Schulz and Peanuts, by David Michaelis, is a scrupulously researched biography of Charles M. Schulz, the prolific cartoonist responsible for the hugely popular Peanuts comic. Indeed ‘responsible’ is particularly accurate here, as we learn in the book of Schulz’s determination to draw each and every one of the 17,897 strips by himself, sans assistants, sans assistance.
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
Sketches and strip cartoons are a well-known medium for autobiographical expression. Not only is it easy to imagine when reading one what the author might have experienced to inspire the panels in front of us, but we have all at some point said, of a scene in our own lives, ‘hey this would make a good comic strip, wouldn’t it?’. The observation can even wear a little thin, when overused, much like trademark Mark Kermode-ism ‘hey that’d be a good name for a band, wouldn’t it?’…
Enjoyable as it is to play armchair Freud and wildly speculate how an author has projected their life onto their art, a biography such as Schulz and Peanuts can present the hard facts to really nail that down and reduce the guesswork.
Naturally, much of the book plays a pairing game, matching characters from Peanuts with characters in Schulz’s life either chronologically as ‘Sparky’s’ story is told, or when specific strips are mentioned. As a fan of the comic, I get huge satisfaction from the interspersing of these strips throughout the text, either explicitly as in the excerpt below or more broadly, thematically (and even cryptically, in places).
An excerpt from page 222 of the biography.
While the raw information of Schulz’s life is impressive – the dates, the places, the people, and so on – it is with Michaelis’ psychoanalysis that I am most impressed. For a work this meticulous, there is always the risk of the biography being a dry description of events in a man’s life with what the person is known for – in this case the cartoons – providing the sole vector of engagement for the reader. However, Michaelis brings to bear a fierce emotional intelligence and pulls no punches in his appraisal of Schulz’s character, foibles, insecurities, strengths, and weaknesses, throughout the book.
Schulz is a particularly good target for such an approach, where his principle character Charlie Brown is so tragically honest with the reader that there is a wealth to mine. This short clip of Schulz talking while he draws Charlie Brown neatly summarises the world explored in the biography.
When I mentioned to my father that I had been rereading this book, his immediate question was whether I thought another biography would expand on it, or if this was the definitive word on Schulz’s life.
My instinct was that, no, there would not be another such Schulz biography. At 655 pages, and with Michaelis’s microscopic attention to detail, the idea that there was room for more to be said seemed slim. Perhaps a mini-biography, more summarising and less rigorously analytical, but not another weighty tome.
However, as a self-professed Peanuts ‘nerd’, I do read articles here and there about Schulz’s life, and occasionally those articles contain information not covered in Schulz and Peanuts.
The most interesting I have read recently is the story of how Peanuts’ first African American character, Franklin, came to be in the strip. Franklin’s existence is largely thanks to a Los Angeles schoolteacher, Harriet Glickman, who wrote to Schulz following Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination and argued that such characters really ought to be featured in America’s most popular comic strip. The correspondence led to Franklin’s introduction in Peanuts and, naturally, pink noses being put out of joint across the country. It all came to a head in Schulz’s outspoken response to the comic’s distribution company president:
I remember telling Larry at the time about Franklin — he wanted me to change it, and we talked about it for a long while on the phone, and I finally sighed and said, “Well, Larry, let’s put it this way: Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How’s that?”
My summary does not do the story justice and I urge you to read the letterpile article I learned all this from, written – entertainingly enough – by an African American called Ronald E. Franklin. You can also watch Glickman herself give an ‘Oral History’ account here, for The Charles M. Schulz Museum.
Coming back to Schulz and Peanuts, if the facts of those Franklin events had been available to Michaelis when writing the biography then he surely would have found a way to include them – the radical racial significance is so great, especially for the time it happened. We can only assume the information came about too late for inclusion.
Does that mean there is space for a whole other Schulz biography, as rigorously researched as Michaelis’? Of course not. But, for the biographer, an outlet to add supplementary information and perspective is a useful tool. An outlet even to cover periods of time that didn’t or couldn’t fit in the paper biography itself. An outlet like a blog, perhaps…
‘Peanuts’ is an intriguing title. I’ve never thought about it before. Can you enlighten us, James? After all, in Anglo-English it means ‘something piffling’, yet Schulz is one of the greatest philosophers of the age!
This question is probably best answered by Schulz himself:
But why would the word be on ‘a list of possible titles’ in the first place? Apparently it was a term (of endearment?) for children, popularised by a 1947 TV programme The Howdy Doody Show, which had an audience section for children called ‘The Peanut Gallery’. That’s according to The Schulz Museum, here.
While I’m talking about names, I’ll clarify that ‘Sparky’ is used throughout the biography (as in the pictured excerpt) to refer to Charles M. Schulz and was a family nickname after the horse Spark Plug from the Barney Google comic strip. I thought it was cool that the nickname came from a comic strip, and I think Michaelis probably did too, as he uses it broadly throughout the book.