On the day before Thanksgiving I once again headed to New York City’s American Museum of Natural History, in large part to see the gigantic balloons for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which are inflated on the side streets alongside the museum and lie there all night, awaiting the start of the festivities. I regard the Macy’s parade as, in part, a celebration of cartoon art, since many of the balloons represent iconic figures from comics and animation. In past years for example, there have been balloons of Spider-Man and SpongeBob SquarePants.

The first time I went to see the balloons being inflated, several years ago, was pleasantly enjoyable, perhaps because I did it during the late afternoon. But this year I stayed on the museum, looking at new exhibits, until closing time, when the balloons were fully inflated, night had fallen, and people had gotten home from work following the usual early holiday closing. The sidewalks surrounding the museum were flooded with a sea of people. moving slowly but inexorably along. In other words, it was not unlike trying to move through the main aisles at the San Diego Comic Con. This year there were even crowds on the sidewalks across from the museum! Don’t believe anyone who tells you that all New Yorkers leave the city for Thanksgiving. Afterwards, I marveled at how many people were out on Broadway, several blocks away from the museum.

For much of my time looking at the balloons, I was behind parents who were pushing a baby carriage containing a infant who was obviously too young to appreciate the balloons and was wailing loudly–perhaps frightened by being hemmed in by these strange adults towering over him?

Along 81st Street, near the intersection with Central Park West, lay the new balloon of Shrek, the movie version, of course, who was smiling benevolently at the passersby. I reflected that the misanthropic Shrek of William Steig’s original book would be horrified at being surrounded by so many children (see “Comics in Context” #186: “Le Petit Chef”).

Behind him was great Cthulhu–I mean, Pikachu of Pokemon, at a greater size even than his manifestations at the New York and San Diego Comic Cons, where I suspect he feasts upon the brains of attendees. Luckily for us, this Pikachu/Cthulhu looked sound asleep as he lay on the street, as if Manhattan reminded him of his home town of R’leyh.

Then there was a silvery balloon in the somewhat abstracted form of a rabbit which may have puzzled onlookers that evening, but turned out to have been designed by contemporary artist Jeff Koons, whose work I’ve seen at the Museum of Modern Art. Koons’ “Rabbit” provides another example of the blurring of the boundaries between high and low at: here is a significant artist in the fine art world working in a supposed children’s medium, that of the giant Macy’s balloon. It’s not unlike what’s been happening in comics and animation.

On the opposite side of the museum, along 77th Street, was another rabbit, the familiar Energizer Bunny, who, unlike his fellow balloon creatures, stood upright. It was an enjoyably amusing sight, despite my qualms that the Energizer Bunny, who appears only in commercials, was too much of a corporate icon to be in the parade.

Heading down 77th Street back towards Central Park West, I passed a brobdingnagian Scooby Doo, whose colossal facial features projected a goofy joyousness rather than his more celebrated look of sheer terror. Beyond him was another dog, whose big smile was quieter, even beatific: Snoopy, wearing his Flying Ace helmet and holding binoculars, as if he would be gazing at the paradegoers even as they looked upward at him.

Snoopy’s presence in the parade testifies to the continued hold that the comic strip Peanuts exerts on the American imagination, seven years after the death of its creator Charles M. Schulz, after which no more new Peanuts strips appeared.

Further evidence is provided by David Michaelis’s new biography, Schulz and Peanuts, and the considerable attention that it has received in the news media. Based upon years of research and over two hundred interviews (listed in the back of the book), Michaelis demonstrates how elements of Schulz’s life–his emotionally reserved father, the early, painful death of his mother from cancer, romantic rejection, lack of appreciation for his artistic talents, his dysfunctional first marriage–are reflected in his work on Peanuts.

