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Schulz And Peanuts: A Biography
 
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Schulz And Peanuts: A Biography (Hardcover)

by David Michaelis (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
List Price: CDN$ 44.99
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Schulz And Peanuts: A Biography + The Complete Peanuts 1959-1962 Box Set + The Complete Peanuts 1955-1958 Box Set
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From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. For all the joy Charlie Brown and the gang gave readers over half a century, their creator, Charles Schulz, was a profoundly unhappy man. It's widely known that he hated the name Peanuts, which was foisted on the strip by his syndicate. But Michaelis (N.C. Wyeth: A Biography), given access to family, friends and personal papers, reveals the full extent of Schulz's depression, tracing its origins in his Minnesota childhood, with parents reluctant to encourage his artistic dreams and yearbook editors who scrapped his illustrations without explanation. Nearly 250 Peanuts strips are woven into the biography, demonstrating just how much of his life story Schulz poured into the cartoon. In one sequence, Snoopy's crush on a girl dog is revealed as a barely disguised retelling of the artist's extramarital affair. Michaelis is especially strong in recounting Schulz's artistic development, teasing out the influences on his unique characterization of children. And Michaelis makes plain the full impact of Peanuts' first decades and how much it puzzled and unnerved other cartoonists. This is a fascinating account of an artist who devoted his life to his work in the painful belief that it was all he had. 16 pages of b&w photos; 240 b&w comic strips throughout. (Oct. 16)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

No other cartoonist tapped the nation's psyche, or touched its heart, like Charles Schulz, who wrote and drew Peanuts for 50 years. While Schulz's gentle humor and endearing characters are what made Peanuts arguably the most beloved comic of all time, it's the strip's psychological insights and underlying melancholy that turned it into enduring art. As Michaelis reveals in this exhaustively researched biography, Schulz's shy, self-effacing exterior hid a complicated, troubled figure who was dogged by overwhelming feelings of inadequacy even as his work appeared in thousands of newspapers worldwide, spawned television and Broadway spin-offs, and generated over $1 billion annually. It's customary for creators to form art from adversity, but Michaelis shows how unhappy incidents from Schulz's childhood would resurface in his strips with a chilling specificity a half-century later; as he once explained, "You're drawing mainly memories." Belying his modest demeanor, Schulz remained creative and competitive until the very end: the final Peanuts episode appeared the day after his death in 2000 at age 77. Thanks to reprints in newspapers and reruns on TV, Peanuts remains as popular as ever; its many fans will be enthralled by the unexpected insight Michaelis provides into Schulz's singular accomplishment. Flagg, Gordon

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Schulz And Peanuts: A Biography
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Schulz And Peanuts: A Biography 4.0 out of 5 stars (1)
CDN$ 28.21
The Complete Peanuts 1959-1962 Box Set
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The Complete Peanuts 1959-1962 Box Set
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The Complete Peanuts 1955-1958 Box Set
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The Complete Peanuts 1955-1958 Box Set
CDN$ 32.92
The Complete Peanuts Box Set Volumes 9 & 10: 1967-1970
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The Complete Peanuts Box Set Volumes 9 & 10: 1967-1970 5.0 out of 5 stars (2)
CDN$ 32.48

 

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Reflections of Charles M. (Sparky) Schulz Based on Peanuts Panels, Nov 19 2007
Did you ever sit in one of those old-time barber shops (like the one Mr. Schulz's dad ran)? To make it easier for you to see how the hair cut was going, there were mirrors everywhere. If you looked to the left and the right, the mirrors would multiply the images so you would see hundreds of yourself.

I was reminded of that optical illusion while reading Schulz and Peanuts. When a person pens as many comic strips as Sparky Schulz did, it's inevitable that much of is in the strips will come from his life . . . and enter into his life. Author David Michaelis clearly reflected on that point and did his best to tie his book's reporting of the Schulz life to the Schulz strips. As a result, the book is literally brimming with strips and the text connects the strips back to the Schulz life or family. Seeing those strips and getting more insight into how the strips connected to the man and his family was certainly interesting. That's the strength of the book.

The weakness of the book is that this focus puts a great deal else about Mr. Schulz's life into a dark background from which little emerges. As a result, this is as flawed and incomplete a biography as you could have while having vast access to so many people and so much material.

I found the first half of the book to be much more interesting than the second half. In the book's beginning, you learn about how Mr. Schulz became a cartoonist, established Peanuts, and the inspiration behind many of the characters and situations. You also find a good description of Mr. Schulz's Christian faith. From there, the story bogs down into too much speculating about Mr. Schulz's psychology and his relationship with his first wife, Joyce. You'll also learn vastly more than you ever wanted to know about the commercial success of the Peanuts empire (after all, you probably lived through it) and various building projects by Mrs. Schulz.

Having seen this book, I think a better concept for Mr. Michaelis would have been to have written a history of the Peanuts strip and how Mr. Schulz developed the strip. The author's writing and analytical abilities didn't seem to be up to much more than that . . . while missing elements that would have been included if the scope had been narrower (such as a discussion of more of the characters and their origins).

If you don't want to get bogged down, feel free to stop reading at page 286. You'll probably like the book better if you do.
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