Austin Kleon – Page 513

BECAUSE NUMBERS DON’T LIE

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

ON SCHULZ AND PEANUTS BY DAVID MICHAELIS

Monday, January 14, 2008

Schulz: All of the things that you see in the strip, if you were to read it every day and study it, you would know me.

Rose: To read your characters is to know you.

Schulz: Isn’t that depressing?

—Charles Schulz on The Charlie Rose Show

Good grief. David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts. A grueling 565 pages of book that exhausted and disappointed me. So many details, so many of them not significant. I never get sick of Peanuts, but by the end of the book, I was sick of Charles Schulz.

Jeet Heer has written a really brilliant post about the strengths and flaws of the book, almost 100% of which I agree with. Jeannie Schulz and the Schulz kids have also been really outspoken about the fact that the book, in their opinion, is just downright wrong.

Whether it’s factually inaccurate or not, I didn’t find it to be a pleasant nor a particularly great read.

The major innovation of the book is the way Michaelis weaves examples of the strips into the autobiography. This works because—as Schulz said—to read the strip is to know him. It’s all there. This book would’ve been a helluva lot better if Michaelis ran with this technique, and just collaged the strips in a way that reflected the chronological order of Schulz’s life, stating the plain autobiographical facts alongside them, leaving out his psychological “insights.” Now THAT would be a cool book.

Here are some materials I recommend instead of the Michaelis book for those interested in Schulz and his work:

	Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s underrated and unfortunately out-of-print 1989 “authorized” biography. Nobody seems to be interested in this book now that the Michaelis biography has come out, but I think it hits all the significant details and deals with Schulz’s depression in a very straightforward and explicit manner. Plus, the writing is way better. Worth tracking down. (Great Amazon customer review.) Check out an excerpt from the book in my post, THE TWELVE DEVICES OF PEANUTS.
	Peanuts: A Golden Celebration Probably the best introduction to the strip: contains, for better or worse, strips from all five decades, including commentary here and there by Schulz himself. It’s a big, coffee-table size book, and about 200 or so pages. You can get it used for dirt cheap. (Even better might be an earlier edition, Peanuts Jubilee, but I think it’s pretty hard to get a hold of…)
	Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz Chip Kidd designed this beautiful little book. It concentrates on the early part of the strip’s life and development, and contains numerous beautiful scans of actual newspaper clippings (a lot which come from the personal collections of Kidd and Chris Ware) and photographs of Schulz’s tools.
	ON THE CHARLIE ROSE SHOW This is a good interview with Schulz from near the end of his life, and you can watch the whole thing for free.
	Charles M. Schulz: Conversations This is a great book which includes Gary Groth’s excellent, 100+ page interview for the Comics Journal. A few more thoughts about the book.
	An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories This might seem like an odd choice, but Ivan Brunetti includes a whole slew of Peanuts tributes, including a piece penned by Schulz himself on how to be a cartoonist.
	THE COMPLETE PEANUTS Finally, if you really want to know the man, just read his strips. Fantagraphics has done an amazing job with these books — I’ve been slowly building my set. (And I’m hoping, hoping, hoping, that they will chose to release it on DVD at some point, a la The New Yorker.)

If any of you dear readers read the book, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

FAVORITE POSTS: I DONE BEEN TAGGED

Monday, January 14, 2008

I ~~usually~~ almost always ignore these things, but Tim tagged me, and I really like Tim and don’t want to let him down, and lord knows I don’t have any NEW content, so:

Go back through your archives and post the links to your five favorite blog posts that you’ve written. But there is a catch:
Link 1 must be about family.
Link 2 must be about friends.
Link 3 must be about yourself, who you are… what you’re all about.
Link 4 must be about something you love.
Link 5 can be about anything you choose.

Post your five links and then tag five other people.

