No idea whether I plagiarized this or not. If not, we might have to make t-shirts…
ON SCHULZ AND PEANUTS BY DAVID MICHAELIS
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?
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. SchulzRheta 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 CelebrationProbably 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. SchulzChip 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 SHOWThis 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: ConversationsThis is a great book which includes Gary Groth’s excellent, 100+ page interview for the Comics Journal. |
 |
An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True StoriesThis 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 PEANUTSFinally, 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.
CHARLES SCHULZ ON HIS PROCESS OF MENTAL DRAWING
While I am carrying on a conversation with someone, I find that I am drawing with my eyes. I find myself observing how his shirt collar comes around from behind his neck and perhaps casts a slight shadow on one side. I observe how the wrinkles in his sleeve form and how his arm may be resting on the edge of the chair. I observe how the features on his face move back and forth in perspective as he rotates his head. It actually is a form of sketching and I believe that it is the next best thing to drawing itself. I sometimes feel it is obsessive, but at least it accomplishes something for me.
THE TWELVE DEVICES OF PEANUTS
So-called creative people understand better than most that there is nothing new under the sun. Working with boulders of granite, with empty stages, with blank paper, they are credited with making something out of nothing, but that isn’t exactly what they do. All art is derived from what is in actuality a remarkably finite human experience. Whatever the medium, the creative person’s task is to interpret an essentially unchanging reality, a dog-eared reality pondered by Homer and Mel Brooks and everyone in between. The artist succeeds if he or she can present something familiar from an unfamiliar angle.”
— Rheta Grimsley Johnson
While everyone else is reading David Michaelis’s new biography, Schulz and Peanuts, I’ve decided to wait and ask for it for Christmas. Instead, I’m reading Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s underrated and unfortunately out-of-print 1989 “authorized” biography, Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz. People have called the book “innocuous” and “flattering”, but I think it deals with Schulz’s depression in a very straightforward and explicit manner, and the writing is really great. Worth tracking down.
Chapter 6 of the book is dedicated to Schulz’s “12 devices”—the twelve ideas that Schulz considered essential to the success of Peanuts:
1. The Kite-eating tree.
2. Schroeder’s music
I was looking through this book on music, and it showed a portion of Beethoven’s Ninth in it, so I drew a cartoon of Charlie Brown singing this. I thought it looked kind of neat, showing these complicated notes coming out of the mouth of this comic-strip character, and I thought about it some more, and then I thought, ‘Why not have one of the little kids play a toy piano?’
—Schulz
3. Linus’s blanket
4. Lucy’s psychiatry booth
5. Snoopy’s doghouse
In the beginning, Snoopy actually slept in his doghouse, and a three-quarter view that worked in perspective was the readers’ most familiar angle….The emergence of Snoopy’s doghouse as Grand Device centered not on actual depictions of the humble abode but on allusions to its fantastic contents…the only view the reader is ever given is a left side view. Yet as its graphic depiction became severely restricted, its function became limitless.
—R.G.J.
6. Snoopy himself
7. The Red Baron
8. Woodstock
9. The baseball games
10. The football episodes
Besides losing, the running (and falling) gag is a pure example of another element that has worked so well for Schulz: repetition…Nothing else in Peanuts is so mechanically repetitious as the football joke….One newspaper editor canceled Peanuts, complaining that the author did the same things over and over. He was forced to reinstate the comic strip, with an apology, when his readers set up a postal howl.
—R.G.J.
11. The Great Pumpkin
12. The little red-haired girl
Hank Williams’s plaintive ballad “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You” spurred the inclusion of the little red-haired girl in Peanuts. After listening to the song over and over again, Schulz was inspired to include in his cast of characters the unrequiting lover….The littler red-haired girl has never been depicted…and he believes she never will be.
—R.G.J.
CHARLES SCHULZ ON CHARLIE ROSE
On cartooning and design:
Good cartoon drawing is good design. A lot of people aren’t aware of that.
On the skills of a cartoonist:
Schulz: I have a combination of strange abilities I can draw pretty well, and i can write pretty well, and i can create pretty well, but I could never be an illustrator. It doesn’t interest me.
Rose: That’s because the idea doesn’t come from you?
Schulz: [Yes.]
On humor and sadness:
I suppose there’s a melancholy feeling in a lot of cartoonists, because cartooning, like all other humor, comes from bad things happening. People will say, “Well why don’t you have Charlie Brown kick the football?” And I say, “Well, that would be wonderful, it’s happy, but happiness is not funny.” I wish we could all be happy, but it isn’t funny.
On autobiography:
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?
