Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} It's a New World Charlie Brown! by Charles M. Schulz Who are you, Charlie Brown is going to make me cry, isn't it? I have a feeling that I might tear up once or twice while watching Who Are You, Charlie Brown? This new Peanuts documentary, launching June 25 on Apple TV Plus, will take a look at the enduring legacy of the Peanuts and its creator, Charles Schulz. Announced today (June 4) with a trailer, the documentary is narrated by Lupita Nyong'o and features interviews with Jean Schulz (Charles Schulz' widow), Drew Barrymore, Billie Jean King, Al Roker, Ira Glass, Kevin Smith, Paul Feig, and others. The latest news about Outlander season 6 Is Mare of Easttown season 2 happening? Plus: The Flash director teases Michael Keaton's return as Batman. The roughly 2-minute trailer for Who Are You, Charlie Brown? also contains clips from older interviews with Schulz, who passed away 21 years ago. Based on what's in the trailer, the documentary looks to explore the impact that Peanuts had on society, from having girls playing sports, to addressing racism with the introduction of Franklin, a Black character, in 1968. The larger themes of Peanuts — also part of its legacy — will also be examined, such as Charlie Brown's relentless faith that things will turn his way, no matter how many times Lucy swipes the football away. "Keep on trying, Charlie Brown," says Schulz in the trailer. "And if anyone should give up, he should." I have a real soft spot in my heart for the Peanuts, and couldn't help but get more than a little excited when I heard the familiar strains of Linus & Lucy playing in the background. So, as sure as the Great Pumpkin rises every Halloween, you can be sure that I'll be watching Who Are You, Charlie Brown? when it comes out on June 25. And I might just get a bit misty-eyed, too. 'Who Are You, Charlie Brown?' debuts on Apple TV+ June 25. Apple has announced that a new documentary, Who Are You, Charlie Brown , will air on the platform later this month. In a press release the company stated: Apple TV+ today revealed the trailer and premiere date for its upcoming documentary special, "Who Are You, Charlie Brown?," set to make its global debut on Friday, June 25 on Apple TV+. Narrated by Lupita Nyong'o and hailing from Imagine Documentaries, the special is executive produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, and features interviews with friends, family, cartoonists and famous fans of the comic strip, to create a heartwarming portrait of the late "Peanuts" creator Charles M. Schulz. Apple says the show "celebrates the significance and global multi-generational popularity of the comic strip and its timeless artistry and design to profile the man whose simple characters would touch the lives of millions through the decades and become beloved cultural icons." The show will feature interviews with Schulz's widow Jean Schulz, Drew Barrymore, Billie Jean King, and more. A new trailer for the show is also available on YouTube: Today, a new Apple TV+ thriller Lisey's Story from Stephen King and J.J. Abrams debuted on the platform. In an interview this week Abrams said that he loved working with Apple and that the company had been an incredible partner. He also confirmed that he was working on more projects with Apple in the future. Exclusive content. Apple TV+ 100% exclusive content for the price of a cup of coffee. With TV+, you can watch well-produced, big-budget TV shows from famed directors, and starring award-winning actors and actresses across all your Apple devices and with up to six members of your Family Sharing group. We may earn a commission for purchases using our links. Learn more. AppleCare+ just got cheaper for the M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Apple has reduced the amount of money customers have to pay to sign up for AppleCare+ for M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro machines. Satechi's new Slim X2 Bluetooth Backlit Keyboard is stunning. Satechi has announced a new Bluetooth keyboard with multi-device support, a number pad, and more. Podcasts are the next thing Facebook is going to ruin, starting next week. Facebook is getting ready to enter the world of podcasts with emails having gone out to podcasters in an attempt to build a catalog. Keep the screen of your 11-inch iPad Pro safe with these protectors. The 11-inch iPad Pro is even better when paired with a screen protector. Here are our favorites, no matter which year your iPad Pro is from. The Untold Truth Of Peanuts. We've been talking about the generation gap at least since the '60s, and it's only gotten trickier to navigate since then, with new technology and social media changing the landscape so fast it can be hard to relate to people who were born just a couple years after you. But no matter what, every generation born since the middle of the last century still has one thing in common. We all grew