Format: Hardcover
Release date: October 16, 2007
Date acquired/borrowed: December 25, 2007
Pages: 672
Start reading date: January 16, 2007
Finished reading: February 21, 2007
My earliest recollections of the Peanuts gang was a green felt wall hanging with Linus on it, the slogan "It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are sincere" sagely written above Schulz's deceptively simplistic character drawing. It hung in my room for some time as a wee lad, I recall, but don't remember when or why it was removed. From my grandmother's house I had claimed my Uncle's old Snoopy toy as my own. You could pop his limbs off easily, I remember frequent pullings-apart, but he always went back together. I watched various"...Charlie Brown" specials on tv featuring Great Pumpkins and Christmas pageantry, and I read Peanuts in the Sunday color comics, but not as frequently the dailies. I'm sure most of us born a few years before Charles Schulz's retirement from comics have (or will have) similar recollections from our youth, scarcely a life in North America -- and millions more globally -- that hasn't had some exposure to Snoopy, Charlie Brown and company.
If you were a child of the 50's or 60's, you probably remember a much different Peanuts than what the rest of us grew up with, the commercialized property with seeming omnipresence, inescapable, unavoidable. Perhaps, like me, you never cared as much for Peanuts as what came after it: Garfield; For Better Or Worse; Calvin and Hobbes; Doonesbury; The Boondocks.... Virtually every newspaper comic strip since Peanuts came on the owes a debt to its creator, and whether you truly appreciate the man's craft or not, you can't deny Charles "Sparky" Schulz' influence on the field of cartooning.
Release date: October 16, 2007
Date acquired/borrowed: December 25, 2007
Pages: 672
Start reading date: January 16, 2007
Finished reading: February 21, 2007
My earliest recollections of the Peanuts gang was a green felt wall hanging with Linus on it, the slogan "It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are sincere" sagely written above Schulz's deceptively simplistic character drawing. It hung in my room for some time as a wee lad, I recall, but don't remember when or why it was removed. From my grandmother's house I had claimed my Uncle's old Snoopy toy as my own. You could pop his limbs off easily, I remember frequent pullings-apart, but he always went back together. I watched various"...Charlie Brown" specials on tv featuring Great Pumpkins and Christmas pageantry, and I read Peanuts in the Sunday color comics, but not as frequently the dailies. I'm sure most of us born a few years before Charles Schulz's retirement from comics have (or will have) similar recollections from our youth, scarcely a life in North America -- and millions more globally -- that hasn't had some exposure to Snoopy, Charlie Brown and company.
If you were a child of the 50's or 60's, you probably remember a much different Peanuts than what the rest of us grew up with, the commercialized property with seeming omnipresence, inescapable, unavoidable. Perhaps, like me, you never cared as much for Peanuts as what came after it: Garfield; For Better Or Worse; Calvin and Hobbes; Doonesbury; The Boondocks.... Virtually every newspaper comic strip since Peanuts came on the owes a debt to its creator, and whether you truly appreciate the man's craft or not, you can't deny Charles "Sparky" Schulz' influence on the field of cartooning.
I never "got" Peanuts. I saw the simple line and the bizarre, macrocephalic characters and, like most children, were drawn to them visually, but the words (so regularly full of lament, chastising, self-deflation, introspection, etc) often didn't carry much meaning to a six or nine or twelve year old, and the overwhelming lack of elation in the panels made it somewhat unattractive when paired next to the sardonic punch-lines of Mother Goose and Grimm or the rather spectacular imagination of Calvin and his stuffed friend come to life. I'm sure I'm not alone, but what I didn't know was that, thanks to Schulz, comics no longer had to have jokes or ongoing stories (but they still could), that they could reflect any mood and be insightful into human nature, not just "set-up + beat = gag". Comic strips didn't have to always be entertaining, they could be comforting, thought provoking, insightful, and relatable. I guess I just never took the time to see what Peanuts was really about outside of it's more commercial endeavors. I also didn't realize how much of Peanuts was a reflection of Schulz himself. I never thought that all those words had to come from somewhere, and until you seriously ponder his achievement, you don't realize the full scope of what Schulz had actually accomplished.
Schulz and Peanuts is an immeasurably well-researched, insightful and engrossing biography of the man behind Charlie Brown by David Michaelis. The author conducted dozens of interviews, read thousands of press clippings, sifted through hours of audio and video footage, gained access to private records and journals and thoroughly examined Schulz's 17,897 Peanuts comic strips (not to mention Schulz's less recognizable prior work) all coming together to paint a startlingly real portrait of the cartoonist.
