Ray Billingsley, A BOY NAMED CURTIS cartoonist: Mr. Media Radio Interview

By BOB ANDELMAN

There are a number of daily newspaper comic strips that we tend to take for granted. “Cathy,” by Cathy Guisewite, is one. Mort Walker’s “Beetle Bailey” and “Hi & Lois” are two more.

And then there is my friend Ray Billingsley’s strip, “Curtis.”

“Curtis” shares the adventures of a young African-American boy whose age I’d put at about 10 or 11, dealing with life in his community. He’s chasing—unsuccessfully—girls, being chased—successfully—by bullies, struggling with his dad’s cheapness and smoking… in other words, all the stuff boys his age do.

AUDIO EXCERPT: "The strip is a lighthearted tale about a boy. That's all it is. It's just that one little factor that turns publishers off. I still go through, 'Well, blacks don't really read this stuff and whites don't get it.'"

But because the character is black, it sometimes seems like his creator, Billingsley, doesn’t always get the opportunities or recognition that other men and women in his field do.

One example: publication of his collected works.

The last time Billingsley was a guest on my show, back in April 2007, he revealed his frustration with the cartoonists establishment and book publishing. Today, there is a new development on that front: publication of the first “Curtis” collection: A Boy Named Curtis. (Visit Ray Billingsley's website!)

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Copyright 2010 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Stephan Pastis, PEARLS BEFORE SWINE, cartoonist: Mr. Media Audio Interview REWIND

(Mr. Media is on vacation this week, so we're rewinding to some of the podcast's earlier, most popular interviews to catch up new listeners!)

Stephan Pastis is a big fan of Ricky Gervais, creator of "The Office" and "Extras," and Larry David, co-creator of "Seinfeld" and creator of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." He also loves him some Cheryl Hines. As a matter of fact, I think the only reason I landed him on the show today is because I interviewed the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" co-star, and that gets him one degree closer to her.

Pastis’ “Pearls Before Swine” comic strip has twice been named Best Newspaper Comic Strip of the Year by the National Cartoonists Society, in 2004 and again in 2007, and it is that funny and that weird.

Well, Zeeba neighbors, prepare yourself for Stephan Pastis.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Stephan Pastis, "Pearls Before Swine" cartoonist: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1

Stephan Pastis is a big fan of Ricky Gervais, creator of "The Office" and "Extras," and Larry David, co-creator of "Seinfeld" and creator of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." He also loves him some Cheryl Hines. As a matter of fact, I think the only reason I landed him on the show today is because I interviewed the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" co-star, and that gets him one degree closer to her.

Pastis’ “Pearls Before Swine” comic strip has twice been named Best Newspaper Comic Strip of the Year by the National Cartoonists Society, in 2004 and again in 2007, and it is that funny and that weird.

Well, Zeeba neighbors, prepare yourself for Stephan Pastis.

You can LISTEN to this interview by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!

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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: How long have the animals been talking to you?

STEPHAN PASTIS: Oh my goodness. I drew Rat in the very first strip I did back in…I drew him in law school so in 1991, I think. It goes back quite a ways.

ANDELMAN: Is there a connection between Rat being your first strip and you having been an attorney?

PASTIS: Oh boy. I think so. It’s one of those rare instances where I can actually remember where I was, what class I was sitting in when I drew him. At the time, he walked on all four legs, and he didn’t move. I would just draw this rat in the same position in six panels in a row. A lot like it is now, I guess, maybe fewer panels that I would just draw like that. Then I would just write all my thoughts for the day and give them to him, and it just seemed to have some life to it.

ANDELMAN: Has he changed that much over the years? I think I read that, by himself, he was a lot more obnoxious and didn’t quite click, but once you added Pig, it just seemed to work better.

PASTIS: I think so. When he’s by himself, he’s too much. He’s too acidic. He’ll overwhelm you. But I think when he’s with Pig, because of that friendship, you sort of assume that he can’t be that bad of a guy cause he’s got Pig for a friend. It’s a lot like what Cheryl Hines does for Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” At least until she left him, she makes him more appealing cause you figure well, there’s gotta be some soft side to Larry if he can have someone that sweet for a wife.






ANDELMAN: Now I’m sure people are wondering how I made this connection to you and Cheryl Hines. We spoke just a week or two ago, and you told me that you have some lines from “The Office” and from “Curb” up on your wall that you refer to.

PASTIS: It’s mostly from interviews. Like I’ll read stuff that Gervais, the creator of “The Office,” has written or spoken in interviews about comedy. He’s like the top of the heap right now so anything he says, to me, is golden. One of the things he says is that the key to comedy is to create a character that is arrogant and pretentious while simultaneously stupid. He calls that like the Molotov cocktail of comedy. And I think that’s really a key, and I’m conscious of that when I do the crocodiles because the crocodiles don’t think they’re lame. The crocodiles think they’re quite skilled, but they’re idiots. And so, yeah, I’ll look at those quotes now and then from Gervais to sort of remind me what comedy should be.

ANDELMAN: “Pearls,” like “LIO” and “Get Fuzzy,” they’re strips created by, I believe, friends of yours, Darby Conley and Mark Tatulli. “Pearls” exists in its own world, a place, for anyone who’s read it, where zebras live next door to crocodiles that want to eat them and a pig and a rat are apparently roommates. Where did this whole world come from?

PASTIS: That’s a good question. To me, I think that the key to creating a strip is to create it from the bottom up rather than the top down. And what I mean by that is just focus on writing individual strips, make them as funny as you can, and let the characters, the setting, all of that flow from those strips. In other words, the jokes should come first, and they will tell you what you need character-wise, setting-wise, whereas if you create it from the top down, you say, “I’m gonna do a strip where the main characters are like this and they have these jobs and they live in this town,” you’re really tying your hands. And you’ve got to do this 365 days a year so you want that canvas to be as broad as possible. So, to answer your question, I really wasn’t conscious of the world I was creating when I created it. I just did strips that I thought were funny. Even now, as a result of that, I don’t know a lot of the answers to those questions. Where do Rat and Pig live? They seem to live together. What part of the country? I don’t know. It does lead to some logistical mistakes. For example, the Zebra lives next to this Fraternity of Crocodiles, but somehow, there is this family of crocodiles with the dad, a mom, and a kid. And they don’t seem to live with the rest of the fraternity, and they’re also next door to Zebra as are the lions. So the only way I told myself that it works is that one of them is the neighbor behind Zebra’s house, one is to the side of Zebra’s house, and one is to the other side. But I’m the creator, and I’m not sure.

ANDELMAN: Are there rules that you’ve established for yourself over time? For example, in Tatulli’s strip, LIO never talks, and he doesn’t have any intention of anyone in that strip ever actually speaking, although they write notes and they watch television. What are the rules in the “Pearls Before Swine” universe?

PASTIS: I don’t have too many. I know that in an early strip I had Rat’s father die so I can’t have him have a father. I know that. When the predators talk, either the Lion or the crocs, I have to remember to do it in lower case. I really don’t have that many rules, I guess, thinking about it. Maybe there are some I can’t think of.





ANDELMAN: Well, let’s take our first call. Howard, right?

HOWARD FINBERG: Yes.

ANDELMAN: Yeah, Howard, you have a question for Stephan Pastis.

FINBERG: I do. Stephan, great strip. Love what you do.

PASTIS: Thank you.

FINBERG: I’m curious. This is a question that I see on the chat that others have as well - the whole idea of crossovers with other comic strips. Where did you get that idea? I think, of all the strips out there, you tend to play homage or take homage with a lot of other strips that are out there.