I had forgotten that I first wrote about Michaelis three years ago in the course of reviewing the first of Fantagraphics’ series of Peanuts reprint collections, for which Michaelis supplied an introductory essay (see “Comics in Context” #66: “A Christmas Potpourri”). Back then I wrote that “Michaelis contends that the darkness within Peanuts was a projection of ‘the private, quiet, depressed Scandinavian part of Schulz’s character. . . .’ Michaelis asserts that ‘Schulz dared to use his own quirks–a lifelong sense of alienation, insecurity and inferiority–to draw the real feelings of his life and time.’” According to Michaelis’s book, Schulz remained emotionally distant in various respects even from friends and family throughout his life. Michaelis quotes Schulz as saying that “depression” was “the wrong term” for his condition and that “I would say ‘melancholy’ would be a better term for myself. Perhaps ‘fearful.’ Perhaps ‘anxious.’ Although this may make life itself rather uncomfortable, it is certainly a good and maybe even necessary trait for a cartoonist to have” (Michaelis p. 435).

Months ago I interviewed Michaelis for Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week. When I asked him about the Schulz family’s reaction to his portrait of the cartoonist, Michaelis spoke about their generous cooperation with him. When I spoke with him in early September, members of the Schulz family had not yet gone public with their disagreements with the book (as they did in The New York Times, October 8, 2007. Michaelis must have known about their disapproval, but arguably it was justifiable for him not to tell me about it if I didn’t already know. Then again, when I interviewed Mark Evanier about his forthcoming book Kirby: King of Comics, Mark told me about “stormy” periods in his relationship with Kirby without my even asking.

Several of Schulz’s children have explained why they disagree with the book on the animation blog “Cartoon Brew.” Schulz’s son Monte sums it up at one point: “I can tell you absolutely that he was not a depressed, melancholy person, nor was he unaffectionate and absent as a parent”.

Various people have written into Cartoon Brew expressing outrage that Michaelis would have a different perspective on Schulz than his children, as if Michaelis were some sort of monster, willfully distorting the truth. In the October 14, 2007 New York Times, Randy Kennedy observed, perhaps wearily, that “Such arguments are nothing particularly new in the world of biography. Writers and loved ones often end up staring each other down across a big chasm separating substantially different versions of a subject both claim to know intimately.”

Who is more correct–Michaelis or the Schulz children? I never met Schulz, so I can’t testify from personal experience. Some of Michaelis’s critics even claim that they met Schulz once and he was pleasant and witty, so how could he possibly be distant and melancholic? But of course any individual has multiple facets to his personality, and a person’s public persona does not necessarily reflect his private emotions.

Nevertheless, I recommend that readers listen to a podcast interview with Michaelis that was conducted in connection with BookExpo America 2007. Michaelis comes across here as he did in my interview with him: his respect for Schulz and his work, and his earnestness in seeking to understand both, are evident.

I wasn’t shocked by reading Schulz and Peanuts because I had already gone through the disillusionment of discovering that Charles Schulz was different from his public image when I reviewed the aforementioned first volume of Fantagraphics’ Peanuts reprints. As I wrote at the time, “Indeed, Schulz as he himself appears in this book provides evidence for Michaelis’s thesis. Michaelis quotes Schulz as saying, ‘I think life is full of anxieties and fears and tears. It has a lot of grief in it, and it can be very grim.’ The book includes an interview that comics historian Rick Marschall and Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth conducted with Schulz in 1987, in which Schulz comes off as both artistically ambitious and curmudgeonly. Schulz had a reputation for being staunchly religious: in last year’s Christmas column, I marveled at how explicitly Christian the ending of A Charlie Brown Christmas, in contrast to so many other Christmas TV specials that deal only with the secular side of the holiday (see “Comics in Context” #24). So it’s a surprise that in the interview Schulz admits, ‘I have no idea why we’re here and I have no idea what happens after you die.’” (See “Comics in Context” #66: “A Christmas Potpourri.”) Moreover, though Schulz is said to have been generous towards various younger cartoonists, and befriended some of them, in the Groth-Marschall interview he comes off as downright mean-spirited towards the younger generation of comic strip artists. In the interview Schulz contends that he likes none of the newer comic strips (circa 1987), although when asked specifically about Gary Larson’s The Far Side, he concedes that he likes that one.

