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.

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