up on Peanuts . Ever since good old Charlie Brown first walked down the street on October 2nd, 1950, he and his many friends — Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, Peppermint Patty and the rest — have been inescapable in the newspaper, on TV, at the movies, and on every product imaginable. Creator Charles M. Schulz did what Snoopy never could — he created the Great American Novel four panels at a time, blowing past sentimental portrayals of childhood with a vision that was full of equal extremes of joy and pain, one that reflects all our lives, no matter how long it's been since we were kids ourselves. And now there's a new version of these classic characters for a new generation of kids to grow up on, with The Snoopy Show debuting on Apple TV+. But it's been a long journey to get there, and like any long journey, it's full of stories. Here's just a few of them. Peanuts' name came from a forgotten TV pioneer -- and Charles Schulz hated it. When Charlie Brown's creator Charles M. "Sparky" Schulz pitched a comic strip called Li'l Folks, Universal Press Syndicate liked the comic, but they didn't like the name. So they called it Peanuts instead. The name may seem nonsensical to modern readers, but in 1950, readers would have recognized it from a kids' media franchise that its namesake eclipsed long ago. The Howdy Doody Show was one of the most popular shows on TV, starring puppeteer Buffalo Bob Smith, his marionette Howdy Doody, and a live audience of real kids, called the "Peanut Gallery." That expression was already old when Howdy Doody premiered, as slang for the rowdy audiences in the cheap seats. But somehow Schulz's editor got it in his head that kids were called "peanuts," so that's the name they went with. Schulz told Dick Cavett that he went along with the new name because "I was so obsessed with drawing a comic strip all of my life that I was willing to take anything anyone gave me. And who was I to argue with United Features Syndicate?" David Michaelis' excellent biography Schulz and Peanuts says, "Sparky was reported to have challenged [editor Larry] Rutman: 'What does it mean?' to which Rutman is said to have replied, 'Little things.' Sparky stubbornly insisted, 'Yes, but little insignificant things — things of little value.'" Throughout his life, Schulz valued his fictional children above all else — no wonder he took the title so personally. Many characters came from life. Schulz has said that all his characters are partly him, but he did look to others for inspiration. As Schulz explained to Cavett, even Charlie Brown is named after a friend Schulz had taught alongside at Art Instruction Inc. in Minneapolis (as are Linus and Frieda). Schulz asked Brown's permission before using the name, and he says, "I can still remember the first day that I drew Charlie Brown, he came walking over, looked down at it, and said, 'Oh, I'm so disappointed. I was hoping I was going to look like Steve Canyon,'" the square-jawed action hero of Milton Caniff's comics. Schulz's cousin Patty Swanson became Peppermint Patty, whose sidekick Marcie was modeled on Swanson's roommate. Snoopy's cousin Spike got his name from Schulz's childhood dog, who appeared in Schulz's first published cartoon, which appeared in Ripley's Believe It or Not when he was only fifteen. Piano prodigy Schroeder came from a boy Schulz worked with at a St. Paul golf course, and Linus and Lucy got their last name as a tribute to his friends Fritz and Louanne Van Pelt. Even Pig Pen has real-world origins — Schulz told Cavett, "Pig Pen came from a friend of mine. his little boy was running around the living room, and he says, 'Go to bed, Pig Pen!'" Michaelis also suggests Pig Pen's messy habits could have come from Schulz's own son Craig. Schroeder grew up fast. One of the most mature characters in the Peanuts world is Schroeder, a child prodigy who can play Beethoven's most complicated symphonies on his toy piano, much like Schulz himself was able to capture truth and beauty in four little boxes of simple little drawings. Schroeder was even more of a prodigy when he first appeared, as a newborn baby. For the next few weeks, Schroeder was just an ordinary infant, until Schulz gave him his first piano and Schroeder began his pursuit of Beethoven. Soon, he was old enough to play on Charlie Brown's baseball team, and it wasn't long before, without explanation, he was the same age as the other characters. His was the biggest, but Schroeder was not the only Peanuts character to go through a growth spurt. Lucy entered the cast as a toddler sleeping in a crib, and Linus began life as a newborn baby before Schulz decided Lucy and Charlie Brown were the same age and Linus was just a year or two younger. That's where Linus was by the time Charlie Brown's sister Sally was born, but in a few years, they were in the same class at school. How some characters grow up while others stay the same age is a mystery, but not as much