Happiness Isn’t…

The word “depressed” is in three out of four panels in today’s Peanuts strip reprint. That’s it! Schulz was happy one quarter of the time.

Here is a clip from the upcoming American Masters program about Charles Schulz. As hoped, Schulz’s great lost love, Donna Wold, makes an appearance.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/OCT07/SchulzPBS.flv 400 300]
My best buddy, and fellow Schulz fan, D.F. Rogers has these interesting comments to make on the subject of Schulz the man…

That lovable cartoonist, Good Ol’ “Sparky” Schulz…warm and witty. Let’s see what he has to say to Mike Barrier. [Link to interview] The portrait of the man as a REAL person, prickly with strong opinions, but stated in a very normal speaking tone with that distinctive Minnesota accent. I was so fascinated by the prickly things he said, that I just had to cut them out to highlight them, OUT OF CONTEXT. It’s like taking all of the scenes of the mad, drunk, crazy George Bailey [in It’s A Wonderful Life] and putting them together. These are things that he really said, so I wonder what the new Bio says that can be anymore prickly than this — other than sensational things?

No; it’s not the time, it’s the anxiety and the guilt feelings that they give to you. Time is no problem with me. I actually don’t even work very long hours. I start here at 9, and usually I go home at 4 o’clock. That’s not bad. Five days a week; I don’t work at night, or on the weekends. So it’s not a matter of time, it’s just a matter of the energy, I guess, plus the fact that it’s not a job which depends strictly on the amount of hours you put in. It depends on what you can think of. The never-ending burden of having to do something day after day after day, and it never lets up.

No, I’m never swamped by that kind of distraction. The only kind of distractions that bother me are the continual requests for special drawings for my grandfather who’s retiring, or the priest in our church who is retiring and who uses your cartoon, or so-and-so’s birthday’s coming up, or so-and-so is sick in hospital, and auctions—we get auction requests every day. Some are fine, and some are not; if they write “Dear Celebrity,” and it’s a form letter, we throw it away. I cannot understand anybody wanting a favor from somebody and not only not even—most of the time not spelling your name right, but not even using your name at all. But we try to do the best we can with all of these things. Those are the things that bother me the most.

But I never paid any attention to those things, and I remember telling Larry at the time about Franklin—he wanted me to change it, and we talked about it for a long while on the phone, and I finally sighed and said, “Well, Larry, let’s put it this way: Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How’s that?” So that’s the way that ended.

It’s a little bit sad when I see some of the others that are imitating, or at least think they’re imitating, what I am doing, by having little sly, philosophical remarks in the last panel which are neither sly nor philosophical, but are just plain dumb. They don’t have the touch to know how to do that. And I think if you don’t have the touch, you shouldn’t do it. I see this so often.

Oddly enough, I have fought against children’s products all these years, because I do not consider it a children’s strip. I have always said, “If you have to do something for children, that’s fine, but let’s not forget that our main reading audience is out there among the college kids, and in the fathers and mothers and grandmothers. Let’s not forget all of those products; I just don’t want a bunch of children’s things out there. But they keep coming out anyway. I have not been able to close the floodgates. The children’s products just keep coming. And I guess it’s all right; it doesn’t hurt anything. But that always has been a personal problem with me.

As I said back at the beginning, this is not a pure art form by any means, it’s a commercial product, and I’ve always said, “How can a commercial product be accused of turning commercial?” It doesn’t make sense.

Being forced to do a show because our producer, Lee null, has committed himself to the networks for a show, I have not always turned out our best work. We have done a show for virtually every holiday that is, and I think in some cases they have not been as good as they should have been, simply because we were forced to grind out a show on a subject which I was not ready to write about.

And I hate autographing. I just despise autographing. I get so annoyed. Every time you pick up the paper, it shows some athlete signing something; it’s always a picture of so-and-so autographing something. What’s so great about autographing? I declined yesterday at the county fair. We had some visitors from England, and null and I walked in the gate and walked down in the midway and were looking around, and some couple stopped me and said, “Aren’t you Charles null?” I said, “Yeah.” “Can we have your autograph?” I said, “No. Can’t I just be left alone to enjoy the fair?”

People say, “Don’t you ever deal in social issues?” “Well, don’t you read the strip?” If you read the strip every day, you’ll see that I deal with more social issues in one month than some of these deal [with] in a whole year.

It hasn’t come out yet, but several months ago, there were two shows, there was a “Garfield” show—I think he went to Hawaii, or something like that—and a Snoopy show. They ran the “Garfield” at 8 and they ran ours at 8:30. I thought the “Garfield” show was so terrible that I said, “I don’t want any more being paired with ‘Garfield. ‘” Maybe we lose viewers, maybe we don’t, I don’t know—8:30 is supposed to be a better time slot. But I said, “That show was so bad—never again. Don’t put me with ‘Garfield. ‘” That’s the only conflict that has ever arisen. I like Jim Davis; I don’t know him real well, but I think he’s a nice fellow. But there comes a time when you do compete.

I remember one day I came back, and I was so weak from the knee surgery I finally had to quit; I just couldn’t hold that pen still. It’s annoying, but I can live with that. I just don’t know is it worth it. Am I supposed to sit here the rest of my life drawing these things while all my friends are retiring and everybody’s doing different things?

We had the radio on to a kind of a quiet-music station all day long, but I don’t do that any more. After my divorce, and the sadness of being separated from the kids temporarily and all of that—although they eventually all came back. But I used to get so depressed listening to songs and music that I stopped. Now it’s just too much of an interruption. Most of my time is just sitting here trying to think of something. Then the phone rings, and the stereo’s on too loud. I never listen to it.

I don’t like the ones in grade-school classes where they broadcast your voice in the classroom and they have the kids ask the questions, because the questions are so obvious: Where did you get the idea for Snoopy? But I still do them. I also don’t like all the commitments ahead of time; like my summer now has been committed. Here it is August 1, and my summer is virtually gone. I’ve gotten to do almost nothing that I wanted to do, because I’m committed to so many different things.