Heidi MacDonald, the ubiquitous Beat, has famously met seemingly everyone in comics, including, once, Charles M. Schulz. But her shock of disillusionment seems to have been greater than my own. “I can’t pretend that I knew Charles Schulz at all, but I did interview him once over a decade ago, and the impression I got from a half hour conversation was that the guy never ever let go of anything sad that had happened to him. (The sadness in his voice when he talked about the death of his dog 50 years previously was heartbreaking.) If that was the takeaway from a short talk with a complete stranger, I would suspect that this profound melancholy was a regular part of his character, and it certainly was reflected in his work. I’m sure there were other aspects of his character (his kindness was also well known) but the melancholy was so pronounced that once I got over the shock of actually talking to Charles Schulz, I never forgot it. ” She correctly points out that “This view is not incompatible with the kind, caring father remembered by his kids…great artists are complex, and Schulz was both.”

Some people posting on the Net furiously condemn Michaelis and his book without having read it. Before writing this week’s column, I reread much of Schulz and Peanuts and was impressed with how thoroughly Michaelis backs up his depiction of Schulz with footnoted quotations from his numerous sources, including members of the Schulz family. Although Michaelis has been accused of getting various facts wrong, which are of relatively minor importance, no one to my knowledge has accused him of misquoting his interviewees. The glowing reviews that the book has received from the likes of novelist John Updike in The New Yorker, The New York Times’ lead book critic Michiko Kakutani, and even Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson in The Wall Street Journal testify to how strongly Michaelis makes his case: all of them find his portrait of the man behind Peanuts wholly persuasive.

Moreover, Michaelis does provide occasional glimpses of the side of Schulz that several Schulz children claim that he overlooked. For example, Michaelis reports that Schulz and his first wife Joyce “could still let go and have fun. One never-to-be-forgotten time became known in the family as the Huge Water Fight. It started when [daughter] Meredith, doing the dishes, sprayed her father, and he wrestled the sprayer away and doused Joyce. [Sons] Monte and Craig entered the fray with squirt guns. . .and soon everyone was spraying everybody else, using any receptacle they could find” (Michaelis p. 333).

Later Michaelis states that Schulz “took deep pleasure in his role as family chauffeur,” and that the family station wagon “was the place he felt most intimate with his children. ‘That was the joy of my life,’ he later mused. ‘I discovered that my place was to be with the kids” (Michaelis pgs. 364-365). Soon afterwards Michaelis declares that Schulz was “devoted to the children” (Michaelis p. 366).

Later, Michaelis writes about Schulz, “With his children he had been fun and silly. . .correct and courteous, considerate and kind, amusing and witty. ‘Each one of us will tell you that our dad was wonderful company at every stage of our lives,’ said Monte. ‘He was such a fun dad to have’” (Michaelis, p. 539). Perhaps Michaelis does not devote enough space to Schulz’s love for his children, but he does not utterly ignore it.

People who accuse Michaelis of portraying Schulz as unlikable and unsympathetic are misreading the book. Michaelis makes it plain that Schulz could be quite charming, and that, indeed, when he reached seventy, “Women adored him, found him attractive, loved being with him” (Michaelis p. 536), leading to his various platonic relationships with younger female friends. By illuminating the causes of Schulz’s insecurities and doubts and melancholy in his youth, Michaelis won my sympathy for Schulz. In fact, for me the controversial section about Schulz’s one extramarital affair with a young woman named Tracey, during his dysfunctional marriage with Joyce, to be the highlight of the book. Through Michaelis’s skillful account, the reader can see why Tracey would find Schulz charming and even lovable. After all of his past miseries, I thought that Schulz deserved to find happiness with Tracey, and I found myself rooting for Schulz to stay with her, although that was not to be.

