Good Grief, a Controversial Schulz Biography!

[krpalmer]

Keeping up with a variety of comics weblogs as I do, I had heard about a major new (or "first full-scale") biography of Charles M. Schulz being written by David Michaelis, who had an article summarising Schulz's life and work in the back of the first volume of "The Complete Peanuts." The book rolled around, and all of a sudden I was noticing articles mentioning that Schulz's grown children had ambiguities about the work, that it seemed to be leaving points out as if to help present Schulz as a somewhat dark and distant figure. A quite lengthy discussion thread has attracted a lot of attention for including comments from Schulz's children and Lee Mendelson, who was the executive producer for the animated special.

Not having read the book yet myself, all the comments for and against both the biography and the criticism ("The truth is surprising! They must have a financial interest in Schulz being a nice guy!") leave me with what amounts to ambiguity. It might well be that I would have been more concerned about the book had I heard it picked a "thesis" that amounted to what seems a very frequent "on-line" conclusion about Schulz, that he should have just retired in 1970 or so. I noticed in a review by Bill Watterson, emerging for a moment from the seclusion he retired to, that Michaelis seems to soft-pedal the later years of Peanuts. Then, I started wondering if mellower work would have fit the thesis the book seems to have picked...