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krpalmerHappening to see notices a “manga biography” of Charles M. Schulz would be translated into English (and my impression is that I keep up with “Peanuts news” enough I saw it there rather than as “anime and manga news”) did get my attention. Knowing about the popularity of Peanuts in Japan kept the juxtaposition from feeling altogether odd to me, but a certain sense of two personal interests bumping together in an unexpected way still could have managed in the end to make me get a copy of the translated manga.
Reading the manga I was conscious of being pretty much aware already of all of the life incidents presented in it, and I still haven’t read the “big” biography of Schulz by David Michaelis after becoming aware of one of Schulz’s children disagreeing with that book’s apparent insistence on “a suffering artist.” (I “made do” with a previous biography written while Schulz was still alive, Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz, even if my feeling of good fortune on happening on a copy in a used book store wound up balanced against discovering a comment Michaelis had been asked to not dwell on “depression” the way Johnson seemed to have...) The draw of the manga would therefore seem to be its art, which is charming even if I was conscious the real-life Schulz didn’t wear glasses all his life and also varied his haircuts more than the manga version did. As it turned out, the manga had some photographs included at the back that showed just that. (The “character design” at least gets modified for the sake of showing age.)
Some early unfortunate moments in Schulz’s life are presented without throwing in the Peanuts strips springing from them. (There are other panels and strips included, without “redrawing,” for the sake of illustration, and also some drawings he did on a wall during rehabilitation therapy after surgery that I’d known about but not seen before.) I did get a sense of the manga working at presenting him as a devoted father and not depressed all the time; it didn’t make a big deal of the “heavier” interpretations and appreciations of the strip. That could have wound up leaving a peculiar impression of the manga as meant most of all for young people whose lives haven’t overlapped with Schulz’s to any extent, but that in turn might have done a little to give a sense of the way Peanuts has managed to keep connecting with people.
Reading the manga I was conscious of being pretty much aware already of all of the life incidents presented in it, and I still haven’t read the “big” biography of Schulz by David Michaelis after becoming aware of one of Schulz’s children disagreeing with that book’s apparent insistence on “a suffering artist.” (I “made do” with a previous biography written while Schulz was still alive, Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz, even if my feeling of good fortune on happening on a copy in a used book store wound up balanced against discovering a comment Michaelis had been asked to not dwell on “depression” the way Johnson seemed to have...) The draw of the manga would therefore seem to be its art, which is charming even if I was conscious the real-life Schulz didn’t wear glasses all his life and also varied his haircuts more than the manga version did. As it turned out, the manga had some photographs included at the back that showed just that. (The “character design” at least gets modified for the sake of showing age.)
Some early unfortunate moments in Schulz’s life are presented without throwing in the Peanuts strips springing from them. (There are other panels and strips included, without “redrawing,” for the sake of illustration, and also some drawings he did on a wall during rehabilitation therapy after surgery that I’d known about but not seen before.) I did get a sense of the manga working at presenting him as a devoted father and not depressed all the time; it didn’t make a big deal of the “heavier” interpretations and appreciations of the strip. That could have wound up leaving a peculiar impression of the manga as meant most of all for young people whose lives haven’t overlapped with Schulz’s to any extent, but that in turn might have done a little to give a sense of the way Peanuts has managed to keep connecting with people.