of one as how they've stayed in grade school for the past 70 years. Schulz had some fun writing out a character. Before Sally, Woodstock, Peppermint Patty, and the others arrived, and before Charlie Brown and Snoopy evolved from a generic boy and his dog to the truly unique individuals they are now, Charles Schulz spent the first few years of Peanuts fumbling around for new characters to populate his world. Some stuck, and some didn't, but none stuck as little as Charlotte Braun, who only appeared 10 times between 1954 and 1955. It seems likely Schulz was already losing interest by then, but you can blame the disappearance of Charlotte Braun at least partially on a fan named Elizabeth Swain, who wrote the cartoonist asking him to phase the character out. Schulz's reply shows an even darker sense of humor than you can see in his comics, saying, "Remember. that you and your friends will have the death of an innocent child on your conscience. Are you prepared to accept such responsibility?" and adding a doodle of Charlotte with an ax through her noggin. Charlie Brown's original voice ended up a convicted felon. The stars of Peanuts reached the screen in 1965 with A Charlie Brown Christmas , under the capable hands of veteran Looney Tunes animator Bill Melendez. The transition was shockingly successful, maybe because Schulz's attentiveness to movement in his comics made them seem animated already. But it's also due to Melendez's many unusual artistic choices, from Vince Guaraldi's iconic jazz score to the casting of real, often untrained children as the characters' voices. In most animation, kids are played by adults, but the authenticity of the Peanuts specials' voice work preserves the essential truthfulness of the comics. Peter Robbins, especially, captured the sadness and innocence of Charlie Brown in many of the character's most iconic appearances. But in real life, Robbins was much less innocent. After moving on to a career in real estate, he was imprisoned for multiple counts of felony harassment, including several against his ex-girlfriend and a plot to kill the county sheriff after his release from his first jail term. He has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has been seeking treatment. "I want to write a book about my experiences in jail, prison and what I have to look forward to," Robbins told San Diego's KWSB-TV, " Confessions of a Blockhead is what I'm going to call it." You can find Charlie Brown at Disneyland. Millions of kids have wished they could meet Charlie Brown and Snoopy, and Knott's Berry Farm brought that dream a little close to reality when they introduced Camp Snoopy to their California theme park in 1983. The attraction gave children a place to meet costumed versions of Schulz's characters, ride on Charlie Brown's kite, and fly with Woodstock. Since then, Camp Snoopy locations have opened around the world, including Kings' Dominion in Virginia, Cedar Point, Ohio, and the Minnesota Mall of America. But while this might have been Charlie Brown's first officially authorized theme park appearance, he'd appeared earlier at the most famous park on earth. In 1966, Walt Disney transplanted his "It's a Small World" exhibition for the 1964 World's Fair from New York to Disneyland. Ever since then, visitors have taken a boat ride around the world, as represented by over 300 animated dolls and a theme song by the Sherman Brothers, who scored numerous Disney musicals along with the Peanuts film Snoopy Come Home. But there's a more concrete Peanuts connection on the ride. As visitors exit, they sail past oversized postcards wishing them well in many different languages. There's also some giant stamps, including one showing a boat crowded with the simple, round faces of happy children. Hidden among them, you can find the original round-headed kid. Even with the minimalist artwork, it's still easy to recognize Charlie Brown from his W-shaped curl of hair and crooked smile. One character actually died. Peanuts gets much darker than most of the all-happy-all-the-time world of kid's entertainment. It never tried to hide from readers or viewers that the world can be a deeply sad and lonely place, especially when you're a kid. But death was a step too far even for Schulz — with one notable exception. In 1971, Charlie Brown's sister Sally started talking with the school building, yelling at it that she's on summer vacation and it can't do anything about it. In one strip from 1974 that's surreal even for Peanuts , the school talked back. Over the next month, Schulz let us in on the school's thoughts, threatening to drop a brick on Sally but also admitting it missed her over the weekend. Sally and the school's relationship continued for two years, until in 1976, the school collapsed because "I had all I could take!" We can see thought balloons coming out of the rubble, but Schulz is still happy to confirm the darkest possible interpretation of this storyline when