev­as­tat­ing influ­ence of North Amer­i­can com­ic books. The artists in Mex­i­co seem to only study their sur­face effects: a lit­tle bit of anato­my mixed with dynam­ic com­po­si­tions, mon­sters, fights, scream­ing and teeth. I like some of that stuff too, but there are many oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties and expres­sions that are also wor­thy of explo­ration.

13) There is a con­nec­tion between music and draw­ing. The size of that con­nec­tion depends upon your per­son­al­i­ty and what’s going on at that moment. For the last ten years I’ve been work­ing in silence; for me, there is music in the rhythm of my lines. Draw­ing at times is a search for dis­cov­er­ies. A pre­cise, beau­ti­ful­ly exe­cut­ed line is like an orgasm!

14) Col­or is a lan­guage that the graph­ic artist uses to manip­u­late his reader’s atten­tion as well as to cre­ate beau­ty. There is objec­tive and sub­jec­tive col­or. The emo­tion­al states of the char­ac­ters can change or influ­ence the col­or from one pan­el to the next, as can place and time of day. Spe­cial study and atten­tion must be paid to the lan­guage of col­or.

15) At the begin­ning of an artist’s career, he should prin­ci­pal­ly involve him­self in the cre­ation of very high qual­i­ty short sto­ries. He has a bet­ter chance (than with long for­mat sto­ries) of suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ing them, while main­tain­ing a high stan­dard of qual­i­ty. It will also be eas­i­er to place them in a book or sell them to a pub­lish­er.

16) There are times when we know­ing­ly head down a path of fail­ure, choos­ing the wrong theme or sub­ject for our capa­bil­i­ties, or choos­ing a project that is too large, or an unsuit­able tech­nique. If this hap­pens, you must not com­plain lat­er.

17) When new work has been sent to an edi­tor and it receives a rejec­tion, you should always ask for and try to dis­cov­er the rea­sons for the rejec­tion. By study­ing the rea­sons for our fail­ure, only then can we begin to learn. It is not about strug­gle with our lim­i­ta­tions, with the pub­lic or with the pub­lish­ers. One should treat it with more of an aiki­do approach. It is the very strength and pow­er of our adver­sary that is used as the key to his defeat.

18) Now it is pos­si­ble to expose our works to read­ers in every part of the plan­et. We must always keep aware of this. To begin with, draw­ing is a form of per­son­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion — but this does not mean that the artist should close him­self off inside a bub­ble. His com­mu­ni­ca­tion should be for those aes­thet­i­cal­ly, philo­soph­i­cal­ly and geo­graph­i­cal­ly close to him, as well as for him­self — but also for com­plete strangers. Draw­ing is a medi­um of com­mu­ni­ca­tion for the great fam­i­ly we have not met, for the pub­lic and for the world.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in March 2015.

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Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Behold Moe­bius’ Many Psy­che­del­ic Illus­tra­tions of Jimi Hen­drix

Watch Ground­break­ing Com­ic Artist Mœbius Draw His Char­ac­ters in Real Time

Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tan­ta­liz­ing Ani­ma­tion

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. 

If you grew up read­ing Amer­i­can com­ic books dur­ing the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, you’ll be famil­iar with the seal of the Comics Code Author­i­ty. I remem­ber see­ing it stamped onto the upper-right cor­ner of issues of titles from The Amaz­ing Spi­der-Man to reprints of Carl Barks’ Scrooge McDuck sto­ries to Jug­head Dou­ble Digest, but I can’t say I paid it much mind at the time. This was in the nine­teen-nineties, by which time the Comics Code itself has lost much of its force. But back when it was cre­at­ed, in 1954, it had as much restric­tive pow­er over the con­tent of com­ic books as the “Hays Code” once had over motion pic­tures.