PASTIS: It’s probably because when I was a kid growing up, and I saw any sort of a crossover, and they didn’t happen very often, I just loved them. I just thought they were so fun. And when I do the strip, I’m really, I guess, just entertaining myself in some way. And since I have always liked them, I try to use them. Nowadays, I know most of the people whose strips I use so I will often run them by them beforehand to see if they’re okay with them. I don’t always do that, but sometimes I do. Like Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott, I know them well so I’ll run that by them. And Bill Keane I know well so I’ll run that stuff by him. And everybody really has been very, very cool about it, especially the Keanes. They’re terrific. Bill is great.

ANDELMAN: Howard, did you have another question, or does that answer yours?

FINBERG: Yes. I have one more question for you, if you don’t mind. It’s about the predominance of croc strips. This is a question that is really coming from my better half, my wife, who also is a comic strip fan. She sort of says what’s with the crocs? It is sort of a one-gag variation. She says well, when is he gonna get off the crocs? I guess she likes Rat and Pig a lot better.

PASTIS: It’s funny. I keep a little chart on the wall where I kind of monitor how many croc strips there are a month, and I try to keep it at about seven or eight. So this month, there’s a two-week series so next month, there’ll be less. But the crocs are by far and away the most popular characters, and they really, for whatever reason, broaden the strip’s appeal. And to those people who are in that group or came along later, they don’t like it when I go and do the Rat and Pig strips. Somebody who’s been reading it for a number of years and likes Rat and Pig like your wife, for example, doesn’t like when the Crocs predominate. You learn when you do a comic strip that you can never please everybody. You have to do what you like. But I am conscious of the fact that there’s one group that likes one and one group that likes the other. It’s always a tough balance.

FINBERG: Thanks a lot.

ANDELMAN: Thanks for calling, Howard. Howard is a huge fan. His living room, God bless his wife. I know Howard, obviously. God bless his wife because his living room is full of original comics, original strips.

PASTIS: Oh, that’s great.

ANDELMAN: Which is actually something Howard probably would like to ask and maybe other people are wondering, what do you do with your strips? Are they resold? Do you have a dealer? Do you keep them?

PASTIS: I keep them. We occasionally give them to editors. I will give them to family and friends. If I parody someone’s strip, I’ll usually give them at least one of those originals, and I’ll trade with them. It’s funny. I built quite a collection of other guys’ strips now. But yeah, I just keep them all.

ANDELMAN: I want to follow up on what Howard was asking you about, and I see there’s some buzz in the chat room as well about this. So you do tip some cartoonists off. Have there been others that you have not tipped off ahead and that you’ve heard about it later?

PASTIS: Yes, yes. I don’t know the “Blondie” creator so when I made fun of their anniversary I didn’t hear from them. I don’t even know if they’re aware of the strip. I did not tip off Cathy Guisewite when I did the first six or seven (referencing “Cathy”). I have met her now at the Reubens. She was very nice to me. I don’t think she appreciated some of the early ones, which is understandable. I think if I ever kind of crossed the line it was with how I dealt with Cathy. I think it was kind of too mean-spirited. Maybe I’m getting too soft, but I look back on it, I sort of regret that a little bit. One funny thing that nobody saw cause I pulled it, but I did a series where Rat got lost in the desert, and he ran into “Family Circus” fans. It appeared in August or September. And Bill Keane got a hold of them and was gonna kill them and something like that. Well, in the middle of that, I did a “Funky Winkerbean” parody making fun of that whole Lisa Moore storyline where she was gonna die, she wasn’t gonna die, she was gonna die, back and forth the story went. I did it, and then I thought, “Holy smokes, this is gonna draw so many complaints cause that storyline drew tons of newspaper articles, and every cancer person, survivor, family member in the world is going to write to me.” So I went back and forth, and finally, I sent the strip to Tom Batiuk, and he couldn’t have been nicer. He was great. He said, “Go with it.” He thought it was funny and the whole bit, and I gave him the original and then he gave me a couple originals, and I pulled it. At the last minute I pulled it cause I just didn’t want the flak. You learn over time that there are certain things that draw flak, heavy flak. One of them is any disease, be it physical or mental. It really draws angry response. Sex, religion, politics, diseases, flooring any ethnicity, that’ll do it.






ANDELMAN: Stephan, Messieur LaChase in the chat room has a question that kind of fits with what you were just saying. Have you ever had to substitute a strip because of a taste issue or a news event?

PASTIS: It’s happened a lot of times. One time early on Rat ran for Senate or something against a guy who had died. And right in the middle of that storyline, a Senator from, I think, Minnesota died in a plane crash.

ANDELMAN: I think you’re right.

PASTIS: I can’t remember his name right now, and I think his name stayed on the ballot. And so, boy, that had to be pulled at the last minute because readers don’t understand that these are submitted weeks in advance. So that can create a bad situation. So, yeah, those were pulled. There was one where Pig was playing in the dryer once spinning around, and that week, I think some kids had been killed or shoved in a dryer or something like that, and so that was pulled for half the country. Yeah, that does happen. One really, really unfortunate one that, boy, had the timing been a little different would have just been horrible was I had a strip where the Crocs were rooting for the death of “The Crocodile Hunter,” Steve Irwin, cause his voice drove them crazy, and then three months later he was killed. Man, if that had run that week, I think that would’ve been the end of me.

ANDELMAN: Oh my goodness.

PASTIS: Yeah, it happens quite a lot.

ANDELMAN: That’s a good one to pull. Stephan, we’ve got another caller here.

FEMALE CALLER: Hi. I just wanted to ask why some characters get names, just a few get names, and the rest are “Pig” or “Rat” or “Goat”?

PASTIS: That’s a good question. The original four, I just thought it was sort of funny to not give them names. I don’t know why. I’m sort of proud of that because people take that now, and they’ll say Rat and Pig, and they don’t think twice that that’s just an animal. It’s really not a name, and I kind of like that. But nowadays, when I add a character, I do give them names. Why have I changed? I don’t know why I’ve changed. They do. I’m thinking about it. The crocs get names. Well, the duck doesn’t really have a name. He’s called the Guard Duck so I guess that’s consistent. That’s a good question. I’ve got to go back and think about that one.

ANDELMAN: Well, Stephan, you have two children, right?

PASTIS: Yes.

ANDELMAN: And you named them “Boy” and “Girl,” is that right?

PASTIS: I named who?

ANDELMAN: Your children. There’s “Boy” and “Girl.”

PASTIS: That would be pretty clever. Easier to remember.

ANDELMAN: Do you want to take a minute and talk about classic comic strips on newspaper pages? I know that’s a topic you hate to talk about.

PASTIS: Fire away.

ANDELMAN: Okay. Do you think there should be a statute of limitations for characters?

PASTIS: It’s hard to say. I think a comic strip is like a novel. I think there’s a reason there aren’t a lot of novels that are 3,000 pages. I think there’s a natural length to a novel, and I think there’s probably a natural length to a comic strip. But who’s to say? Herriman ran for forty years or something with “Krazy Kat,” and he was pretty darn good. Can you go for a long time? Sure. Sparky did. It is possible, but at the same time, it is disheartening. You look at a comics page and boy, the average age of the comics on a page would blow you away. Some of these started in the 1920s and ‘30s and some before then. It is hard to understand how a newspaper can continue to attract young readers when they do that, but who am I to say?

ANDELMAN: It’s interesting. I look at a strip like “Blondie,” which, to me, kind of defies logic in that, for years, I thought it had kind of dried up, and I found the last couple years I actually enjoy it a lot more, and it seems to have gotten somewhat relevant and come back. But there are strips that you just wonder are they strictly being kept on to keep some money coming into the heirs cause, obviously, the creator is long gone. Who’s to decide other than the cartoonists who want that space on the page? Who’s to decide when something has reached the end of the road?

PASTIS: It’s a really tough thing for a couple of reasons. One, okay, they do these comic polls, and when they do them, let’s say they do a newspaper-only comics poll. The people that are going to take the time to cut those things out and send them into the newspapers, stick the stamp on the envelope and all that stuff, tend to be older people. And so these older people have seen these characters for 30, 40, 50 years, and they’ve seen a young strip for two or three years or less. And so there’s a dynamic at play there where you’re just gonna lose. That’s a really tough nut to crack. So that’s a big part of the reason right there. And they do these polls, and they make no attempt, no attempt whatsoever, to do what every other poll that takes itself seriously does, which is to take stock of the demographics of who’s responding. It’s crazy. If the average person responding to a poll is sixty-two years old, what strips do you think are gonna be on that list? I could tell you what’s gonna be on that list. I don’t even know what your question is at this point, but I just went off on polls.





ANDELMAN: That’s okay. Would you prefer that editors just make a decision themselves and stop polling the audience that way?

PASTIS: Well, I’ve been able to talk to editors. I went to this features, what’s it called, American Society of Features Editors, ASFE something, and I spoke there, and I got to talk to the editors, and I got to tell them this. I said you try to do these newspaper polls. They make no attempt to do the demographics so that’s flawed. So then they say “We’ll open up to online so we’ll get young people.” And then they take no step whatsoever to stop someone from just cheating and voting thousands of times. And I don’t know why they do that. It’s basically just an invitation to cheat. It’s saying, “We’re going to put the comic in here that has learned to cheat the best,” and that doesn’t work either. So I’ve seen some papers that do it right. I’ve seen the Indianapolis Star did a poll where, if you vote online, you have to give your local phone number, and I think they inform people that they might call the number. And so that seemed to discourage fake votes so that sort of worked. But, yeah, I would prefer that they use their judgment, but it’s not a blind guess. For example, walk around a newsroom and look at the cubicle walls. What’s on the wall? What are people cutting out? What’s on the refrigerator in the break room? There’s an indicator. What’s your kid reading? What’s your wife reading? Go to Barnes and Noble and look in the comics section. What’s on the shelf? There’s a great way to do it. What are people spending their money on? What do people like so much they’ll actually spend their money on? Go to Amazon.com and go to the section called “Cartooning.” There’s one for cartooning, and there’s one for comic strips. Look at the top 50. What’s in there? There are ways to do this even if you don’t trust fully your own judgment rather than to open it up to rampant cheating online or just a lot of old people voting in a newspaper-only poll. There are ways to do it, and they don’t do it. This is a very sore subject for cartoonists, as you can tell by the length of my answer, but it’s very hard for cartoonists to take. And I think the easiest way for an editor maybe to understand that would be to say how would they like their jobs put up for a poll? Like, “Which editor do you like best at our paper? Vote and let us know. Who’s your favorite? Who’s your least favorite? And by the way, you can vote a thousand times in a half hour.” How would that make them feel? This is our job, and when you do something like that, it’s difficult to take. They don’t do that, I don’t think, with any other part of the paper.

ANDELMAN: My wife, who’s an editor at a newspaper, is probably cringing right now. Let’s go back to the phones for a minute. Howard was trying to call in. I think we’ve got him back on there. Howard, are you there?

FINBERG: I think I’m here.

ANDELMAN: Alright. Go ahead.

FINBERG: Stephan, what’s your work habit like? Tell us about your day in terms of do you get up, go to Starbucks, get inspiration, come back, or do you try to bang out a bunch of strips all at once? What’s your style like?

PASTIS: It varies, but the latest thing I’ve been doing is I drive to a coffee shop, and I have my iPod on with songs that I picked specifically, and I have it on so loud that I can’t hear anything else in the coffee shop. Usually, it’s to drown out the music they play at coffee shops. That drives me nuts. I want kind of my own music. And then I sit sort of in a corner where I can’t see people. I tend to have my back to people, and I pull the brim on my cap down real low. I know I look like an absolute freak. I know that. And then I just drink a lot of coffee, and I sit there with a notebook, and I write in script form. So it’ll say “Rat:,” “Pig:,” and then if there’s sort of a stage direction, I’ll put it in parentheses. And I just sit there, and I write like that. And for the first hour, it tends to be really bad, and I always want to get up and go home. And then after the first hour, sometimes two hours, the ideas start to come and more than not, the ideas come in bunches. So if you saw it on a graph, you’d see Hour 1: 0, Hour 2: 1, and Hour 3: 5. It just starts to all roll. And then after about three hours, I will drive home and then I draw a few. But it’s the writing I enjoy the most. When there are no ideas coming, it’s really tough, but by and large, writing is the exciting part. You never quite know what you’re going to find that day, and it’s a lot of fun. I think the only thing that really differentiates me from other cartoonists, and I’ve talked to a lot of cartoonists about this, is music. Most people like the room to be silent, and I don’t. I need the music. I need it to be really loud. So, yeah, that’s pretty much it.

FINBERG: Do you do your own inking and color work?

PASTIS: Yeah, I do. I do all that stuff. I ink them. If I didn’t ink them, they’d probably look a lot better. I ink them, and then I clean them up on the computer and add the Zip-a-tone on the computer and do the Sunday color on the computer. I think most cartoonists do that now. I know a couple like Patrick McDonnell (“Mutts”) who still does his Sundays. I think he watercolors them and then turns it into a color chart for American Color to add the color, but man, I couldn’t do that if I tried.


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© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Lee Salem, "Universal Press Syndicate" editor: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2

(Return to Part 1)

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: We talked about “The Boondocks” a minute ago, but do you think that Aaron McGruder will ever return, and what was the last you heard about this?

LEE SALEM: I know he is enamored of the whole Hollywood sensibility and the opportunities of Hollywood. I think he thinks that he can do a bit more creatively with animation, and I certainly understand that. I think that there are certain personality/creative types who are drawn to what comic strips can do whether on a newspaper page or the web, but I think other sensibilities respond to animation. I think Aaron’s talents are shown on a television show, and I doubt very much if he will return to the confines of a three or four panel a day strip.

ANDELMAN: Have you ever thought what it is that might be different about the culture at Universal compared to other syndicates, that, you have had these brilliant strips, these very unique strips, whether it be “Far Side” or “Calvin and Hobbes,” “Boondocks,” even “Doonesbury,” which has taken some long breaks? You don’t hear these same kinds of things happening at other syndicates. I mean, we never heard about Fred Laswell taking a year off from “Snuffy Smith,” for example, or giving up a popular strip like “The Boondocks.” Why does it seem to happen at Universal whereas we don’t hear about it from other syndicates?

SALEM: Well, the owners here asked me the same question with a slightly different tone in it: “Why is that happening to us all the time?” I think when the company was founded by John McMeel, who is now the CEO, and Jim Andrews, who ran the editorial side and, alas, died in 1980, I think they wanted to do things a little differently, and even in a very conservative medium like the comic page, tried to push out the boundaries a bit, and I think that is the flip side of the coin of being attracted to talents who are somewhat exotic and eccentric in the way they approach the art form. Garry, I think, really was the cornerstone of the editorial viewpoint that we had developed. We like people who try to do things a little differently, and sometimes that entails a slightly different attitude toward the definition of a career. You’re right. There are other cartoonists, and they are legion, who wouldn’t think about taking time off. I think when we announced a vacation program for our cartoonists, Charles Schulz was quoted as saying, “Well, I love this job; why would I ever want to take a vacation from it?” But I am not in a position to judge another person’s creative wellspring, and if our cartoonists sometimes think they need some time off, then we are going to try to accommodate them within certain limits. I think it’s the responsible thing to do for the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and I think if we had not had a time-off policy for someone like Trudeau, I think he would have given up the drawing board a long time ago.