Sally introduces herself as "one of the pupils of the school that committed suicide." When pressed, she says, "Well, I happen to know it had been depressed for some time!" It's true — two days before it collapsed, the school thought, "I'd cry, but I hate to streak my windows." In the world of Peanuts , not even buildings are safe from existential despair. Peanuts had some crossovers with Batman. Charlie Brown and Snoopy might not be Justice League material, but that hasn't stopped them from meeting Batman multiple times. In Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli's classic Batman: Year One , we meet Gordon's corrupt predecessor, Commissioner Loeb, a collector of pop culture memorabilia whose office is full of Charlie Browns and Snoopys until he gets a visit from Catwoman. In one series of Peanuts strips, we get some glimpses at a novel by Snoopy: "It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! The maid screamed. A door slammed." And then, as a "sudden twist," "Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!" The next day, we see another passage: "As he touched her hand, she sighed. " and finally, "And they lived happily ever after. The end." Writer Len Wein and artist Walter Simonson turned Snoopy's novel into a Batman story for the 500th issue. They had to get a little creative — the "pirate ship" is a model a bad guy tries to club Batman with — but it made for a memorable experiment, with no dialogue except for Snoopy's narration. But Peanuts' most memorable Batman crossover was the creation of Kite Man, real name Charles Brown. Our Charlie Brown may never be able to get a kite in the air, but Kite Man has mastered a variety of gimmick kites, using one as a hang glider. In Hawkman, writer Tony Isabella revealed the characters' shared name, and gave the villain Charlie Brown's catchphrase, "Rats!" Fergie appeared in the Peanuts cartoons. Bill Melendez's decision to use real kids for the voices in his Peanuts movies and specials meant that he went through multiple casts as his young stars aged out of their roles. Most of them faded into obscurity as they grew up, but one of the Peanuts voices blew up in a big way — but not the way anyone would have expected at the time. Starting with the bizarrely dated It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown!, Sally Brown had the voice of a young actress named Stacy Ferguson. She continued in the role through the two-season run of The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show, but later moved on from acting to focus on music as the lead singer of Wild Orchid. After a few years with them, Fergie — as she was now known — shot up to superstar status when DJ/MC will.i.am invited her join his group the Black Eyed Peas. Their first album with Fergie was Elephunk, the record that made the Peas an industry juggernaut, with Fergie singing lead on megahits like "Imma Be," "Boom Boom Pow," and "I Gotta Feeling . " It's a little hard to imagine the artist behind hypersexual songs like "My Humps" and her solo hit "Fergalicious" as little Sally Brown, but her expensive lifestyle certainly seems like the kind of thing Sally would dream of. All she wants is what's coming to her. All she wants is her fair share! Charles Schulz's daughter got a whole special to herself. Even a great artist like Charles Schulz couldn't resist the temptations of nepotism. In 1988, he co-wrote It's the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown with his son Monte, starring his daughter Jill. She does about as well as you'd expect from someone who got the gig just because her dad draws Snoopy. Despite the name, Charlie Brown and Snoopy only appear for a minute or two. Instead, the plot focuses on Jill as the titular girl in the red truck, who meets Snoopy's brother Spike in the desert. This causes some friction with her jealous boyfriend, and that's about all the story we get until the tacked-on climax where Spike gets caught up in a coyote hunt. The special is not helped at all by Paul Rodriguez's maddening synthesizer score (even the music Spike plays on piano is synthesized!), which only looks worse compared to Vince Guaraldi's work on the classic specials. It hasn't aged well, and neither has the continuation of Peanuts ' fascination with the aerobics fad after Flashbeagle . But Red Truck does feature some impressive blending of live action and cartoons, and Spike's animation is much more fluid and three-dimensional than anything you'd expect from the famously cheap Peanuts specials. But even that looks pretty bad next to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which opened the same year. Everyone in comics teamed up to celebrate Peanuts' anniversary. In December 1999, Charles Schulz announced he would be retiring for health reasons. The final Peanuts comic would appear the following February, almost exactly half a century after the first. Schulz poured his life into Peanuts , and maybe there