As regular readers know, I’ve been writing about Danny Fingeroth’s book Disguised as Clark Kent this month, and in the course of discussing the secret identity motif, he refers to the autobiography of movie director Samuel Fuller, A Third Face. As Fingeroth states, Fuller “explains the book’s title as referring to the three ‘faces’–identities–an individual exhibits: the one he shows the world, the one he shows his family and friends, and the ‘third face,’ the one that only he himself sees” (Fingeroth, Dressed as Clark Kent, p. 101).

That makes sense, and it’s applicable to Schulz’s case. Isn’t it possible that Schulz generally showed a cheerful, charming “face” to the world but suffered from doubts and inner turmoil that he usually kept hidden? This doesn’t mean that his public persona was a hollow facade; it probably represented a genuine side of his personality, but not the only side.

Further, upon consideration, it does not surprise me that some of his children saw a different side of Schulz than the side upon which Michaelis focuses. I cam see parallels in my own life. My father was in combat during World War II, but apart from acknowledging that fact, he never speaks about it. In the war he obviously underwent emotions and experiences that he does not wish his children to know about. Instead, we know him as a cheerful, caring parent.

Good parents tend to want their children to have better lives than they did. So it’s surely possible that Schulz could have been a caring father in various ways, in reaction against the unhappiness in his own childhood.

I also recall talking with a relative about our relationships with a third member of our family, and discovering that she had a completely different impression of his behavior than I did. Was he showing her a different side of his personality than he showed me? Or do she and I interpret his behavior differently?

That leads to another question: how would any of us and our families look from an outsider’s perspective? Have you ever been in a situation in which you are talking to someone who badmouths a friend of yours? I have, and in some cases I can understand why my friend is being criticized, but in others I am surprised and bewildered: how could this person so dislike a person I care about? Family members or close friends may well tend to excuse or overlook each other’s faults. At his October 18, 2007 appearance at the Barnes & Noble in Manhattan’s Lincoln Square, Michaelis told the audience that on many occasions when he was interviewing someone who knew Schulz, the interviewee would mention some incident in which Schulz behaved unpleasantly, but would then immediately add that that wasn’t the way Schulz ordinarily behaved. Michaelis’s point was that those examples of bad behavior did happen from time to time and did reveal an aspect of Schulz’s character.

As a creative artist, Schulz revealed his “third face” in his work. What I find most fascinating about Schulz and Peanuts is that Michaelis finds and reprints specific examples of Peanuts strips that reflect people, events, and emotions in the course of Schulz’s life. One of the governing principles of Michaelis’s book is that Schulz’s Peanuts is to a large degree an autobiographical work. Sometimes Schulz may have been consciously aware of the autobiographical implications of one of his strips; other times he may not have been, but the subtexts were present nonetheless.

There seemed to be a new critical reevaluation of Schulz’s work soon after his death, when he was no longer around to disagree with it. The emphasis was on the angst in Peanuts, especially in its early years, and especially as personified by Charlie Brown. And it’s true, the melancholy and sense of alienation are there in the strips.

But I suspect that underlying this reevaluation may be a critical bias that comics, or perhaps work in any medium, has to be dark in mood in order to be taken seriously as art. I keep seeing Schulz depicted as the forebear of Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes. Certainly, their work is influenced by Schulz’s. sometimes even making rather explicit references to Peanuts. But characteristically the misery and alienation in Ware and Clowes’ work outweighs the humor. But aren’t a wide range of genuinely humorous newspaper strips, spanning the period from Johnny Hart’s B. C. to Patrick McDonnell’s Mutts and beyond just as clearly influenced by Peanuts and Schulz’s style of humor?

Michaelis correctly sees and shows how Schulz’s work in Peanuts reveals the cartoonist’s inner demons. Indeed, the strips demonstrate the truth in Michaelis’s portrait of Schulz.