ANDELMAN: Do you think that Universal has kind of looser reins on its artists than maybe others do?

SALEM: Yeah, that’s one way to describe it. Editorially, we are involved quite a bit. We spend a lot of time up front working with cartoonists on characters and development and trying to come up with a common understanding of where the strip might go in the future. I think that we have a reputation for standing with our artists. I think that’s a good thing more often than not, and I think that the artists respect us and like us for standing with them when they try to do something that is perhaps frowned upon by some newspapers. But in terms of loose reins, I am not sure if I would describe that, because we believe in the creative process, and we believe that the cartoonists, once they have developed a relationship with their readers, have a right to try certain things, and maybe it’s not so much a question of tight or loose reins but a different approach to creativity and how that is going to be reflected in the marketplace.

ANDELMAN: Lee, as you look back, if you would look back on Lynn Johnston’s separation from Universal, is there anything you wish you had done differently? And the reason I ask that is that was a tough time to lose a strip that had, I think, 1,800 clients, given that you had just lost, I think, within a period of time Watterson, Larson, and Erma Bombeck had died on the column side.

SALEM: Yeah, that was in a relatively short space of three years or so, and those are four people who left us for different reasons. Yeah, looking back, I am sure that there are things we could have done in our relationship with Lynn that would have encouraged her to renew with us. She decided she wanted to try something else, and we always know that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, and in this case, it wasn’t as green as perhaps she thought it was. It wasn’t too long into it before she called and tried to renew the relationship, and when the opportunity afforded itself contractually, she came back to us.

ANDELMAN: In terms of, and we should include her in the group we were talking about a little while ago about the kind of looseness of taking time off, who came up with the new plan where some strips will kind of repeat, and it’s going to be not fresh every day, or maybe you would want to describe that differently?

SALEM: Well, she has a very able team who works with her on different aspects of the strip and also assists her with licensing and other areas, and I think that in discussions up there, they kind of were moving toward this approach to the strip, and when it was presented to us, we talked about it and had some input here and some input there, but to us, it seemed like a nice midway point between either full retirement or keeping up with the daily grind of deadlines. So we are looking forward to seeing what happens, because I think it will be a blend of old and new, and I think it will be something a little different in the market. It won’t be strict reruns as such, and I think she is going to take some creative steps that this particular approach will allow her. I think it’s going to be good for newspapers and good for fans in newspapers and probably good for the strip.

ANDELMAN: And when will that start?

SALEM: Late September.

ANDELMAN: Okay. Let’s come back to “Cathy” for a moment. I was reading something that interested me. Cathy Guisewite had said that she was originally encouraged by her mother to become a cartoonist, that her mother went to the library, made up a list of syndicate editors to whom her daughter, who was kind of hesitant, should submit her admittedly maybe primitive drawings, and the first name on the list was you. Do you remember that package?

SALEM: I still have that package.

ANDELMAN: Oh, you do?

SALEM: I remember it very well. When I retire, it will be on eBay. It was one of those things, it was addressed to Jim Andrews, whom I have already mentioned, and at that time, the submissions came in to me, and it ended up at the top of my “In” box, and just by fluke, I just grabbed it and immediately loved the writing, and I put a little note on it saying, “I really love this writing, but the art…?” And it went to my out box, and that same day it ended up in the top of Jim’s in box, and he just happened to grab it, and we had a contract out to her the same day. And that’s what’s fun about this business is that things like that can happen. It’s still a great forum for Cinderella stories, and there is a talent out there yet who could send something in and six months later be in a hundred papers and a year from now be in 300 or 400 papers. It can happen that quickly, so it’s still a lot of fun, and that’s what keeps us going.

ANDELMAN: Which is more important, though, the art or the story-telling?

SALEM: Well, I think the times have shifted. People like Garry Trudeau and Cathy Guisewite, even some of the early Larson, the art was criticized by more established or more finished artists, but I think in those cases, the writing really kept things going until the art could catch up to the writing. I think now that we have been through that period of thirty, thirty-five years, "Dilbert" is another good example, I think that given readers’ habits and what newspapers are looking for, good writing will prevail over good art. I think it’s easier to sell good writing with less good art than it is to sell good art with less good writing.





ANDELMAN: I think I know the answer to this next question, but I am going to ask you any way. Cathy appears in easily more than a 1,000 newspapers, but it doesn’t get the same respect that some of your other strips do. As a matter of fact, it is often ridiculed in other strips. How do you explain its enduring popularity?

SALEM: Well, I think it is in some ways an iconic strip. I mentioned before that I thought in some ways she was a pioneer in this industry, and outside of “Brenda Starr,” which wasn’t really a humorous strip, and one or two earlier attempts, there really was not much in the comics pages for or by women in 1976, and this was the year in which, I may be off a year or two, but I think women were the people of the year at Time magazine. We were kind of waking up to the fact that half of our population really wasn’t being given opportunities the way they should be given, and I think “Cathy” was perceived as an example of that at that particular point. I think within a year and a half or two years of syndication, she had been invited to the White House and was involved in efforts for the Equal Rights Amendment, and I think that her long-time readers have come to accept that part of what she did for the art form and for newspapers. I think more recent readers look at the strip a little differently in terms of the small world in many ways that “Cathy” inhabits, but the writing has been consistent over the years, as has the art, and I think people have just come to accept what it is. You’re right. Some of her fellow cartoonists sometimes make fun of her style or the way she sets up jokes or the themes that she explores, but what’s interesting, I think two springs ago, she was honored by the National Cartoonists’ Society, and some of those very same cartoonists who might on occasion ridicule the strip were the first ones in line to shake her hand and give her a hug and ask for her autograph.

ANDELMAN: You have mentioned Cathy Guisewite as one of the first female cartoonists doing a daily and female-centered strip that really hit it big and then also seeking out an African American-based strip in “The Boondocks,” I recall that “For Better or For Worse” got you guys in some hot water at one point when -- is it Lawrence? -- who turned up gay? Are there any gay strips coming? Should there be?

SALEM: I haven’t seen any. I think that if that’s going to work, it would be less because it’s a gay strip than it is because it is a strip with characters, one or two of whom happen to be gay, if you see the emphasis difference there, but who knows? It would depend a lot on the writing and the sense of humor that the artist might employ.

ANDELMAN: It would be a lot trickier, I bet, to get that on the daily newspaper pitch. If you could point comics fans to one largely undiscovered Universal strip, what would it be?

SALEM: Oh, gosh, there are too many people that… I am looking at my wall. One of my favorites is from a panel we do, and the answer shows a guy standing there on the phone, and he goes, “Uh oh,” and the caption is reading… wait, it’s way across the wall… the caption says, “You find out that you are responsible for things you never knew you were responsible for,” and that’s the kind of humor that I particularly like. You are going to have to edit this. I am blanking out on the title of the panel.

ANDELMAN: I like that, actually.

SALEM: It will come to me before the interview is over.

ANDELMAN: All right. And if it doesn’t, you can tell me later, and I will add it in. Now, what strips distributed by your competitors would you like to have had a Universal?