These aren’t my “all-time” favorites, but they’re some decent ones. Here goes:

	FAMILY: A TIME MACHINE STUCK ON REPEAT Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 My grandmother’s 80th birthday. A trip to Salem, Ohio. Family slides, deja vu, and memories of things that never happened. Moments flickered on the edges of my sight that never happened. A life that was never lived. It was something like the opposite of deja vu: what I was seeing in front of me triggered memories that had never existed.
	FRIENDS: CAT POWER OUTAGE Sunday, October 16th, 2005 My buddy Nathaniel, who was going to UVA at the time, tells a great story about going to see Chan Marshall live in Charlottesville, Virginia. A few minutes later, she muttered something about the KKK, claimed she felt “this weird energy,” and literally RAN off stage.
	MYSELF: IT’S JUST A SERIES OF GAG STRIPS WRITTEN IN A SECRET CODE Saturday, June 24th, 2006 The first post where I tried to articulate my thought that an artist’s job is to create his own “secret code.” People talk about voice and style, and I have no clue what they’re talking about. “Find your voice!” they say. Screw that. I’m working on my secret code. Other related posts: THESE CODED DRAWINGS ARE REALLY MY JOURNALS MORE THOUGHTS ON MAKING A MOUNTAIN OUT OF GAG STRIPS
	SOMETHING I LOVE: DRAWING THAT SIGNIFICANT OTHER (SCENES OF DOMESTIC BLISS) Monday, October 1st, 2007 I really love drawing my wife. She’s the perfect model: she’s beautiful, she doesn’t complain, and she’s always around. This post has examples of other cartoonists drawing their significant others. More drawings of my wife:
	ANYTHING I WANT: PROCESS: MY COVER FOR HAWKLINE’S UPCOMING EP, “SHIPWRECK” Friday, July 27th, 2007 This was a really fun project to work on, and I think it gives a really accurate, honest portrait of how I work. I tend to look at everything through the medium of collage: all we’re really doing with art is taking things that we’ve seen and making something we can call our own. Borrowing. Stealing. Mixing. We take the words we know and put them into sentences. We take the notes we know and put them into melodies. We take the experiences we have and shape them into stories.

Okay, I spent way too much time on that. This trip down memory lane is over (thank God). I guess I’ll tag Mark, Maureen, Darby, James, and Adam.

MY READING YEAR, 2007

Saturday, January 12, 2008

10 good books that I read this year:

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy

My reaction was similar to James Kochalka’s.

Harry Potter 7
by J.K. Rowling

Always a fan of the movies, this year I let go of my HP snobbery, looked past the clunky prose, and let myself fall into the dream..

The Early Comic Strip
by David Kunzle

A long-out-of print collection of ancient precursors to the comic strip that I got my hands on through interlibrary loan.

Posts about the book:

Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow
by Anders Nilsen

Maybe my favorite book last year by my favorite contemporary cartoonist. My “review.”

The Political Brain
by Drew Westen

A book that got me interested in politics again.

My mindmap of the book.

Secret Knowledge
by David Hockney

A book about the use of optics in painting from the 1400s on, which changed a lot of my ideas about perspective, realism, comics, and collage.

King-Cat Classix
by John Porcellino

A retrospective collection of Porcellino’s King-Cat mini-comics. I also read his Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man and Perfect Example. Those clean, Zen lines!

The Gospel According to Jesus
by Stephen Mitchell

Reminded me how much I love the teachings of Jesus and how much I hate contemporary Christianity. A lovely book.

Saul Steinberg: Illuminations
by Joel Smith

This was the catalog of a gallery show we saw while we were on our honeymoon, and it kick-started the Year of Steinberg, in which I became obsessed with his work.

Posts about Steinberg from this year:

The Braindead Megaphone
by George Saunders

A collection of essays from my favorite living fiction writer. We got to meet Mr. Saunders twice this year: once at Oberlin College and once at the Texas Book Festival.

THE APRON STRINGS

Thursday, January 10, 2008

I’m so ashamed at the low output of this blog that I’m posting a couple of sketches, hoping they will somehow make up for it. (My Tumblelog has been bustling with activity, but it doesn’t really count.) The sketches are for a design to go on an apron that Meg wants to sew.

I’ve got a couple of posts in mind for next week, most notably my thoughts on David Michaelis‘s Schulz and Peanuts, which I’m finding to be an utterly exhausting read. I’ve got about 150 pages to go. Here’s the fine stack of books I’ve got waiting for me once I finish: