The AAUGH blog

Sparky: The Life and Art of Charles Schulz is a biography aimed at the younger set. In terms of the text, it’s a reasonable attempt. It’s certainly a better and fuller biography than those books that come as part of a series of bios sold in bulk to school libraries. There are no revelations here for anyone who has read the grown-up bios of Schulz, of course, but that’s not the goal. The text does oversimplify things emotionally.

Looking at the cover, you’d sense that the book is designed well. Reading it, however, you’ll find that the book is overdesigned, formatted more to look interesting than to read well. It’s all done with full-color printing, although there are only a few full-color items in it (a handful of Sunday pages; all of the photographs, even ones that were originally in color, are reproduced monochromatically). Instead, the color is applied to the text; one page might be in medium blue text on a light blue page, another is yellow text on a dark green page. All of it is in a sans-serif font, which makes for slightly harder reading, and printed on glossy paper, which can cause glare problems in some lighting. Looking at the page, one is not encouraged to read it.

There are a few odd editorial decisions along the way, like the decision to discuss Schulz’s near-fiancee Donna as the person “who inspired the ‘red-haired girl’ in the strip”, avoiding the appropriate inclusion of “little” in that term. There’s a section where author Beverly Gherman explains that “Many cartoonists penciled in their whole strips and then inked over the lines. Not Sparky. He drew the characters with a pen [...] because he liked shaping them with a pen line, not copying over pencil lines.” The next spread is actually a two-page photo of a pencil in Sparky’s hand, a hand that leans on a strip where two of the panels are yet uninked, pencil-drawn figures clearly visible, with unerased pencil lines clearly visible in the inked panels. (There’s also things for us nigglers to stare at, like the “image from the Christmas television special A Charlie Brown Christmas” which appears to be a very good recreation of a shot from the special, only the line weight appears too light and Charlie Brown’s hands are in a position which his hands are never quite in in that scene. Or the fact that the page with that image comes in the midst of the phrase “But Sparky Sparky had always said”, with one “Sparky” on the previous page and one on the following page.)

All in all, this is a slick product in many ways, but if I had to recommend a Schulz bio for the younger set, I’d probably still go with the out-of-print Young Adult volume Charles M. Schulz: Cartoonist and Creator of Peanuts before I’d go with this.

My Life with Charlie Brown is a collection of various prose essays that Schulz did for various publications, talking (generally) about Peanuts and his life as a cartoonist.

For those studying Schulz, this is an interesting work. You’re apt to have seen much of the material before; the biggest chunk of the material (about 1/3) is the text portions of Peanuts Jubilee, the 25th anniversary book from 2005. Other pieces we’ve seen excerpted from elsewhere, providing sideline commentary in books like You Don’t Look 35, Charlie Brown and Peanuts: A Golden Celebration. Still other pieces are unpublished, seen here for the first time. Sources include not just Peanuts books, but articles written for newspapers, magazines, and books, and one transcribed speech for the National Cartoonist Society, with items from the 1950s into the 1990s. One piece is officially written not by Schulz, but by Charlie Brown.

Schulz’s prose is clear, clean, and direct. His flow from topic to topic is, however, rather choppy. He speaks in short anecdotes, which actually makes it good for the sort of excerption that was done in some of the anniversary books, but can give the reader a bit of whiplash reading it. Often, they read more like a personal letter than something with a specific theme to cover.

There are lots of little treats to be found – Schulz denying his first wife was a “Lucy” (a key claim of Schulz and Peanuts), some comments on the creation of the Youth magazine cartoons that I wish I had when editing Schulz’s Youth, Schulz expressing his interest in Northern Exposure star Janine Turner, and so forth. On the other hand, since most of this material was created not as a single organized effort but for specific purposes, there is a lot you’d want to see Schulz write about that he didn’t, as well as some repetition beween articles.