SALEM: You know, I spend more http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.giftime thinking about what we’re doing and less about what the competitors are doing, so I am not really sure how to answer that. Obviously, any syndicate executive would have loved to have “Dilbert” before it took off the way it did, and there are other strips that are making a mark, like “Pearls Before Swine” and “Get Fuzzy.” But you know, I just finished reading a book called April 1865, which is about the last month of the Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln, and there is a scene in which Grant is talking to his generals, and he said, “Lee, Lee, I am tired to hearing about General Lee. What are we going to do?” And that’s kind of like the way I look at it. I worry less about the other syndicates are doing than what we ourselves are doing.

ANDELMAN: Well, let me ask you in a slightly different way, and you already mentioned…

SALEM: “Real Life Adventures,” by the way. It suddenly came to me.

ANDELMAN: That’s it, “Real Life Adventures.”

SALEM: “Real Life Adventures” is one of my favorite panels.

ANDELMAN: Okay. Now, Will Eisner used to tell a story about rejecting “Superman” when Siegel and Shuster were shopping it to New York publishers in the last 1930s. Do you have any similar stories of missed opportunities? You kind of referred a little while ago to “Dilbert.” I wondered if that might be one.

SALEM: I don’t know whether we saw “Dilbert.” We did see “Bloom County” early on, and he signed with the Washington Post Writer’s Group. The story’s here that somebody may have seen “Garfield” way back when, but I can’t confirm that one. It’s a small enough industry with only half a dozen or so major players that it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw one or two others that were picked up by the syndicates and did very well, and vice-versa. It happens in this business a lot, maybe not a lot, but it happens enough so that syndicate editors who are in charge of acquisitions are certainly aware that it’s a problem, and we try to be sure to look at things quickly when they come in.

ANDELMAN: How many submissions a year at this point?

SALEM: We get roughly fifty or sixty a week, so that’s 3,000 or so a year. Not all comics, of course, but a mix of things, puzzles and columns, etc., but everything has to be looked at to be sure that it’s something that we can use or not use.

ANDELMAN: I imagine you might have some good stories, but to what lengths have creators gone to get noticed by you and Universal?

SALEM: Well, there are some who just knock on the door and say, here I am, and sometimes we can see them, sometimes we can’t, depending on what’s going on. I do remember one person had a strip set on a tropical island. I forget the details of it, but for a week we were getting coconuts in the mail in advance. We would open this coconut and no note, no anything, and then maybe the third day there was a note, and by the fifth day, it was like, coming soon, and then we finally got the submission, so that was a creative way to do it, and we looked at it, but there wasn’t something we thought we could do much with. But I think people rely too much on fancy packaging and less on writing and art in the original material, and that’s the one thing I would encourage people interested in the art form, is to spend time on the writing, spend time on the art work, and then don’t worry about the quality of the package. Assume that the editors are going to do their job and read the material.

ANDELMAN: Lee, before we wind up, just a couple more things. Universal, of course, distributes far more than comic strips. It was the home of Erma Bombeck, it distributed my pal Chuck Shepherd’s popular “News of the Weird” feature, and it’s the home of conservative columnist Ann Coulter. Are there any internal conflicts being the distributor of political properties as diverse as Garry Trudeau and Aaron McGruder and Ann Coulter?

SALEM: Not so much conflicts. It’s interesting you would mention Ann Coulter and Aaron McGruder, because at one time, the same editor handled both, and I think he suffered from political whiplash if he had a week of “The Boondocks” come in the same day as a column by Ann Coulter, say. I think that newspapers and readers understand that syndicates are in the business to disseminate entertainment and disseminate ideas and disseminate discussion, and it would not do this company any good, nor do I think it would do newspapers any good, for us to come have a strong ideological viewpoint, personal strong ideological viewpoint that we try to purvey in the newspapers.

ANDELMAN: And I know that Universal has had some events, I guess the 25th or 30th anniversary, have those three ever been in the room together?

SALEM: No.

ANDELMAN: Okay. All right. I realize that Aaron, of course, is not doing “The Boondocks.” Is it still running in some places?

SALEM: We make it available online and in print for foreign newspapers.

ANDELMAN: Which of the three, Trudeau, McGruder, or Coulter, has caused you more sleepless nights or phone calls from nervous editors?

SALEM: Well, all three have presented a variety of problems, but I would have to put Garry Trudeau at the top of the list, only because that’s about as close as we ever came to getting sued. He did a week on Frank Sinatra receiving the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor that an individual can receive, and he did a week on Sinatra, just a blistering week, with alleged Mafia ties, etc., etc., and we had lawyered it inside, out, and backwards, and but that didn’t stop Sinatra and his lawyers, and we had some exchange of mail, and I really thought that this could be it, this could be the test of the First Amendment, but finally Sinatra’s lawyers backed off, but it was touch and go and our lawyers in the situation were terrific. The people we got problems from, of course, was the insurance company.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

David Michaelis, "Schulz and Peanuts" author: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1

Peanuts Treasury was the first hardcover book I remember getting as a kid, somewhere around 1968, 1969. I spent hours reading and re-reading it, losing myself in the comic misadventures of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, wishing I could be like Charles Schulz, the strip’s writer and artist. My first dog, acquired around that same time, was not coincidentally a beagle, like Snoopy, whom we named Peppy, and I loved that crazy dog. I was so fond of Peanuts Treasury that it’s one of the few prized possessions from my misspent youth that followed me through college, half a dozen adult relocations, and is now on my daughter’s bookshelf.

It’s hard to find anyone who has anything bad to say about “Peanuts” or Schulz. The strip’s creator lived and thrived in the pre-Internet age where the world didn’t demand every detail of a celebrity’s life be preserved and shared. For the most part, we knew only his good works and the enduring cartoon series based on them. In his new book, Schulz and Peanuts, biographer David Michaelis introduces readers to the real cartoonist behind the daily strip. Michaelis’ previous biographical work includes a history of painter N. C. Wyeth.

(Incidentally, the Schulz family – led by Sparky’s widow, Jean – has aggressively come out against the book they once authorized and with which they cooperated fully.)


BOB ANDELMAN/MR. MEDIA: You write in the book that different people called Charles Schulz by different names, depending, I guess, on their level of familiarity with him and his comfort level with them. What would you call him if you met him today?

DAVID MICHAELIS: In my dreams, and I do meet Sparky occasionally in my dreams, we’re on a first-name basis, meaning the time, as you know, you spend with a figure and you’re thinking about him and about his work and his life every day, you do occasionally meet up in a dream at night. And I’ve had a few where Sparky has called me “David” and I’ve called him “Sparky” and sometimes tried to judge his expressions. I’ve tried to make sense of what he thinks of all this, but in real life, I would call him “Mr. Schulz.” If I were opening the door of the Warm Puppy Coffee Shop at the Redwood Empire Ice Arena in Santa Rosa, I would walk in and walk up to his table and say, “Mr. Schulz, how do you do?” I think he had a certain level of formality and decency and a kind of calmness that inspired respect.

ANDELMAN: What was going on in your life professionally when this book came along, and how did it come along?

MICHAELIS: Well, I was two years away from a previous biography of an artist, N. C. Wyeth, and I felt very strongly when I saw that Charles Schulz had died that a piece of my childhood had just vanished. I was not unlike you in a very specific regard - I actually had a beagle, too. In fact, that dog came to us from the pound and was given to us as a dog named “Phooey,” and we thought that was a terrible name for a beagle, and so we renamed him “Pooey,” which is what stuck with us with this beagle.

I also had a Linus sweatshirt, and I was very much -- in that moment in 1967, 1968 -- of great self-identification with “Peanuts” characters. But actually, it was looking in these years of studying “Peanuts” as a biographer that I often came across one of Snoopy’s exclamations repeated frequently in the early years, “Phooey!” he would yell, and I figured that was probably why the previous owners had named our dog that.


