Some friends recently asked me to name 15 artists who have influenced me and who will always remain important in my life. Honestly, I haven’t been able to answer the request, because I haven’t identified 15 who have been so monumentally influential that they will always and forever be in my pantheon of artistic awesomeness.
What? Doesn’t everyone have such a pantheon?
However, when I tried to reach the full 15, Charles M. Schulz was most definitely there. The “Childhood” chapter of my life story would be notably incomplete without Schulz and his “curiously independent” cast of un-childlike children. I grew up in what has been called the waning years of Peanuts glory, a time in which many considered the strip past its prime and much softer and far less esoteric than it once was. I didn’t know any of this at the time; all I knew was that I enjoyed reading the comics and I loved all my Snoopy stuffed animals and other paraphernalia.
It wasn’t until my teen years that I became more curious about this comic’s evolution through its impressively long existence, and I started seeking out the early Peanuts comics. And my love for Peanuts grew even greater. It was almost as if I were discovering this comic and its characters for the first time. Indeed, those later strips with which I was so familiar seemed subdued and rather banal in comparison with Schulz’s early dark, philosophical, somewhat nihilistic strips. His work in the 80s hooked me as a child. His work through the 50s-70s is what made me a lifelong fan.
When I heard that David Michaelis had written Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, I remembered being incredibly excited. However, early reviews made me wary enough that I didn’t bother picking up a copy until I found the book in a beachtown bargain bin in 2009. I bought it…and promptly abandoned it to a shelf when I got home.
True to my promise this year, I’m trying to make my way through some of the backlogged biographies/autobiographies/memoirs I have. And how could I resist this book’s smexy Charlie Brown-inspired cover?
[Apparently, quite easily, since it’s been almost four years since I bought this book…but I digress.]
For a 600+-plus-page biography, I kind of expected to walk away with more insight on Schulz beyond the fact that he was shy, self-effacing in that intrinsically Midwest way, somewhat pedantic, thoughtful, introspective…but also a bit emotionally incompetent (as detrimentally introverted people can be), especially when it came to the relationships he tried to form throughout his life. Honestly, I had long suspected this last part, and I think it was one of the reasons that I didn’t want to read this biography. Sometimes, we simply want to believe that our heroes are just that