was none left for him without it. Though he had drawn the final episode weeks earlier, it appeared exactly one day after he died. He left behind an overwhelming legacy, and that spring, over 40 cartoonists teamed up to commemorate Peanuts ' 50th anniversary and Schulz's life, all of them coordinating to publish their homages the same day Schulz received a posthumous lifetime achievement award from the National Cartoonists' Society. After all, by 2000, many of them had grown up on Schulz's comics and even decided to get into the field because of his work. On May 27th, 2000, you could open your paper to see the King of Id's night watchman spotting a beagle on a flying doghouse, Marmaduke "doing a Snoopy," Garfield lying on top of Snoopy's doghouse, and a father and child bonding over a classic Peanuts special in The Boondocks. The comics page wasn't the same without new Peanuts , but for just one day, we got to see just how much we'd lost. The Today Show turned Peanuts into a nightmare. Schulz may have been less happy with the tribute the hosts of The Today Show paid to his masterpiece for Halloween 2015. To promote The Peanuts Movie, NBC's crew dressed up as Charles Schulz's most beloved creations, and if they're still beloved after that, it's in spite of the impressive effort these costumes put into ruining them. Bringing cartoon characters into the real world is always a tricky proposition, and The Today Show drove Charlie Brown and friends in a flaming semi truck straight into the heart of the uncanny valley. What's the worst thing in this picture? Is it the misshapen prosthetic ears that are somehow too big and too small at the same time? Al Roker's shiny plastic forehead? The oversized shoes and socks? Tamron Hall's horribly detailed, greenish rubber feet? Meredith Viera and Carson Daly's attempt to recreate Linus and Pig Pen's scribbled hair by apparently dumping a basket of electric cords on their heads? Kathie Lee Gifford's faceless Woodstock, her mouth apparently frozen open in mid-scream, which the AV Club suggests attendees at the namesake rock festival might have seen if they'd gotten into the brown acid? Fortunately, some silly and/or soul-scarring costumes aren't enough to tarnish Peanuts' legacy. The truthfulness and purity of Charles Schulz's vision is truly immortal, and we can all look forward to curling up with our grandchildren to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas many, many Christmases from now. The Great Pumpkin Never Comes: Charles M. Schulz & Peanuts. CHARLES SCHULZ GAVE HIS LAST interview late in December 1999. He had announced his retirement the week before, and, always on a deadline, had already drawn what he knew would be the final Peanuts strips; one last small daily, scheduled to be published on January 3 2000, and then a concluding Sunday colour strip, to run February 13. Schulz was retiring at 77 because illness had left him unable to meet the demands of a daily strip. He had been told he had colon cancer and it had metastasized to his stomach. He publicly announced he was planning to devote time to seeking treatment, but he privately knew he didn’t have much time left. In that last interview, filmed for America’s Today programme, he recalls signing his name to the final panel, and realising that, after 50 years and 17,897 strips, that last pen stroke really marked the end of the line for Charlie Brown. “And all of a sudden,” he said, “I thought: You know, that poor kid, he never even got to kick the football. What a dirty trick.” Of course, we wouldn’t have wanted it – and he probably couldn’t have drawn it – any other way. Charlie Brown was born to lose. He would never get to kick the ball Lucy Van Pelt held for him, just as he would never pluck up the courage to talk to that Little Red-Haired Girl, just as black-haired, black-hearted Lucy herself would never win Schroeder away from eternal, fanatical practice on his toy piano. By the time of Schulz’s death, Peanuts had grown into a $1.2 billion dollar industry that earned him a reputed $40 million a year. Syndicated in some 2,600 newspapers around the world, it had a daily readership of over 355 million people. Neither that success, however, nor the ubiquity of the warmest, fuzziest, happiness-is-a-warm-puppy-est aspects of the strip, endlessly replicated in merchandising and licensing spin-offs since it became a global phenomenon in the 1960s, should obscure the fundamental, paradoxical truth: that the most popular comic strip in the world was a deeply personal work, about the interior torments of people who, like its artist, never felt popular, felt out of place in the world. Schulz conceived, lettered and drew every single one of those 17,897 strips alone. By the late 1980s, following heart trouble, his hand developed a tremble that began increasingly to show in his once perfectly bold lines. By the late-1990s, when he was plagued by failing eyesight and hit by a series of