I had a great, strong childhood feeling about “Peanuts”, and to find him now gone in the year 2000, which was in itself one of those years that people my age had been waiting for all our lives. The year 2000 was so far in the future and seemed so impossible that I wondered if I would even be alive. And to now find Charles Schulz gone within a month and a half of the turning of the millennium, it was a shock.

I remember thinking that when I saw “Peanuts” in its fullest accounting, in the New York Times, I remember there were small displays of the characters, small little introductions, sensing for the first time how these characters that I felt I knew so well might be connected to his work and to his life. And overall, my sense was, Gee, there is a moment here that maybe will close soon but in which Charles Schulz can be seen for the first time in the context of the times in which he grew up and in the times in which “Peanuts” was written and the times in which he himself changed and influenced through his work. I thought a big, full-length proper biography was not only due this American genius (but) I was still kind of mad at the Pulitzer Prize committee for not awarding Charles Schulz a Pulitzer Prize. He seemed not to ever have been undervalued as strongly as he felt he was, but I certainly felt he had been somehow overlooked in certain ways, and I thought if his life had been told perhaps in a more simplified way, then it might ultimately reveal greater complexity.

ANDELMAN: It’s one thing to have a thought in a vacuum that someone would make an interesting biography, and it’s another whole one to devote what, six, seven years of your life? How did you get the clearance early on to get the access to the people and the documents and everything else that you really needed to do something like this?



MICHAELIS: In thinking over Schulz, I put it aside thinking I had no business writing about Schulz, probably because I wasn’t known as or had not had adult professional training as a comics guy. I was not a writer about comics. I was a reader of comics but not a writer of them and never had written about comics in my professional life. But after I thought things over... As with some many of these things, I think the subject chooses you rather than you choosing the subject, two people came long in the next month or two after his death and said to me, apropos almost of nothing except it turned out my own inner doghouse thoughts, “Hey, did you know that Charles Schulz spent a good deal of his adult life wishing to meet Andrew Wyeth and hoping to know Andrew Wyeth or loved his work?” And I had just finished a biography of N. C. Wyeth and thought to myself, well, if there’s a connection to Andrew Wyeth, presumably there may be a connection to this whole world that I’ve just been living in of illustration, which was an undervalued art form in somewhat the same way that comics were.

I wrote to Charles Schulz’ widow, Jean Schulz and ten days later heard back, and Jean Schulz said that her husband, Sparky, she put it in the present tense, she said, “You’ll be glad to hear that my husband has your book, and it’s on the table beside the drawing table at home, and he was reading it in the last months of his life.”

It felt like not just a vote of confidence, but it almost had a “it was meant to be” feeling about it. I think Wyeth and Schulz are very different people, and there’s a very different story there, but to see this undervalued art form and relate it in some ways to comics was a starting point in some ways of understanding the comics of Schulz. But more than that, I felt strongly after looking into the images of Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, familiar images if you read those books and Scribner Illustrated Classics, and finding Wyeth’s life in them that this might be an approach to “Peanuts” and I felt strongly that there was more, there had to be more to “Peanuts” if it was as complex in nuance as it seemed to be, and it had to relate in some way to his life.

ANDELMAN: You heard back from Jean, and how much time went by before you actually got started?

MICHAELIS: I wrote to Jean in May, she wrote back, the month turned, and we were into June. We met in June, because I happened to be out in California at a wedding about two weeks later. She agreed to meet with me. We met. We spoke at length about the subject of a biography, and we both agreed to get started interviewing sooner than later, especially with the men who Schulz had known in the war. I think I learned recently from the Ken Burns documentary about WWII that now it’s up to 1,200 veterans a day dying off in 2007, so it was probably a slightly slower rate in 2000. But still, it was clear that to get to some of these men who knew him in the war, his neighborhood friends growing up, the folks who knew him at art instructioning would be a great thing for not only the book but also the archives of the Charles M. Schulz Museum, which was then pretty much still on the drawing board. I agreed that my notes and interview materials and research materials should all be placed into the research center at the Museum so that there would be a kind of nucleus in the archives there. I felt very strongly that that was a great thing to do and that it would be of some service to the whole idea of an archive.




I think that there was no question that people were still in grief about Schulz at the time, and my interviews began almost immediately. I still to this day wonder whether or not had I started a few years later, there might have emerged a different portrait. But people were really ready to talk to me about Sparky. I found in my earliest interviews that I almost couldn’t get a word in edgewise, and it’s true of interviewing, as you know; you go and see someone, and they have had a lifetime of experience with the person you are writing about, or they’ve had half a lifetime or anyway a long relationship usually, and there’s a lot to say. You really don’t need to say a thing. They want to tell their story.

Schulz had such a profound impact not only on all of us readers but those in his life, too, and that was the first awareness I had of some of Schulz’s, the nuances, the subtleties of Schulz’s character, but also, as I began to read the comic strip now in earnest, there was, to me, a whole world that was embedded and now was beginning to correspond to the things I was hearing about in his life. And then to go to his correspondence and his business papers with the syndicate, opening up those, there was a richness suddenly, a kind of three-dimensional -- I don’t know if you played it, but I remember as a kid, suddenly chess was played on Lucite on three, or checkers, in three levels at the same time. I always felt it was a little like that with the interviewing and the papers and the strip itself.

ANDELMAN: I suspect that a lot of the people that you interviewed, particularly the older people, found it easier to talk about Schulz shortly after his death than when he was alive, because he was very private, right?

MICHAELIS: Absolutely.

ANDELMAN: Did not want people talking about him, so they probably had decades of things that they wanted to tell.

MICHAELIS: Absolutely. Exactly. I think one of the complications that came up, the words I would hear about Sparky were that he was a wonderful man, as you and I would imagine, and that he was shy and that he was humble and that he was unchanged from his earlier days, usually, that he was generous and that he was fun and funny and had a sharp, edgy wit at times. There was always a moment in which someone would say, “But you know, there was more to it.” That’s all true, and there would be anecdotes and material presented along those lines and very warmly and very appreciatively.



ANDELMAN: Before we turned on the tape, we were talking, and I was telling you that I had done this biography of Will Eisner, another comics legend. And in doing that, I can still remember sitting at the dinner table with him one night when he started telling me about his children, something that he had never talked about before, and finding out -- I don’t want to make this about my book or Eisner -- at that moment that a lot of what had happened to him in the last thirty years had to do with the loss of his daughter as a teenager. I knew at that moment that that was going to be the electrifying moment of the book, and what I wondered about, was there a similar kind of an “a-ha” moment in researching Schulz and learning about Schulz, or was it a lot of things?

MICHAELIS: I think it was an accumulation, without question, but I had moment after moment where I was surprised to learn that Schulz was more complicated than I could have guessed and that I really was with everybody else, I expected a very specific kind of person, and my sympathies or my feelings about him grew and I became far more engaged with him as a man, as a person, than I had been before, because I found it fascinating. I found what I was hearing about him fascinating.

The whole theme of love, for instance. He had a very difficult time throughout his life, to hear the story told by those nearest him, to hear himself tell the story. Another great source for me was the interviews he had given to American newspapers over the years. He considered the newspaper his employer. He considered the managing editor of any newspaper who sent him a reporter to do an interview, he considered that person to be part of his job to respond to, so over the years, he made an account of his life. Sometimes it was day by day, week by week, and you could chart some of the changes in his views and his thinking as those went on.

