Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaelis

Like I said, I have to beat out the Kangaroo on the graphics.

The latest non-schlock book I finished. (Schlock books to be listed later; one of life's rules is that you can't begin with schlock). Well worth reading.

I grew up with Peanuts. I had Peanuts sheets and pillow cases. I read Peanuts faithfully in the paper. I collected Peanuts comic books, I saw the Peanuts play (You're a Good Man Charlie Brown) and waited faithfully every year for the return of the Peanuts Christmas Special. And like everyone else who read and saw and bought, I never once used the word 'Peanuts'. They were Snoopy books and Charlie Brown sheets and TV specials. By everyone, I mean everyone. One of the revelations of this excellent biography is that Schulz himself hated the 'Peanuts' moniker, and never ever used it. It was forced on him by 'the boys back east' when he was an unknown 20-something cartoonist. Throughout his life, when asked what he did for a living, he told people, 'I draw Snoopy.'

The other revelation is just how self-revelatory Peanuts was. Schulz put his personal life there for all to see in his comic. The author demonstrates this in the most unobstrusive of ways by dropping four-panel strips in throughout the text. So you'll be reading about what a crabby and overbearing bitch his first wife was, and along will come Lucy declaiming "Boy I'm crabby today. Nobody better get in my way." (Snoopy often would; he couldn't resist the challenge). Schulz's one mid-life affair was transferred nearly verbatim into the strip, in the form of Snoopy in love with a pretty she-beagle ("with soft paws") he met at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. Fortunately for Schulz (or not), his wife never read the strip.

Making millions and then tens of millions as a cartoonist, awash in wealth and fame, Schulz managed yet to be a mostly unhappy man for much of his life, preyed on by simultaneously by a belief that what he did didn't really matter, and a contrary resentment that no one had yet recognized what a genius he was. It's the author's contention that all this was to the benefit of the strip, and us the readers, and Schulz as a artist. His second wife made him much happier. And when that happened, Peanuts lost its edge.

Blore's Books gives this one 8B's. (Out of possible 10)