Accord­ing to the video from Youtu­ber matttt above, the Comics Code was imple­ment­ed in response to one pub­lish­er above all: EC Comics, whose grim and graph­ic titles like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Hor­ror made both a big impact on pop­u­lar cul­ture and a dent in the rep­u­ta­tion of the comics indus­try. Clos­ing ranks, that indus­try formed the Comics Code Author­i­ty to enforce a regime of self-cen­sor­ship, man­gling EC in its gears just as it was about to pub­lish one of the most inno­v­a­tive sto­ries in its form: “Mas­ter Race,” the tale of an ex-SS offi­cer in mod­ern-day New York, by an artist named Bernard Krig­stein.

At its height, EC was a ver­i­ta­ble comics fac­to­ry, with a set of pro­ce­dures in place that ensured the effi­cient pro­duc­tion of cheap thrills — often at con­sid­er­able cost to the poten­tial of the medi­um. Krig­stein, who’d always har­bored high­er artis­tic aspi­ra­tions, chafed at these lim­i­ta­tions, find­ing such workarounds as sub­di­vid­ing rigid­ly defined pan­el spaces into sets of sequen­tial images, the bet­ter to con­vey move­ment and action. Nowhere did this tech­nique prove more effec­tive than in “Mas­ter Race,” with its prac­ti­cal­ly cin­e­mat­ic tour de force sequence in which the haunt­ed Carl Reiss­man slips under the wheels of a pass­ing sub­way train.

Qual­i­ty takes time, and Krig­stein missed the sto­ry’s dead­line just before the Comics Code went into force. “Mas­ter Race” was pub­lished a few months lat­er, albeit in one of EC’s new, san­i­tized, and thus much less pop­u­lar titles. The meth­ods of visu­al sto­ry­telling he refined have now become stan­dard ele­ments of com­ic art, but the medi­um’s enthu­si­asts can sense how far Krig­stein could have gone, if not for the frus­tra­tion that ulti­mate­ly caused him to aban­don comics for a career as a high-school teacher: “Some­thing tremen­dous could have been done,” he said, “if only they’d let me do it.” With the Comics Code long since defunct — and now that EC’s most dis­turb­ing comics look tame — con­tent has become a free-for-all. But what artist dares to be as bold as Krig­stein in push­ing for­ward the form?

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Dis­ney Artist Who Devel­oped Don­ald Duck & Remained Anony­mous for Years, Despite Being “the Most Pop­u­lar and Wide­ly Read Artist-Writer in the World”

1950s Pulp Com­ic Adap­ta­tions of Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries Get­ting Repub­lished

Why the Short-Lived Calvin and Hobbes Is Still One of the Most Beloved & Influ­en­tial Com­ic Strips

How Art Spiegel­man Designs Com­ic Books: A Break­down of His Mas­ter­piece, Maus

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Praised as the Great­est Com­ic Strip of All Time, Gets Dig­i­tized as Ear­ly Install­ments Enter the Pub­lic Domain

“Thou Shalt Not”: A 1940 Pho­to Satir­i­cal­ly Mocks Every Vice & Sin Cen­sored by the Hays Movie Cen­sor­ship Code

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

If you know more than a few mil­len­ni­als, you prob­a­bly know some­one who reveres Calvin and Hobbes as a sacred work of art. That com­ic strip’s cul­tur­al impact is even more remark­able con­sid­er­ing that it ran in news­pa­pers for only a decade, from 1985 to 1995: bare­ly an exis­tence at all, by the stan­dards of the Amer­i­can fun­ny pages, where the likes of Garfield has been lazi­ly crack­ing wise for 45 years now. Yet these two exam­ples of the com­ic-strip form could hard­ly be more dif­fer­ent from each oth­er in not just their dura­tion, but also how they man­i­fest in the world. While Garfield has long been a mar­ket­ing jug­ger­naut, Calvin and Hobbes cre­ator Bill Wat­ter­son has famous­ly turned down all licens­ing inquiries.

