I had a review in that issue of TCJ. There is a lot of good in Michaelis but he misses a lot too -- Schulz's wide reading (which informed Peanuts) and aesthetic sensibility get short shrift.
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Replying to @HeerJeet @ben_towle
One of the great "oh no" moments of my life was spending an hour talking to Monte Schulz about that book and then realizing after hanging up that my tape recorder was broken.
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Oh, maaaaannnnn. Did he have stuff to say that was beyond the stuff from that giant TCJ "rebuttal"?
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Replying to @ben_towle @cmautner
Monte had a lot more to say about the book than even in TCJ. He and I exchanged emails & phone calls about it. The family was very upset.
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Replying to @HeerJeet @ben_towle
I interviewed Michaelis initially (it was why Monte Schulz reaches out to me) and it didn’t make it into my article but he conceded he might have focused too much on the dark stuff.
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Replying to @cmautner @ben_towle
It's really hard to write a cartoonist's biography unless there are intrinsic things in their lives that are interesting (as with, say, Herriman). Schulz was a genius but he mostly sat at his table and drew. Michaelis overemphasized the dark stuff to create drama.
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Well, they could alternately discuss the... ya know... comics? But I guess most biographers don't want to school themselves in the art form. Same reason, I guess, you get all that dopey Flash animations of comics in documentaries about cartoonists.
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Replying to @ben_towle @HeerJeet
I think there is stuff that Michaelis found that is fascinating, like that Lucy was based on his first wife. But certain aspects of his life definitely get short shrift
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Replying to @cmautner @ben_towle
You have to balance the life with the art -- the tragedy is that Michaelis is a good enough writer that he could have done justice to the art. He decided not to.
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I think he was overly-fixated on making real life-to-strip connections. Part of the problem w that is that there may or may not be an actual causal connection there, More to the point: the strips are worth thinking critically about regardless.
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Yeah, Schulz obviously took a lot from his life but he reshaped it in his art, which has intrinsic qualities apart from the life. So you have to use biographical facts sensitively, noting connections but also how art works on its own.
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