Let me back up. I remember my first interview with Cathy GuisewGaryite (“Cathy”), the cartoonist, and I remember as I was leaving her office, she said, “You know, this is going to be fascinating for you because you are going to find out something right away. You are going to find out that Sparky is incredibly big and incredibly small at the same time.” Cathy, who had given a eulogy for Sparky some months earlier at his memorial service in Santa Rosa and clearly understood him and clearly was a trusted and beloved member of his. I’m not sure if inner circle is the right term, but she was a close friend and knew him. It wasn’t somebody looking in from the outside, she had known him, and I remember her saying to me in that first interview, “You know, he always wanted to know if he was loved. He would test you. He would test you to see whether you really loved him, and he wasn’t quite sure even then once you had made your declaration, even kiddingly, or even light-heartedly or even passionately or even with great depth of feeling, ‘I love you, Sparky.’” She wasn’t sure even then whether he could hear it.

I remember just before that seeing that last interview with Al Roker in which he, having had a stroke, in the context of his illness he was very vulnerable. The vulnerability of Charles Schulz was suddenly very much there for the whole world to see and that sense of vulnerability in which he was able to say, “I can’t believe that what I did, they loved what I did. I can’t believe that what I did, that they thought it was so good.” That even now, at the end, after all, wondering whether his work had been loved truly, whether he had been seen and understood, whether it was understood, that whole process that he had gone through in his entire life of becoming an artist, triumphing over doubts of all kinds in his background; his parents not thinking that a cartoonist would ever amount to very much; supporting him, trying to be the loving parents of an aspiring artist; his cousins being a little more cruel to him, saying, “You’re never going to make it. You’re never going to amount to anything,” but that he fulfilled expectations, that he exceeded all expectations and fulfilled himself but still could doubt whether or not what he had done was good. He would say to Gary Groth, the editor of The Comics Journal, very comprehensive interview at the end of his life, you know, “Have I had success? Do you think so?” and mean it. He wasn’t just jesting, he wasn’t being ironic, he really meant it. You hear it over and over again, Schulz doubting whether he’s loved, whether he’s seen clearly, whether he’s understood.

It goes back into some deep childhood stuff where he even said back at one point something the way Linus would be sent by Charlie Brown to talk to a little red-haired girl on the playground. I discovered that he had asked this Pudge Geduldig, stellar golfer on the St. Paul Central High golf team, to go back and talk to a girl that Charles Schulz, little Sparky Schulz, had been in love with, had a crush on on the Lake Street streetcar, and he just wanted Pudge to go back to St. Paul and ask her, “Did you notice him? Did you see him? Were you aware that there was this boy who had a crush on you?” Of course, this by then was the early 1970s, Charles Schulz, world-famous Charles Schulz could have picked up the phone and called Lila Bischoff and said “Hi, Lila, this is Charles Schulz. You probably don’t remember me. Ha, ha, ha, but gosh, I write the comic strip ‘“Peanuts”,’ and I just want to talk to you about the old days.” He would never have done that, and the whole feeling of being unseen and overlooked remained in his life. I felt very strongly, as I kept finding this out, as I kept learning, how he didn’t really want to free himself from a lifetime of yearning, longing, unfulfillment on the one hand, anxieties, fears, worries, in addition….


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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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David Michaelis, "Schulz and Peanuts" author: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2

(Return to Part 1)

BOB ANDELMAN/MR. MEDIA: One of the things that struck me was that he never really matured in some ways. Sometimes, we have these feelings when we’re a kid, we have them when we’re a teenager, that we don’t belong, that we don’t fit in, that no one understands us, but most of us sort of grow out of that, and by oh, I don’t know, 47, my age, you kind of feel like you are starting to get the hang of things, but I get the sense that he never did. He had children, and I am sure he loved his children, and he certainly loved his second wife, but as a member of greater society that maybe he just never did quite get it, he never did feel a part of things.

DAVID MICHAELIS: I think he was continuously aware that he didn’t quite fit in. I remember a quote that I used as an epigraph where he said, “Cartoonists don’t live anywhere.” I think he had a sense of disconnection from the world and from the world around him, and he was in such an odd place after a certain point in his life with the kind of success that “Peanuts” had, with the kind of really quite unique place that “Peanuts” was in the culture. As a cartoonist, he almost had to explain himself after a certain point because he was so much more than a cartoonist, and he kept things real for himself by living what he felt was… Well, he would live on his own terms, and he would live in an ordinary way.

I remember Clark Gesner saying this to me very early on. Clark Gesner was the fellow who did You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, who wrote the lyrics and composed the music and eventually was part of the team that put that musical into the theater in the 1960s. He had visited with Schulz and knew him to some extent, and he said, “You know, this is going to baffle you for the entire time you are working on it, because Sparky presented himself to the world as ordinary. He resisted being treated as extraordinary even though he knew he was.” Even though he knew he had this talent, and even though he knew it could project him and his work into extraordinary stratospheres undreamt of by a boy from Snelling and Selby Avenues in St. Paul, still he kept resisting anything like fame or celebrity, and he lived a life where he had to insist on being ordinary, and it put pressure on him. It put a lot of pressure on him because at the same time he yearned for recognition.

ANDELMAN: I think once one of your characters is a balloon in the Macy’s Day Parade, I think you have pretty well established some measure of success. A lot of the early headlines related to your book have had to do with that there is this darker side of him, that he had perhaps some psychological issues. Are you uncomfortable with that emerging so quickly and maybe that defining the book?

MICHAELIS: I am hoping, as all writers do, that the book itself is read and is read as carefully as the blogs and the stories about the book, because I think that in some ways this whole debate misses the point of why biography, which is to understand Charles Schulz as Schulz understood himself, not as his children understood him or as the world understood him but as he saw his life. That’s certainly the point of view from which I was trying to approach his life, both finding it through “Peanuts”, which is a more abstracted way of understanding how Charles Schulz knew the world, but how he in his own words understood.


If you take simply the issue of his melancholy, which is the word he used to describe the daily sense or weekly sense of angst and dread and strong feeling of doubt and, in some cases, even doom, this was the language he used to describe himself. There was never a diagnosis given by a doctor that was then embraced by Schulz and others about his condition, if you want to call it that, or his situation. But he himself understood himself to be doubtful, insecure, uncertain, fearful, worried. I could keep going, but it would all be too much all of a sudden to hear all of this without saying, as well, yes, “Did he enjoy life?” Well, you know, you couldn’t be literally a victim of clinical depression and be as productive as he was. There’s not a chance. You wouldn’t have found Charles Schulz doing what Charles Schulz did, which was to live with and overcome these things. In a real sense, he was Charlie Brown because the central quality of his life was fortitude. It was getting up every day and trying again.

ANDELMAN: I was going to ask you, were there periods in his life where he could not get up and produce?

MICHAELIS: No, that’s just it. You see, this is why his children quite rightly object to a world that’s saying, “Charles Schulz was an unhappy man, universally categorically across the board.” I think my book is a very sympathetic portrait of a guy overcoming and dealing with his worries. The central story of the book is the achievement of “Peanuts”, the achievement of creating this comic strip that became the world over beloved and embraced, and he became the most popular visual artist of the 20th Century. You couldn’t do that and be a depressed person, but you also couldn’t do that and be a normal person. We’re talking about an artist. We’re talking about a complicated artist, a guy whose complications were the stuff of his art, where he made conscious and deliberate choices not to get help for his struggles but to continue to tap into them and use them as the sources of his art.




ANDELMAN: One of the great devices in the book, I hope you don’t mind the term device, but one of the great devices in the book is that as you are reading, there are “Peanuts” comic strips that are dropped in that, among other things, besides being entertaining, they start putting his life and the things that he felt and the way he did things in context. I wanted to ask you, which came first, the anecdotes or the strip? Did you tailor the strips to match up with the anecdotes or vice versa? How did that all come about, and that must have been very time-consuming in and of itself.