But the strips also show another side of Schulz’s personality that Michaelis does not sufficiently emphasize. In his book Michaelis acknowledges that Charlie Brown and Snoopy are the Peanuts characters who most represent their creator. Describing a strip in which Schulz’s two characters lie with their heads propped against opposite sides of a tree, Michaelis refers to “Charlie Brown and Snoopy, his own two personae, on either side of the tree of life (Michaelis, p. 473).

(Michaelis also insightfully points out that Schroeder, who conjures classical music from a toy piano, represents Schulz, the cartoonist who created great art through the “children’s” medium of the comic strip. Michaelis also persuasively asserts that Schroeder’s ignoring Lucy’s advances to concentrate on his music demonstrates Schulz’s own priorities when it came to his work and to emotional involvement with others.)

Michaelis also maintains that from 1967 onward Snoopy displaced Charlie Brown as the real lead character in the strip. But he does not sufficiently explore the implications of this shift.

Three years ago this month I wrote the following in my review of Fantagraphics’ first Peanuts reprint volume (see “Comics in Context” #66: “A Christmas Potpourri”): “. . .as the strip evolved, it became clear that it had not one star but two: the other was Snoopy, the dog with a human consciousness, who is yin to Charlie Brown’s yang. Charlie Brown can be morose; Snoopy is often jolly, even exuberantly dancing on his hind legs. Charlie Brown frets about his role in life; Snoopy can, too, but the simple pleasures of being fed at suppertime are enough to make him happy, even ecstatic. Charlie Brown is the Everyman as mediocrity, trapped by his own limitations, doomed to failure. Snoopy is a dog who transcends his own canine nature: he thinks like a human being, he walks upright on his hind legs, he writes novels (bad ones, true, but as Dr. Samuel Johnson would say, the miracle is that he writes at all), and he is even the only good player on Charlie Brown’s infamously incompetent baseball team. Charlie Brown’s wishes almost never come true, and his friend Linus awaits the coming of the Great Pumpkin (Schulz’s counterpart to Beckett’s Godot) in vain. But Snoopy easily adopts other personae (ranging from other animals to Charlie Brown’s opposite number, “Joe Cool”) and can even escape into a fantasy world, famously the one in which he is a heroic World War I pilot battling the Red Baron. (Sometimes when Snoopy fantasizes being in a World War I French tavern, for example, Schulz draws the tavern around him, as if Snoopy somehow actually is there.)”

I summed up, “Snoopy is the spirit of optimism that balances Charlie Brown’s pessimism. They represent the two poles of Peanuts’ worldview. If Charles Schulz could feel as depressed as his semi-namesake Charlie Brown, then surely he must have also found an emotional outlet in Snoopy’s joie de vivre.”

If Snoopy took over the star role in Peanuts as the decades passed, does that indicate that the optimistic side of Schulz’s personality was becoming dominant? Michaelis observes that Snoopy’s role as scoutmaster to Woodstock and his fellow birds resembles the role of a parent. Might the strips with Snoopy and the birds reflect the side of Schulz’s personality that some of his children insist that Michaelis ignores? In his review of Schulz and Peanuts in The New Yorker (October 22, 2007), John Updike observes that “With the introduction, in 1970, of Snoopy’s friend the tiny yellow bird Woodstock, Schulz gave himself access to a whole fresh realm of tenderness; a sort of parenthood at last crept into the strip, where human parents are invisible.”

Julie Phillips, in her review of Schulz and Peanuts in the Sunday Nov. 11, 2007 Washington Post, writes, “One thing that might be missing from this otherwise fascinating book–and maybe this is what the [Schulz’s] children feel–is an explanation for the joy and pleasure that shine through his work. Where, in his lonely Minnesota upbringing, did Charles Schulz learn to let Snoopy dance?”

