And David Michaelis’ agenda was to show how the negative side of Schulz was responsible for his greatness. Sorry, David. It probably had more to do with genes, since imagination, humor, intelligence, creativity, writing and drawing ability are increasingly considered inherited traits. Those traits suffered mightily in the household Schulz grew up in, but he prevailed – and
that’s a positive story!

B.J.

Let’s hope there’s another Schulz bio that takes up the cartooning and includes more comments from other great cartoonists – like Watterson. Of maybe Watterson should do a bio himself?

B.J.

That is only partly true. In reality Pig-Pen and Franklin kept on making occasional appearances until the very end. Pig-Pen was indeed a single joke repeated over and over in different forms, whereas there was never really much to the Franklin character. Schulz seems to have tried to develop him a bit but really he remains a sort of generic kid — introduced mainly because Schulz wanted to make a statement in the ’60s by including a black character in his strip.

And the Little Red-haired Girl was mentioned more in the first couple of decades of “Peanuts,” for sure, but she was a recurring theme in the last few decades, culminating of course with Charlie Brown almost asking her to dance with him but then failing, and her appearing in silhouette, dancing with Snoopy. That was in 1998.

Yes, three of the orginal five characters were phased out by the mid-70s — Violet, Shermie, and Patty — probably because they weren’t as interesting as the other, more eccentric kids. And Frieda was mostly a one-not character too, although she had some good storylines.

As for the quality of Peanuts, I would say that certainly the strip wasn’t as great in its last few decades as it was in its first few, it was still above-average and in spite of its decline, Schulz deserves a lot more respect than this biography is purported to give him.

I’ve had a similar philosophy for my site; namely the sitcom comparison. My site has a generic name (theblogComics.com) on which I post multiple comics series, and if any of them start “dying out” they’ll get a proper conclusion and I’ll axe them. In fact, I’m losing steam with one of them right now and it’s going to get a ‘series finale’ of sorts at the end of this year, while the rest of the series get renewed for the next ‘season’.

Though, I don’t want to change it up too much, because folks like familiarity. But if I’m phoning it in on a strip, I feel I’m doing readers more of a disservice by dragging it along, than if I just end it peacefully. So once or twice a year I plan to review the state of my comics and decided if they need to be retired or refreshed. And from there, if I do end one, decide if I should create a new strip to replace it, or just expanded the posting of the existing ones if they’re still in good shape.

Some strips may last 5, 10 or 20+ years, others, only 6 months. But this way, in theory, things shouldn’t get stale. It’s still a method in progress, so time will tell if it works.

If cartoonists weren’t afraid of losing their spot in the newspaper, they could come up with a new strip every few years if they wanted to!

Look at television. Sitcoms run out of things to say. The smart ones move on before they’re cancelled. The strongest writers and actors can always get new gigs. I wish cartooning were like that. Comics pages would be a lot stronger for it.

Actually, it’s going to be like that at my cartoon syndicate launching next year. Our focus will be on the artist, not the feature.

Well, there you go again, Rick… making sense by pointing out the reality of writing for daily comic strip.

Peanuts had pretty much complete saturation in newspapers (2400)… meaning that if a paper had a comics page, Peanuts appeared in it. Apparently millions of readers found it quite readable…Until you can reach that level of success and popularity with a feature of your own, I’d advise holding off calling anyone else’s work “garbage”. Of course you are entitled to that viewpoint, but such a blanket condemnation, as if the rest of the world held the same view, just ends up making you look silly.

>>>A word about Pig-Pen. It is obvious that Schulz didn’t want to have anything to do with him, because Pig-Pen is the most under-used (and over-exposed) character in the history of comic strips.

Explain how an under-used character (meaning “not appearing enough for your taste”) can simultaneously be over-exposed (meaning “appearing too often for your taste”)? Again a very silly statement.

If you’ve ever read anything by Schulz regarding his treatment of Pig Pen, he felt that the character was a one trick pony that had played out it’s usefullness by the end of the sixties.How many, I’m clean now I’m dirty gags could one come up with? I’ve read he felt that he could not expand on the character so he phased him out. One could say the same about Shermie, Violet, Frieda, Charlotte, Patty (not Peppermint patty) the little red haired girl and Franklin…

Snoopy on the other hand was multi dimentional and perhaps one of the strongest characters ever to develop in a comic strip. Of course he went back to him quite often. Sparky’s experimentation with character development was to be commended. Some worked, others didn’t, but he didn’t stagnate.