UNFINISHED THOUGHTS ON THE DARK SIDE OF CHARLES SCHULZ
SETH ON PEANUTS: COMICS = POETRY + GRAPHIC DESIGN
The cartoonist Seth, from an interview with Carousel in 2006:
“I have felt, for some time, a connection between comics and poetry. It’s an obvious connection to anyone who has ever sat down and tried to write a comic strip. I think the idea first occurred to me way back in the late 80’s when I was studying Charles Schulz’s Peanuts strips. It seemed so clear that his four-panel setup was just like reading a haiku; it had a specific rhythm to how he set up the panels and the dialogue. Three beats: doot doot doot— followed by an infinitesimal pause, and then the final beat: doot. Anyone can recognize this when reading a Peanuts strip. These strips have that sameness of rhythm that haikus have— the haikus mostly ending with a nature reference separated off in the final line.
As time passed I began to see this connection as more and more evident in how I went about writing my own work. Certainly, it is not a process that is very tightly worked out — but when I am writing a comics page (or sequence of pages) I am very aware of the sound and ‘feel’ of how the dialogue or narration is broken down for the panels. If you have to tell a certain amount of story in a page then you have to make decisions on how many panels you need to tell it. You need to arrange these panels — small, big or a combination of the two — and decide how to sit them on the page. All these decisions affect how the viewer reads the strip; there is an inherent rhythm created by how you set up the panels. Thin panel, thin panel, long panel: this rhythm is felt by the reader, especially when you put the words into the panels. When writing a comic strip I am very aware of how I am structuring the sentences: how many words; one sentence in this panel; two in this one; a silent panel; a single word. These choices are ultra-important in the creation of comics storytelling, and this unheard rhythm is the main concern for me
when I am working out a strip.I imagine poets feel this same concern. If you read any free verse poetry you can see how the poet has made certain decisions for how to break the thoughts apart and structure them, often in a way that defies a system.
[…]
It seems to me that the language of poetry is very dependant on setting up images and juxtaposing them against each other. A poet will create an image in the first two lines of his poem and then he will create another in the next two lines, and so on. I do find this jumping from image to image in poetry to be a very interesting, comic-like element. Many poems are almost like word comics.
Comics are often referred to in reference to film and prose — neither seems that appropriate to me. The poetry connection is more appropriate because of both the condensing of words and the emphasis on rhythm. Film and prose use these methods as well, but not in such a condensed and controlled manner. Comic book artists have for a long time connected themselves to film, but in doing so, have reduced their art to being merely a ‘storyboard’ approach.
The underlying rhythm seems to have gone unheard for literally decades in the world of commercial comic books (a few noticeable exceptions: Kurtzman, Kirby, Stanley).
[…]
The ‘words & pictures’ that make up the comics language are often described as prose and illustration combined. A bad metaphor: poetry and graphic design seems more apt. Poetry for the rhythm and condensing; graphic design because cartooning is more about moving shapes around — designing — then it is about drawing. Obviously when creating a strip about a man walking down the street you are drawing pictures of the man and the environment…however, you are also trying to simplify these drawings down into a series of more iconic, graphic renderings. The more detailed the drawing — the more it attempts to capture ‘reality’ — the more it slows down the story telling and deadens the cartoon language. Don’t get me wrong; the cartooning can be very specific, it doesn’t have to be generic. It simply has to properly ‘cartoon’ the images. The drawings become symbols that are arranged on the page (and within the panels) in the most logical way to make the reading of the story work; you place these cartooned images together in a way that does what you want them to do. You aren’t concerned with drawing a proper street scene so much as you are concerned with moving the reader’s eye around the page in the way you wish it to move. Trying to draw realistically just sets up a myriad of frustrations for the proper use of cartoon language. Think of the cartoon language as a series of characters (letters) being purposefully arranged to make words.”
Source: Ngui, Marc, “Poetry, Design and Comics: An Interview with Seth.” Carousel 19 (Spring-Summer 2006) [archived PDF]
A MARRIAGE GUIDE FOR WRITERS
Meg and I have this Peanuts strip taped to the fridge:
Relationships are hard enough, but it takes a real champion of a person to be married to an artist. Lots of times you have to be a maid/cook, motivational speaker, a mother, and an editor — all at once.
Lucy would never cut it.
We have a few marriage books scattered on the coffee table, but none of them touch on the trials that await the spouse of an writer.
So, if you’re an writer and you’re thinking about getting married, or if you’re thinking about marrying a writer, I’d recommend checking out Bruce Holland Rogers’ book, Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer.
There are lots of writing books out there, but Word Work is unique in that it’s all about the practical, day-to-day, nuts-and-bolts of a writer’s life. There are three chapters about relationships: “Writers and Lovers,” “Writers Loving Writers,” and “Writers Loving Non-Writers.”
Lucky for me, my non-writer is a champion, and she could have written the last chapter.