Ask most any comedian and they will tell you the best, most innovative comedy comes from dark, dark places. Comedians, for all their humor, are not generally the happiest of people. The same goes for the bulk of history and the world's greatest artists, writers, creators... it's the channeling of this darkness into something constructive that often (but not always) leads to some of our culture's most formidable accomplishments. Schulz was a tormented man, haunted by phobias and feelings he couldn't let go of. He was not a depressive and he was not unlikeable, but he was not a happy man. Armed with even that little bit of knowledge, one's view of Peanuts changes considerably. But through Michaelis' exploration much of the matter and meaning of the strip comes into light, giving a lot of Schulz' work a dual or triple-nature.
The traumas of his youth are subtle, but had an effect on Sparky lasting his entire life. His mother's lack of affectionate display left Sparky craving love and adoration but never knowing truly how to appreciate it when he received it. His father, a barber dedicated to his profession, gave Sparky a real fear of leaving his workspace or home for too long, Agoraphobia he would consider late in life. What sparky did have, though, was drive, a determination to be a cartoonist. Deciding at the age of six that it was his chosen profession, he never wavered at the idea, even when his mother or family members would ridicule the idea that it was a worthwhile career. His mother's opinions and attitudes are presented as starkly negative, or at best indifferent, and the fact that she passed away from cervical cancer before he could achieve any notoriety, to prove to her his talent and win her love and admiration, left his triumphs unsatisfying even at his death.
Throughout Michaelis' narrative -- filled with quotes from family, friends, contemporaries, celebrities and Schulz himself -- the gestation of Schulz's career and the characters he's made famous are reflected back onto Sparky's personality. Most of the characters represent some aspect of Sparky, but some reflect family members sometimes amalgamating his mother, his wives and his children. To understand where these characters have their origins, where their habits, personalities, nuances are derived from gives the sense of Peanuts being more than just a cartoon, but a therapy for Sparky, a daily, public catharsis, discreetly letting the public in on his private thoughts and relationships.
Schulz's career brought newspaper cartoons into the big-time, making a billion-dollar empire out of his characters. Sparky pioneered a new sensibility and maturity to the daily funny pages, transformed the art and intelligence level that could be portrayed, and revolutionized the appeal of comics and their potential (also quietly revolutionizing creator's rights by getting his syndicate to return the copyrights to him). Sparky's heart -- despite all the deviations into storybooks, film, musicals, television, advertising, toys, gift ware, jewelry, tchochkes and an uncountable number of other realizations -- always remained dedicated to the comics. When the Ford licensed the characters the cries of "sell-out" could be heard, but until Peanuts, no comic strip had warranted the attention and Sparky forged a new path in character licensing, and every subsequent comic came with a decision virtually pre-made to either be a consumer property (Garfield) or keep the focus of the strip undiluted (Calvin and Hobbes).
Michaelis explores deeply Sparky's family ties, his marriages, his friendships, his working relationships, and his parental role, all while remaining focused on it's impact to the comic. The core of the book always maintains the Sparky saw himself a cartoonist above all, and all that he was really worth to anyone, and the book never loses sight of that. He was a dichotomous character, full of self-doubt at nearly every turn, occasionally riddled with bitterness, regularly crippled (not physically but sometimes socially or mentally) by uncomfortable memories, and yet he was utterly committed to being the best at what he did and competitively proving it as often as he could, and even still undercutting his achievements. Michaelis never goes as far to call Schulz the unhappy clown, because that's a little too simplistic. While he could never actually get into Sparky's mind, he so thoroughly allows us to travel along with Schulz on his journey from infancy to his passing that, through this book's 560-some pages (the final 100 pages are filled with the bibliography), you feel you knew the man as he was, human, flawed, but never the awkward, dull, plain-faced, nobody he saw himself being. You feel him a friend, someone more comfortable to call "Sparky" than "Charles".
It's impossible not to have a newfound respect for the man and his work after reading Schulz and Peanuts, just as it's impossible not to see the medium in an new light, even if you already adore it. Michaelis uses Schulz's story as much to show the changing face of the comics. These days, with the internet pulping the newspaper business, comics have a new challenge ahead of them, and are now without both Sparky's guidance and his shadow. This is an unexpectedly powerful book, with much more going on in it than just simply a comparison between Schulz and his cartoons. Like Sparky's comics, there's many ways to look at his life, and much to think about, lessons to learn (personally, I see so much of it being about the psychological influence of parents on their children). I'm still not an affirmed Peanuts fan, but I understand it a lot better than I ever did, and I'm curious to explore the work of the world's friend Sparky, currently available in the glorious Complete Peanuts volumes from Fantagraphics.
Rating: 5/5
Schulz and Peanuts is an immeasurably well-researched, insightful and engrossing biography of the man behind Charlie Brown by David Michaelis. The author conducted dozens of interviews, read thousands of press clippings, sifted through hours of audio and video footage, gained access to private records and journals and thoroughly examined Schulz's 17,897 Peanuts comic strips (not to mention Schulz's less recognizable prior work) all coming together to paint a startlingly real portrait of the cartoonist.