The main organization of the book is solid; there’s a Schulz timeline in the front to give you context, then the essays are grouped as “My Life”, “My Profession”, and “My Art” – logical and useful groupings, and there’s an appendix for a couple of odd bits (a report Schulz wrote for a class on the novel; a poem he wrote for his wife). However, there are some sloppinesses – a didn’t’ here, an incorrect attribution there, calling Craftint Doubletone paper Crafting – and some bad choices. The source of each essay is named at the end of the essay, when knowing the source while reading the essay would actually help the reader understand the intended context – who was being written to and when (I found myself simply skipping to the end of each piece before I read it). There are occasional Peanuts strips inserted, and the pages they’re on include distracting thick black angles; it was a while before I realized that they were supposed to invoke the zig-zag on Charlie Brown’s shirt. There aren’t explanations for individual pieces, so that things that would be understood by Schulz’s intended audience can go by the reader. For example, in his address to the NCS, Schulz complained about people who were not members and who said that they weren’t “joiners”, it might help to know he was referring to comments by “Calvin & Hobbes” creator Bill Watterson; or the one place (I can’t quickly find to quote) where he talks about keeping his strip clean and not doing material about toilets and fire hydrants, which might not make sense unless you’d read “Mother Goose & Grimm” and seen how those items are used in that strip (Schulz certainly did not exile fire hydrants from his strip, he just didn’t use them in untoward ways.)

So is it an ideal version of what it is? I don’t think so – but it’s something that is good enough. I’m glad that I have it.

The Complete Peanuts 1975-1976 is shipping a bit early (no, this is not an April Fool’s joke.)

Life is full, and I haven’t had a chance to complete reading my copy, but I will say that the introduction is probably my favorite of the series thus far. Robert Smigel’s rather acidic work (Triumph the Comic Dog, the Ambiguously Gay Duo) may not strike some as particularly Peanuts-like, but this intro isn’t just a case of “famous person who likes Peanuts” but (as this intro as well as some of his work makes clear) this is a talented someone who takes their Peanuts quite seriously, who was very influenced by and very aware of the work. When he talks about the strip, he’s talking about this specific period, and how it reflects a change from what came before. Kind of nice to see someone like that doing the talking.

Of course you want it. It’s the Complete Peanuts. Go buy.

• My main computer is back home (yay!), and as I promised with my review of the re-release of Peanuts Philosophers, here’s a comparison of the size in the new edition and the old:

Snoopy's philosophy was more expansive in the old days.

• Now shipping (early): My Life with Charlie Brown, where Charles Schulz’s writings about his own life are compiled.
• This year’s It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown airing will be Wednesday, at 8 PM in most US markets. ABC, of course.
• This year’s A Charlie Brown Christmas showing will be, ummmm, in December. Or maybe late November. Folks, it’s March. I doubt they have it figured out yet, nor are they apt to tell me if they did.

Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Peanuts is a recently-released hardcover gift book. The format is pretty straightforward; on the left hand of most spreads is a topic one might need to learn about, and on the right hand is a Peanuts strip in which a characters demonstrates such knowledge or gains such knowledge for himself. For example, the left side of the page might say “How to offend a serious musician…” and the strip on the right will have Lucy opining to Schroeder that Beethoven “probably thought he was too good to play Jingle Bells.” There are a handful of Sunday strips in here, although the book is a bit small to present them well; most of the strips are dailies, all taken from the last third of Schulz’s run. The dailies are neither in black and white nor in full color, but are in very selective color – in most of the strips, just one object is colored, a single color. That’s actually a good choice, although the quality of the effect varies. It’s a reasonably-well put together attempt at what it was attempting to be, but what it is is a gift item or novelty; there are too few strips presented too small for it to be a serious strip collection (not that it has any pretense in that direction.)

The title and concept are obviously a reference to the hit book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten… which is a sign of how things change. It used to be that gift books were inspired by Peanuts books, rather than the other way around, as anyone who has a copy of Happiness is a Rat Fink or Johnny Carson’s Happiness is a Dry Martini can attest.

The little boxed set Snoopy & Woodstock: Best Friends comes with a little rubbery Snoopy figurine, a littler-but-not-littler-to-scale Woodstock figurine, and a little paperback book, about 3 inches square. The book is a strip reprint… well, kind of. The strips reprinted are abridged editions, each brought down to two select panels printed in black-and-white on facing pages.

All in all, this thing feels overpriced at $8.95… would probably feel overpriced at half that. The figures are generic, unposable, and unimpressive. I cannot recommend this one.