MOST OF US THINK OF OURSELVES AS CHARLIE BROWN…
Daniel Mendelsohn ends his pretty excellent review of Jonathan Franzen’s memoir, The Discomfort Zone, by turning a critical eye to Franzen’s essay on Peanuts that ran a few years ago in the New Yorker:
Ah well. What can you do with someone who professes to love “Peanuts” but doesn’t understand a word of it? “The Discomfort Zone” features an odd but suggestive paean to the creator of the comic strip that, more than anything else in American popular culture for many decades, celebrated the comic side of something Franzen professes to know a lot about: discomfort — the sheer, poignant, foolish awkwardness that comes with being human. Recounting the unappealing facts of Schulz’s biography, Franzen emphasizes that the cartoonist was a difficult, embittered, resentful man — the kind of person who still seethed over perceived insults he’d received four decades before. Yet the author is quick to defend Schulz — the, um, artistically brilliant, tormented, somewhat geeky Midwestern offspring of Scandinavian parents — as a hero of Art. “To keep choosing art over the comforts of normal life … is the opposite of damaged.”
Franzen’s insistence on seeing this repugnant person as an ideal is, no doubt, what leads him to his wrongheaded interpretation of the comic strip itself. “Almost every young person experiences sorrows,” he rightly points out at the beginning of his exegesis of “Peanuts” — a sentence that gives you hope that the geeky child still hiding inside the adult Franzen is going to admit that, like everyone else, he loved “Peanuts” because he, too, identified with the perpetual awkward, perpetually failed, and yet just as perpetually optimistic Charlie Brown. But no: for Franzen, who, even as a child, “personally enjoyed winning and couldn’t see why so much fuss was made about the losers” the real hero of “Peanuts” is not the “depressive and failure-ridden” Charlie Brown, but the grandiose beagle, Snoopy: “the protean trickster,” as Franzen calls him, “the quick-change artist who … before his virtuosity has a chance to alienate you or diminish you” can be “the eager little dog who just wants dinner.” But Snoopy’s self-proclaimed virtuosity does, in the end, alienate and diminish: he’s amusing, with his epic grudge against the Red Baron (and the Van Gogh and the spiral staircase he lost when his doghouse burned down), precisely because he represents the part of ourselves — the smugness, the avidity, the pomposity, the rank egotism — most of us know we have but try to keep decently hidden away. Franzen, like most of us, is very likely an awkward combination of Charlie and Snoopy; the difference being that whereas most of us think of ourselves as Charlie with a bit of Snoopy, Franzen clearly doesn’t mind coming off as a whole lotta Snoopy with the barest soupçon of Charlie: a person, as this lazy and perverse book demonstrates, whose very admissions of weakness, of insufficiency, smack of showboating, of grandiose self-congratulation. For my part, I’ll stick with Charlie. Who, after all, wants the company of a character so self-involved he doesn’t even realize he’s not human?
Personally, I like to think of myself as Schroeder.
A FEW THOUGHTS ON PEANUTS
I’ve been on another obsessive Peanuts-reading tear. If you’re interested in listening in to the conversations of one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century, I highly recommend Charles M. Schulz: Conversations. Particularly wonderful is the 100+ page interview with Gary Groth from 1997 that ran in the Comics Journal.
Two things that strike me right this second about the strip.
First, I’ve been thinking about the difference between reading comics in serialized form — in newspapers or seperately published editions over time — and reading them in book form. Schultz himself said that comics strips weren’t art because they were “too transient” to appeal to several generations. But the act of collecting Peanuts into books, or “treasuries,” basically has cemented their status as great art. Because the characters are so strong, and the world is so static over time, Peanuts is an epic of gag strips — in book form, it really does amount to what George Saunders called a “50-year novel.”
Second, I’ve been thinking about the way in which Schultz’s drawing led his ideas. His formal innovations with his drawing — dressing Snoopy up as a fighter pilot, for instance — led to his character and story development.
Take the character of Schroeder. Schultz said:
“I was looking through this book on music, and it showed a portion of Beethoven’s Ninth in it, so I drew a cartoon of Charlie Brown singing this. I thought it looked kind of neat, showing these complicated notes coming out of the mouth of this comic-strip character, and I thought about it some more, and then I thought, ‘Why not have one of the little kids play a toy piano?'” (*)
Schultz made sure to recreate exactly those Beethoven musical scores by hand, and it was the act of drawing — the simple aesthetic pleasure of musical notes in a comic strip — that led to Schroeder.
What this means to me is that drawing comics is its own particular brand of alchemy. You can’t just sit down and say, “I’m going to draw a character with a funny nose who has no father and always trips over his shoelaces.” The description means nothing. You have to draw that character into existance.
It’s the act, not the idea.