small strokes, those lines grew shakier still. Yet this never detracted from the strip, only deepened it. Schulz made that shaking line part of the aesthetic of Peanuts , so you hardly noticed it. If you were aware of it, and the reasons behind it, what it said about one man working away on his own for half a century, it added immeasurable poignancy. Extraordinarily, Schulz died on the night of February 12, 2000: just a few hours before the last ever strip appeared –Snoopy sitting atop his doghouse with his trusty typewriter, tapping out Schulz’s farewell to his readers. When the strip stopped, so did he. FIRST PUBLISHED IN OCTOBER 1950 , Peanuts appeared against the backdrop of America’s first, most feverishly optimistic flush of consumerism. The joke was an old one in newspaper cartoons: the button-eyed kids had adult thoughts and feelings rolling around their big round heads. But what made Schulz’s creation stand out – in addition to his audaciously modern, minimal draughtsmanship – was the nature of those thoughts and feelings, how he tapped into the unmentionable neuroses hidden away out of sight behind the period’s bright white-picket-fence veneer. Long before the underground comics of the late-1960s, the radical, hung-up hippy creations epitomised by Robert Crumb, Schulz seemed to speak out for society’s losers and misfits. Schulz smuggled the term “depression” into the funny pages. He gave the phrase “security blanket” to the world, but only because insecurity –along with rejection, disappointment, melancholy, loneliness, self-consciousness, paranoia and unrequited longing – was his great theme. It was there from the start. For a long time, Schulz was squeamish about reprinting the earliest Peanuts , because he felt they didn’t reflect the nature of the strip as he ultimately developed it. A few years before his death, however, the American comic book publisher Fantagraphic began discussions with him for The Complete Peanuts , a heroic project to reprint the entire run in a chronological sequence of books. Beautifully designed by the cartoonist known as Seth, the first two volumes, covering 1950 – 1954, appeared in the States in 2004. This month, courtesy of Edinburgh publisher Cannongate, they are reprinted in UK editions. At first glance, you can see why Schulz might have felt these early outings were unrepresentative. What strikes you most about Peanuts in its first years is how unlike Peanuts it is. Charlie and the gang actually look babyish, unfinished. Familiar faces are absent –Linus, Sally, Pig-Pen, Peppermint Patty – still unborn or yet to move to the neighbourhood. Lucy isn’t the whirlwind harridan curmudgeon she would become. She’s just a younger neighbourhood kid Charlie sometimes baby-sits. Most strikingly, Snoopy, the beagle who would come to almost steal the strip from his master and emerge as the most sophisticated and grownup member of the cast, is still mostly just a doglike dog, still walking on all fours, cut off from the vibrant Walter Mitty-esque fantasies that would make him a superstar from the early-1960s on. (Meanwhile, Schulz still hasn’t refined his abstract, flatland style. You actually see Snoopy’s doghouse drawn in perspective, making clear the impossibility of his famous later pose, sitting on the peak of its pitched roof with his typewriter). Look again, though, and familiar motifs begin to emerge. Silent Snoopy suddenly thinks a first thought in 1951. Little Lucy whisks her first ball away in 1952. And there, shimmering in the infinite white spaces of the very first Peanuts strip, published October 2 1950, loom all the premonitions of angst to come. Charlie Brown, all alone, walks past a boy and a girl sitting on a step. As they watch him approach and pass, the boy says: “Well! Here comes Ol’ Charlie Brown. Good Ol’ Charlie Brown…Yes, sir! Good Ol’ Charlie Brown…How I hate him!” PEANUTS HAS BEEN IN THE POP-CULTURAL BLOODSTREAM for so long that it’s hard to imagine there was a time when it wasn’t. But Schulz suddenly seems to be in the air again. The publication of The Complete Peanuts in the UK coincides with the appearance of a thoroughgoing new biography, Schulz and Peanuts , by David Michaelis, that has been the subject of some controversy in the US. Schulz gave hundreds of interviews across his life, and the outline of the story Michaelis tells will be familiar to fans. He was born in Minneapolis in 1922, the only child of a Norwegian mother and a German father, who, like Charlie Brown’s unseen dad, was a barber. Prophetically nicknamed Sparky – after a racehorse in the popular 1920s comic strip Barney Google – he grew increasingly awkward as he entered his teenage years, but he loved to draw, and his mother encouraged him in that retreat. She died of cancer in 1943 when he was 21 and literally on the eve of going to war, and he never got over the loss. He saw active combat and was close by when Dachau was liberated. He never went to