That choice set him apart from the oth­er suc­cess­ful car­toon­ists of his time, not least Charles Schulz, whose work on Peanuts had inspired him to start draw­ing comics in the first place. Calvin and Hobbes may not have its own toys and lunch­box­es, but it does reflect a Schulz­ian degree of thought­ful­ness and per­son­al ded­i­ca­tion to the work. Like Schulz, Wat­ter­son eschewed del­e­ga­tion, cre­at­ing the strip entire­ly by him­self from begin­ning to end. Not only did he exe­cute every brush­stroke (not a metaphor, since he actu­al­ly used a brush for more pre­cise line con­trol), every theme dis­cussed and expe­ri­enced by the tit­u­lar six-year-old boy and his tiger best friend was root­ed in his own thoughts.

“One of the beau­ties of a com­ic strip is that peo­ple’s expec­ta­tions are nil,” Wat­ter­son said in an inter­view in the twen­ty-tens. “If you draw any­thing more sub­tle than a pie in the face, you’re con­sid­ered a philoso­pher.” How­ev­er mod­est the medi­um, he spent the whole run of Calvin and Hobbes try­ing to ele­vate it, ver­bal­ly but even more so visu­al­ly. Or per­haps the word is re-ele­vate, giv­en how his increas­ing­ly ambi­tious Sun­day-strip lay­outs evoked ear­ly-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry news­pa­per fix­tures like Lit­tle Nemo and Krazy Kat, which sprawled lav­ish­ly across entire pages. Even if there could be no return­ing to the bygone gold­en age of the com­ic strip, he could at least draw inspi­ra­tion from its glo­ries.

Iron­i­cal­ly, from the per­spec­tive of the twen­ty-twen­ties, Wat­ter­son­’s work looks like an arti­fact of a bygone gold­en age itself. In the eight­ies and nineties, when even small-town news­pa­pers could still com­mand a robust read­er­ship, the comics sec­tion had a cer­tain cul­tur­al weight; Wat­ter­son has spo­ken of the car­toon­ist’s prac­ti­cal­ly unmatched abil­i­ty to influ­ence the thoughts of read­ers on a dai­ly basis. In my case, the influ­ence ran espe­cial­ly deep, since I became a Calvin and Hobbes-lov­ing mil­len­ni­al avant la let­tre while first learn­ing to read through the Sun­day fun­nies. It took no time at all to mas­ter Garfield, but when I start­ed get­ting Calvin and Hobbes, I knew I was mak­ing progress; even when I did­n’t under­stand the words, I could still mar­vel at the sheer exu­ber­ance and detail of the art.

Calvin and Hobbes also attract­ed enthu­si­asts of oth­er gen­er­a­tions, not least among oth­er car­toon­ists. Joel Allen Schroed­er’s doc­u­men­tary Dear Mr. Wat­ter­son fea­tures more than a few of them express­ing their admi­ra­tion for how he raised the bar, as well as for how his work con­tin­ues to enrap­ture young read­ers. Its time­less­ness owes in part to its lack of top­i­cal ref­er­ences (in con­trast to, say, Doones­bury, which I remem­ber always being the most for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge in my days of incom­plete lit­er­a­cy), but also to its under­stand­ing of child­hood itself. Like Stephen King, a cre­ator with whom he oth­er­wise has lit­tle in com­mon, Wat­ter­son remem­bers the exot­ic, often bizarre tex­tures real­i­ty can take on for the very young.

He also remem­bers that child­hood is not, as J. M. Coet­zee once put it, “a time of inno­cent joy, to be spent in the mead­ows amid but­ter­cups and bun­ny-rab­bits or at the hearth­side absorbed in a sto­ry­book,” but in large part “a time of grit­ting the teeth and endur­ing.” Being six years old has its plea­sures, to be sure, but it also comes with strong dos­es of tedi­um, pow­er­less­ness, and futil­i­ty, which we tend not to acknowl­edge as adults. Calvin and Hobbes showed me, as it’s shown so many young read­ers, that there’s a way out: not through stu­dious­ness, not through polite­ness, and cer­tain­ly not through fol­low­ing the rules, but through the pow­er of the imag­i­na­tion to re-enchant dai­ly life. If it gets you sent to your room once in a while, that’s a small price to pay.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How to Make Comics: A Four-Part Series from the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Praised as the Great­est Com­ic Strip of All Time, Gets Dig­i­tized as Ear­ly Install­ments Enter the Pub­lic Domain

