Category: Cartooning

Charles M. Schulz died eight years ago today. Seems a lot longer, doesn’t it?

As Monte Schulz revealed here and at Cartoon Brew, he has written a lengthy essay about Schulz and Peanuts for The Comics Journal, that he is calling his final word on the subject of how his father’s biography is different from what he was led to believe it would be.

Fantagraphics has announced that Monte’s essay will be in issue #290 of TCJ, which should go on sale in May. My quick-acting buddy D.F. Rogers has already pre-ordered copies for us. Here’s a blurb about the issue:

Hard truth, subjective take, or slanted hatchet job? Monte Schulz and a roundtable of Peanuts experts and critics probe and debate David Michaelis’ controversial biography of one of the most influential and beloved cartoonists of all time: Charles M. Schulz.

Over at this link on Cartoon Brew, Monte Schulz says…

It seems as if my essay and the others will appear in the April issue of The Comics Journal. I hope you will all find my 36,000 words to be both informative and entertaining! And I hope to never have to write about the biography again! I think it’s a decent essay. It offers a lot of information, and it is not a re-hashing of what I’ve written on here. It’s all new.

So the issue of TCJ coming out in April is the one to get. We’ll be on the lookout, for sure. And just a little while ago, Monte added this comment…

Actually, Bill Melendez adored my father and could not have cared less whether Dad drank or not. That’s just another example of something David wrote that was either false or misleading. Bill and my dad were truly great friends and Bill is distressed over some of things David quotes him as saying in that book. In any case, had you ever seen my dad and Bill Melendez, you’d have known how fond they were of each other, and of Lee Mendelson, too. They made a great team back then.

If you haven’t read the David Michaelis biography Schulz and Peanuts, and you’d like to flip through the book at a store just to get a sense of what Monte is talking about, give page 384 a try. Read to the end of the last complete paragraph on page 385. Posthumous psychoanalysis.

According to Editor & Publisher, the original art for the Peanuts comic strip for December 22, 1952 was auctioned recently for almost $32,000. Note the use of “Tschaikowski,” which is how “Tchaikovsky” is spelled in Germany.

New England is close to losing the Super Bowl, and I only have time to post a couple of frames from the Coke commercial with Charlie Brown beating out Underdog and the other cartoon character whose name I can’t recall because I don’t watch the show.

P.S. Well, that’s it. With 35 seconds left, New England has lost. Grrr…

This is Peanuts from the day Monte Schulz was born…

… and this is Peanuts from exactly nine months before. POW indeed!

Click to see complete comic strip

“It all started when my oldest son, Monte, was in high school and was involved with an art class where the project was a coat-hanger sculpture. He was telling me about it one day while we were riding home in the car from school, and he said that he was going to transform a coat hanger into the figure of a baseball pitcher. It sounded like a good idea to me, and I was anxious to hear about the final results.

“Several weeks went by before he mentioned it again, and this time he told me that the teacher had handed back the projects and he had received a C on his coat-hanger sculpture. I remember being quite disturbed by this, because I could not understand how a teacher was able to grade this kind of project. I thought about it as the months went by, and finally translated it into the Sunday page where Sally expresses her indignation over receiving the same grade for her piece of coat-hanger sculpture.”

– Charles M. Schulz