MICHAELIS: The uncovering of the life, the revealing of the life in the slow, steady process or actually sometimes very sudden leaps that one makes at the beginning came first. In other words, as I spoke to people, as I gained some understanding from papers and documents and records of how Schulz had lived his life, how he saw the world, how he interacted with people, how he did and didn’t change at first glance from boyhood to adulthood, it was suddenly the big themes of unrequited love, the big themes of Schroeder’s devotion to art as something that will be making absolutely oblivious to this overpowering girl at the end of the piano asking for his attention, the longing for a little red-haired girl. You begin to see the big themes emerge in broad strokes, but then some little pieces of the puzzle float up, and suddenly there I am looking into a drawer and oh, there’s a picture of a girl, an attractive girl in probably the 1940s to judge from the dress and light and quality of the photograph, and then there’s the next time I’m in Minnesota asking one of his art instruction colleagues, “You know, there was this photograph, did you know…” “Oh, that’s Naomi Cohn. Everyone was in love with her.” “Sparky probably had a crush….” “Oh yeah, Sparky did have a crush on her. I remember…” suddenly emerging a figure of Naomi Cohn, and then suddenly I’m finding Sparky talking about her in several interviews now that hadn’t been out before, and suddenly a portrait is emerging, and because of the United Media database, the comic strip library, I could now go and type in Naomi, and then suddenly up would come, oh suddenly here in 1992, here’s Charles Schulz putting Naomi Cohn into a strip, and oh, yes, in fact, this character Naomi in “Peanuts” is wearing a beret, and that turns out to have been a characteristic of Naomi, the aspiring artist in Minnesota in the 1940s. Sometimes it was as simple as that, and sometimes it added complexity and richness to find something from his life in the strip either chronologically or thematically.



ANDELMAN: I thought about this a lot, but when my dad died a few years ago, I went through his personal affects and uncovered a number of things that disturbed me in a variety of ways. As someone who also writes biography, I have to admit I would never want someone picking through the bones of my life and discovering and magnifying as we do, I mean, that’s what we do for a profession, my mistakes and idiosyncrasies. I don’t want my wife to have to read, “Oh, well, all of his friends remember that he had this unrequited affection for Andrea Passer in high school, and 30 years later, he still thought of her.” Does that kind of stuff ever cross your mind when doing this kind of work? Do you ever have that moment of a little wince, maybe Sparky wouldn’t really like me writing about this, and maybe I shouldn’t? Maybe this I should set aside.

MICHAELIS: Clearly, the choices that led to a book that’s only, and I say, really mean only, 533 pages long, it shows how much I did have to leave out. It shows how severe the selection process is when the first draft of my thorough full-length manuscript was about 1,800 pages long, so to cover a life in a thorough way is by itself a kind of trick, and it is a distortion, and it’s an imperfect instrument for re-creating a life.

But I do believe that there is a way of looking at biography in the context of an artist’s life that makes it valid to do what I did, which is to present the life and the work together. I can tell you, absolutely, that if someone wrote a book about my father and said anything critical, I’d be unhappy, too. I well understand this, but I also believe, and it just jumped into my head, I actually haven’t even thought of this before now, this country embraced a story called The Bridges of Madison County, and in that story, a love affair is related to children who discover a trunk full of the evidence of this love affair in their mother’s life after she’s gone. It enhances the discovery, painful as it is, that she had this relationship during her marriage enhances their sympathy and understanding for what she went through as a person and for who she really was, and the truth hurts. Sometimes along with the hurt that goes with truth is a greater sympathy and a greater feeling of love for someone because you now know more of who they were rather than less.

If what I’ve written about Charles Schulz makes people who love him uncomfortable, I have to believe that if you read it carefully and think it through, that there is enough there to love him the more for who he was despite himself and despite the world that he was trying to grow out of. We all have limitations, and one of the things I kept bumping up against with Schulz was the sense that he had triumphed over limitations, and his limitations were always visible to him, indeed down to the very last strip of ““Peanuts”.” The very last daily strip is Snoopy pondering a snowball while a snowball fight is going on behind him that he can’t participate in because, as the caption says -- and it’s not a thought balloon -- it was a caption, the dog realized that his father hadn’t taught him how to make a snowball. That’s the last statement of ““Peanuts”.” It’s a statement about limitations. It’s about being alone with who you really are and what you were taught and what you were given, and I think it’s very important, if you’re going to try to understand Schulz at all or you want to believe that you know who he was, to know where he came from and how he dealt with the world that he grew up in and how he brought it into his adult life and what he did and didn’t understand of his own life is very important to see.




ANDELMAN: Just a couple more minutes, David. You’ve been very patient about this, and particularly you brought up his last strip, and I wanted to ask you about that. The coincidence that his last strip appeared the day that he died is too much for some skeptics. One comic fan I spoke to in preparing to talk to you insisted that I ask you this: Is there any chance that either his passing was withheld from announcement to coincide with that last strip because the two were so close? And he insisted that I ask you this, is there any chance that Schulz either so to speak pulled the plug himself or had a family member do it so that he and the strip went out together?

MICHAELIS: It is a completely valid question, and I was asked it frequently by the reporters, such as Steve Kroft from “60 Minutes” who had seen Schulz before his death, in the year before his death. Reporters and smart, engaged thinking people who interacted with Schulz understood one of the simplest and basic facts about him, which he himself had put out there for years, which is that he always said, “When I die, the strip dies.” He also always said, “I would feel very empty without this strip.” And in one case, he had joked around saying, “If I didn’t have the strip, I’d be dead.”

He had time and time again showed how fused he believed his life and the strip were. And in the dismay and upset of the months that followed his stroke in November of 1999, in the dismay of realizing he was not going to be carrying on ““Peanuts”,” he was profoundly shaken, and you see it in the interviews he gave at the time. And there’s ample evidence to understand how completely baffled he was about how he was going to go on and what life meant now. So that to find some way to end his life as the strip ends would be logical.

I have to say that in every way I looked at this, without going into a full-scale Congressional investigation into it, I had to believe that no, he did not, or no, he was not, or no, there was no assistance. It would be inconsistent with everything I found to believe that that was true.

However, I do think that as I understand it to myself, I think he somehow witch-doctored himself to that point. One hears about it all the time, the giving up of life, the giving up. Whatever your belief system is, it can engage in this question, whether he gave himself up or whatever. However you see it. But the medical terminology given to me to understand this by his family, by his doctor, is just vague enough still to make one wonder, and there’s no question that the question is valid, but I think I would have to conclude myself from everything that I could find at the time that no, he went by natural causes.

ANDELMAN: Last question: were there any other parts of this Charles Schulz puzzle that you were unable to solve after all these years?

MICHAELIS: Well, I wished from the beginning -- and I still wish -- that the clear evidence of his relationship with his mother had been left on paper more than by the hearsay and very considered evidence left by people who knew her and given in interviews. I wish there were her letters I wish she had written to him. I wish there was on paper some way of seeing how she and Sparky had lived their life, the life of his boyhood, and whether or not there’s any chance to understand his parents remains to be seen. There may yet come some moment where out of a shoebox comes all sorts of letters from his early life. I felt that was a puzzle that I could only guess at or only become closer to understanding through the interview process and through a lot of legwork in historical societies turning out. Just seeing her death certificate and understanding that her death was a death by cervical cancer and not from colon cancer led through numerous channels of research and interviewing to new ideas about why Schulz had had the kind of experience that he had in high school during her illness and so forth.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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