Michaelis writes that “Snoopy’s spontaneous, soul-satisfying dances made him a genuine free spirit whose only commitment was to ecstasy itself.” (Michaelis, p. 395) He adds that “Peanuts in the new age of Snoopy was bolder but still quietly dissident, laying claim to joy, pleasure, naturalness and a self-glorifying spontaneity.” Michaelis declares that “Snoopy’s basic desire” is “to transcend his existence as a dog by altering his state of mind,” which Michaelis correctly links to the spirit of the late Sixties (Michaelis, p. 396).

Might it be that Schulz also “altered” his “state of mind” as time passed? Yes, in Peanuts Schulz expressed his sense of isolation and melancholy and failure, most of all through Charlie Brown. But isn’t the larger point that in Peanuts Schulz usually presents his characters’ angst and alienation from a comedic perspective? Doesn’t this demonstrate that Schulz, at least to degree, could, through his creativity, rise above his inner demons and laugh at them, and laugh sympathetically at the side of himself who, like Charlie Brown, suffered from them? (In sharp contrast, Ware and Clowes often seem mired in depression in their work.)

But still, Michaelis presents evidence that Schulz’s inner demons tormented him to the end of his life. Although he had served in Europe during World War II, Schulz was terrified by the prospect of travel. “His fear, as he explained it to [his second wife] Jeannie in 1973, ‘was that he would panic on the plane–that he would lose control, start screaming’” (Michaelis p. 515). His friend, fellow cartoonist Cathy Guisewite, said that “You never felt like anything you said or did would ever make him feel really loved” (Michaelis p. 532).

Michaelis describes an incident when Schulz was in the hospital during the final months of his life.

“”No one loves me,’ he [Schulz] said to Chuck Bartley.

“ ‘Sparky [Schulz’s nickname], everyone loves you,’ said Chuck.

“‘That’s right,’ said Cousin Patty. ‘And you know why?’ she said to Bartley.

“’Why?”

“‘Because they don’t know him.” At which Sparky let out a big laugh.” (Michaelis, pages 557-557).

And there is further evidence, though Michaelis does not say so, of Schulz’s characteristic ability to laugh at his personal demons and himself.

Shortly after Schulz and Peanuts was published, PBS’s American Masters series presented the new documentary “Good Ol’ Charles Schulz,” for which Michaelis served as a consultant and appeared on camera. (Could this be the first American Masters dedicated to a comics creator?) But Michaelis wasn’t in charge of the film, which, though it portrayed Schulz as a caring father, nonetheless reached conclusions about his melancholic personality that were similar to Michaelis’s book. The documentary likewise showed Peanuts strips that seemed to relate to events in Schulz’s life, often choosing selections that do not appear in the Michaelis book. Members of the Schulz family are reportedly unhappy about this documentary as well, but it may set you wondering whether the documentary confirms Michaelis’s take on their mutual subject.

Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts is surely only the first book to be written about Charles Schulz following the latter’s death. There will be more, and it is likely that some of Schulz’s colleagues in comics and animation will eventually wrote their own memoirs, in which they will give their impressions of Schulz. So in ten or twenty years we should be able to evaluate whether Schulz and Peanuts was on the wrong track or whether it was an important pioneering book in providing a better understanding of Charles Schulz and his body of work. I suspect that Schulz and Peanuts provides an incomplete portrait of its title subjects, but that it will nonetheless prove to be a landmark work in biographical studies of the great figures of the comics medium.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

I recently interviewed Quick Stop contributor Fred Hembeck about his forthcoming massive retrospective collection of his work, The Nearly Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus, for Publishers Weekly’s weekly online newsletter Comics Week. You can find the interview in the November 20 edition here.

A copy of Jess Nevins’ annotations to Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier (including contributions by myself and others) has been posted at the Comic Book Resources website. But there have been several new versions of Nevins’ list since then, as numerous League enthusiasts, including myself, continue to add further annotations. I advise League aficionados that if they’ve already read Nevins’ Black Dossier list, go back to its site and take another look. Each time you go back you’ll find still more (with the more recent annotations in blue type).

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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