And having spent time with the Schulzes in the ’90s at their home in Santa Rosa, Calif., I know enough about Sparky to know it feels accurate. It’s unclear how much of the book can be directly attributed to Schulz, but the references listed in the bibliography are impressive. In the fourth panel, lying in his hospital bed, he thinks, “Good luck finding a punchline in there.” A perfect example: Toward the end of the book, in the first three panels of a daily comic, Schulz learns he has terminal cancer and two years to live. They do it with a careful balancing of biographical information and sly winks to the reader from a retired Sparky, who tells his own story. They bring Sparky and the strip together as one. Debus maintains his own drawing style, and he and Matteuzzi depict the highs and lows, the frustrations and triumphs of their hero with a familiar cadence. They don’t ape Schulz, they present Schulz. It was out of these efforts that Bone was born.įortunately (and this becomes clear in “Funny Things” almost immediately), “Peanuts” was all that to Debus and Matteuzzi, too. Schulz, and sometime around the age of 5 or 6 I began trying to create a character of my own. I knew Snoopy was drawn by someone named Charles M. The interiority of these little drawings was magnetic. Embarrassment, humiliation, pressure and anxiety. On TV we had “Gilligan’s Island,” “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Mister Ed.” The comics, which I loved, were mostly high jinks (Blondie’s husband, Dagwood, making a big sandwich and colliding with the mailman). Even as a kid, I knew most of pop culture was silly entertainment. It is difficult to overstate the impact “Peanuts” had during its mid-60s bloom. I taught myself to read with a “Peanuts” collection. “Peanuts” is more important to me than anything I learned in school, more meaningful than any book I ever read (and I am a well-known “Moby-Dick” fan). That may be my own hangup, as a cartoonist and one of those people for whom Sparky was Michelangelo. For most readers, this artistic choice will seem merely novel for me it comes close to treading on sacred ground. Still, it took a moment to get over the audacity of telling Schulz’s life story in the format of “Peanuts”-style strips (104 sequences consisting of a full-color Sunday comic followed by six black-and-white daily strips). “Funny Things,” the new hand-drawn biography of Schulz by Luca Debus and Francesco Matteuzzi, doesn’t shy away from these other traits. He was famously shy and humble, just like his beloved creation Charlie Brown, but he could also be impatient and demanding, like the football-snatching Lucy Van Pelt. Schulz, written by Luca Debus and Francesco Matteuzzi. FUNNY THINGS: A Comic Strip Biography of Charles M.
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