17 Min­utes of Charles Schulz Draw­ing Peanuts

The Dis­ney Artist Who Devel­oped Don­ald Duck & Remained Anony­mous for Years, Despite Being “the Most Pop­u­lar and Wide­ly Read Artist-Writer in the World”

The Comi­clo­pe­dia: An Online Archive of 14,000 Com­ic Artists, From Stan Lee and Jack Kir­by, to Mœbius and Hergé

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Any­one can learn to draw the cast of Peanuts, but few can do it every day for near­ly half a cen­tu­ry. The lat­ter, as far as we know, amounts to a group of one: Charles Schulz, who not only cre­at­ed that world-famous com­ic strip but drew it sin­gle-hand­ed through­out its entire run. He was, as a nine­teen-six­ties CBS pro­file put it, “a one-man pro­duc­tion team: writer, humorist, social crit­ic.” That clip opens the video above, which com­piles footage of Schulz draw­ing Peanuts while mak­ing obser­va­tions on the nature of his craft. “When you draw a com­ic strip, if you’re going to wait for inspi­ra­tion, you’ll nev­er make it,” he says. “You have to become pro­fes­sion­al enough at this so that you can almost delib­er­ate­ly set down an idea at will.”

Schulz’s ded­i­ca­tion to his work may have been an inborn trait, but he did­n’t find his way to that work only through his par­tic­u­lar abil­i­ties. His par­tic­u­lar inabil­i­ties also played their part: “I stud­ied art in a cor­re­spon­dence course, because I was afraid to go to art school,” he says in a lat­er BBC seg­ment.

“I could­n’t see myself sit­ting in a room where every­one else in the room could draw much bet­ter than I.” With bet­ter writ­ing skills, “per­haps I would have tried to become a nov­el­ist, and I might have become a fail­ure.” With bet­ter draw­ing skills, “I might have tried to become an illus­tra­tor or an artist. I would’ve failed there. But my entire being seems to be just right for being a car­toon­ist.”

In draw­ing, he also found a medi­um of thought. “The real­ly prac­ti­cal way of get­ting an idea, when you have noth­ing real­ly to draw, is just tak­ing a blank piece of paper and maybe draw­ing one of the char­ac­ters in a famil­iar pose, like Snoopy sleep­ing on top of the dog­house,” he says. Then, you might nat­u­ral­ly “imag­ine what would hap­pen if, say, it began to snow. And so you’d doo­dle in a few snowflakes, some­thing like that. Per­haps you would be led to won­der what would hap­pen if it snowed very hard, and the snow cov­ered him up com­plete­ly.” If you con­tin­ue on to draw, say, Snoopy­’s loy­al friend Wood­stock being sim­i­lar­ly snowed in, you’re well on your way to a com­plete strip. Now do it 17,897 times, and maybe you’ll qual­i­fy for Schulz’s league.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Charles Schulz Draws Char­lie Brown in 45 Sec­onds and Exor­cis­es His Demons

Hayao Miyazaki’s Sketch­es Show­ing How to Draw Char­ac­ters Run­ning: From 1980 Edi­tion of Ani­ma­tion Mag­a­zine

Umber­to Eco Explains the Poet­ic Pow­er of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts

Hergé Draws Tintin in Vin­tage Footage (and What Explains the Character’s Endur­ing Appeal)

Car­toon­ists Draw Their Famous Car­toon Char­ac­ters While Blind­fold­ed (1947)

The Endur­ing Appeal of Schulz’s Peanuts — Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #116

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.