Ask most any comedian and they will tell you the best, most innovative comedy comes from dark, dark places. Comedians, for all their humor, are not generally the happiest of people. The same goes for the bulk of history and the world's greatest artists, writers, creators... it's the channeling of this darkness into something constructive that often (but not always) leads to some of our culture's most formidable accomplishments. Schulz was a tormented man, haunted by phobias and feelings he couldn't let go of. He was not a depressive and he was not unlikeable, but he was not a happy man. Armed with even that little bit of knowledge, one's view of Peanuts changes considerably. But through Michaelis' exploration much of the matter and meaning of the strip comes into light, giving a lot of Schulz' work a dual or triple-nature.
The traumas of his youth are subtle, but had an effect on Sparky lasting his entire life. His mother's lack of affectionate display left Sparky craving love and adoration but never knowing truly how to appreciate it when he received it. His father, a barber dedicated to his profession, gave Sparky a real fear of leaving his workspace or home for too long, Agoraphobia he would consider late in life. What sparky did have, though, was drive, a determination to be a cartoonist. Deciding at the age of six that it was his chosen profession, he never wavered at the idea, even when his mother or family members would ridicule the idea that it was a worthwhile career. His mother's opinions and attitudes are presented as starkly negative, or at best indifferent, and the fact that she passed away from cervical cancer before he could achieve any notoriety, to prove to her his talent and win her love and admiration, left his triumphs unsatisfying even at his death.
Throughout Michaelis' narrative -- filled with quotes from family, friends, contemporaries, celebrities and Schulz himself -- the gestation of Schulz's career and the characters he's made famous are reflected back onto Sparky's personality. Most of the characters represent some aspect of Sparky, but some reflect family members sometimes amalgamating his mother, his wives and his children. To understand where these characters have their origins, where their habits, personalities, nuances are derived from gives the sense of Peanuts being more than just a cartoon, but a therapy for Sparky, a daily, public catharsis, discreetly letting the public in on his private thoughts and relationships.
Schulz's career brought newspaper cartoons into the big-time, making a billion-dollar empire out of his characters. Sparky pioneered a new sensibility and maturity to the daily funny pages, transformed the art and intelligence level that could be portrayed, and revolutionized the appeal of comics and their potential (also quietly revolutionizing creator's rights by getting his syndicate to return the copyrights to him). Sparky's heart -- despite all the deviations into storybooks, film, musicals, television, advertising, toys, gift ware, jewelry, tchochkes and an uncountable number of other realizations -- always remained dedicated to the comics. When the Ford licensed the characters the cries of "sell-out" could be heard, but until Peanuts, no comic strip had warranted the attention and Sparky forged a new path in character licensing, and every subsequent comic came with a decision virtually pre-made to either be a consumer property (Garfield) or keep the focus of the strip undiluted (Calvin and Hobbes).
Michaelis explores deeply Sparky's family ties, his marriages, his friendships, his working relationships, and his parental role, all while remaining focused on it's impact to the comic. The core of the book always maintains the Sparky saw himself a cartoonist above all, and all that he was really worth to anyone, and the book never loses sight of that. He was a dichotomous character, full of self-doubt at nearly every turn, occasionally riddled with bitterness, regularly crippled (not physically but sometimes socially or mentally) by uncomfortable memories, and yet he was utterly committed to being the best at what he did and competitively proving it as often as he could, and even still undercutting his achievements. Michaelis never goes as far to call Schulz the unhappy clown, because that's a little too simplistic. While he could never actually get into Sparky's mind, he so thoroughly allows us to travel along with Schulz on his journey from infancy to his passing that, through this book's 560-some pages (the final 100 pages are filled with the bibliography), you feel you knew the man as he was, human, flawed, but never the awkward, dull, plain-faced, nobody he saw himself being. You feel him a friend, someone more comfortable to call "Sparky" than "Charles".
It's impossible not to have a newfound respect for the man and his work after reading Schulz and Peanuts, just as it's impossible not to see the medium in an new light, even if you already adore it. Michaelis uses Schulz's story as much to show the changing face of the comics. These days, with the internet pulping the newspaper business, comics have a new challenge ahead of them, and are now without both Sparky's guidance and his shadow. This is an unexpectedly powerful book, with much more going on in it than just simply a comparison between Schulz and his cartoons. Like Sparky's comics, there's many ways to look at his life, and much to think about, lessons to learn (personally, I see so much of it being about the psychological influence of parents on their children). I'm still not an affirmed Peanuts fan, but I understand it a lot better than I ever did, and I'm curious to explore the work of the world's friend Sparky, currently available in the glorious Complete Peanuts volumes from Fantagraphics.
Rating: 5/5
Bonus
(Thanks to my Dad for the pic!)