Art school, but learned his craft via a correspondence course, and later became an instructor for the same learn-by-mail school. He named his characters after co-workers he encountered: there was a real Charlie Brown; there was a Linus; and there was a girl with red hair called Donna Johnson whom Schulz wanted to marry, but who turned him down and married a fireman. He never forgot the rejection. What has raised eyebrows in the States, however, is Michaelis’s portrait of Schulz as fundamentally unhappy, a cranky, reserved individual, plagued by anxieties, given to holding grudges and dwelling on perceived slights for decades, then regurgitating them in his strip. What might raise eyebrows among Peanuts fans, though, is how many commentators and reviewers have reacted to the biography as though this was some great revelation, the cracking of a secret code. Did they ever read Peanuts in the first place, or are they basing their knowledge on the drawings of Snoopy and Woodstock dancing happily on their pencil cases? Look back at the time where Charlie Brown goes to summer camp and spends the entire trip with a paper bag over his head. Now, seriously: can the idea that Schulz was a somewhat depressed guy who found it hard to relate to other people and was often difficult to get along with really come as news? The Peanuts gang always looked cute, but a current of anxiety and discontent crackled through their comfy backyard universe like a jagged black zigzag ripping across a sunshine-yellow t-shirt. Umberto Eco, in his famous essay on Peanuts , put it this way: “These children…are the monstrous, infantile reductions of all the neuroses of a modern citizen of the industrial civilisation.” There have been countless Peanuts parodies, both by comic book artists who love and profess to loathe Schulz’s work, but the most brilliantly acute pastiche of all was drawn by Robert Sikoryak in 1990: Good Ol’ Gregor Brown , a retelling of Kafka’s Metamorphosis , Charlie Brown waking to discover he’d turned into a cockroach. The very title of his strip was a flag of defeat. His syndicate forced the enigmatic “ Peanuts ” on Schulz, and he slunk along loathing it for the rest of his career. “Good grief” is Charlie Brown’s most famous catchphrase, but two others phrases repeat far more often: “I CAN’T STAND IT!” and that perfect expression of the inexpressible, “*Sigh.*” Writing in 1985, Schulz himself highlighted the bleak melancholy that was Peanuts ’s bedrock: “All the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; The Great Pumpkin never comes; and the football is always pulled away.” Schulz’s family, who granted full access to Michaelis, feel betrayed by his book, and have protested vociferously that the warm, loving, open and extremely generous side of the man they knew (Schulz gave away literally millions of dollars to various causes, often without credit) has been largely airbrushed out of his biography, so as to not to spoil the picture of a tortured artist Michaelis had already decided he wanted to paint. And Schulz’s family are probably right. While it’s the melancholy that lingers, Peanuts could not have survived 50 years, nor become so beloved, if Schulz did not also have a deep sense of fun and humanity. He is unsentimental and sarcastic in Peanuts , but he is never cold and mean. He depicts losing as the universal condition. If he says that we’re all ultimately alone, he also says that at least we’re all in it together. Schulz’s characters, named after friends, but really facets of himself, were baffled by life’s constant disappointments, cruelties and absurdities, but never fully defeated. The sad cosmic joke might be that Charlie Brown never gets to kick the ball. But the really funny thing is, he never stops trying. Originally published in The Sunday Herald November 14 2007. It’s a New World, Charlie Brown! Charlie Brown and friends are headed to Camp New World to see what life was like for the pilgrims. Lucy can’t wait to get all dressed up. Sally can’t wait to pick flowers. Linus is looking forward to fishing. But when the Peanuts gang arrives at Camp New World, they discover everything is a lot harder than they thought! Can everyone work together to plan a feast just like the pilgrims’ Thanksgiving? Charles M. Schulz. Charles M. Schulz was born November 25, 1922 in Minneapolis. His destiny was foreshadowed when an uncle gave him, at […] More about Charles M. Schulz. Tracy Stratford. ** Exclusive CBC Author Interview with Tracy Stratford ** Tracy Stratford is the author of three new children’s Peanuts books, writing […] More about Tracy Stratford. New Charlie Brown Children’s Books (Author Interview: Tracy Stratford) News & Buzz. Podcast Announcement – Taking A Holiday Break! The Top 10 Conservative Books of 2018. The Top 5 Dumbest Liberal Books of 2018. Movie Review: A Star Is Born (2018) Current Poll. Conservative Book Club. 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