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Comics!

Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #28

Oh, you comicking booksters! Here's two pieces of comicky news for you guys.

Oh, you comicking booksters!

Here's two pieces of comicky news for you guys.

1. This pilot for an animated show based on Plastic Man is making the rounds on the internet. It was created by Tom Kenny, aka Spongebob, and Stephen Destefano, an amazing cartoonist who did a lot of Ren & Stimpy work. It seems to be largely based on Kyle Baker's hilarious take on the character.

2. People are really getting into commenting on the new Spider-Man character, Miles Morales, who assumes Spider-Man's costume and superhero identity after Peter Parker dies in an alternate continuity universe. This isn't just fiction, it's non-canonical fiction. I was interviewed on NPR about this and you can still listen to it here and read more about it here. I'm suspect of shit like this being pandering, but if it works it works. Making Nick Fury look exactly like Samuel L. Jackson in the Ultimate universe made sense and worked. This could work too. Comics are an important art form and I think they deserve more time in the spotlight, but this is one of those cases where it seems like the world's lost its mind. Our country's going down the drain. Why is this news?

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So that's the news.

The Complete Peanuts 1981 -1982
Charles Schulz
Fantagraphics

This week I am talking about the new volume in the Complete Peanuts series from Fantagraphics. I expected that the quality of the Peanuts comics would be waning by now, but I'm still laughing at the jokes and recognizing the personalities of characters I know in the gang. The introduction is by the cartoonist behind For Better or For Worse, which I always found really boring, but everything else about this book is pretty great. It's a beautifully designed, thick, brickish volume with lots of memorable storylines. The strongest one involves Peppermint Patty believing that she witnessed a butterfly turn into an angel and everyone thinking she's an idiot. Snoopy's brother Marbles is introduced. Marbles can communicate with Snoopy but he still finds Snoopy's behavior strange. Sally goes away to Beanbag camp and comes back adorably pudgy. Marcie admits to Charlie Brown that she's always loved him and in the same breath acknowledges that he could never love her. Snoopy plays more mixed doubles tennis tournaments with an awesome meanie named Molly Volley, and they compete against Crybaby Boobie and Bad Call Benny. All in all it's a beautiful two years worth of Charles Schulz's creative output. It'll make you laugh, it'll make you think.

I am very excited to present a brief interview with Charles Schulz's son, author Monte Schulz.

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VICE: The contents of Peanuts 1981 – 1982 is strong throughout, and the standout series of strips is clearly the butterfly miracle story. That's the one in which Peppermint Patty is tricked by Marcie into believing that a butterfly that had been sitting on her nose and fanned off had in fact turned into an angel. She tells everyone about her religious experience and they laugh at her. Do you have any insight into what inspired this story?
Monte Schulz: No, I don’t remember the genesis of that particular story, but my father was always interested in theology and philosophical questions. For several years when we first arrived in California, he taught Sunday school at our local Methodist church, not so much to evangelize his personal experience with the New and Old Testaments, but, I think, to engage in theological dialogue. His office held several volumes of Bible commentaries and studies of both Testaments, and, of course, copies of the Bible itself, in both King James and Revised Standard translations. Among his friends over the years were Robert Short, author of The Gospel According To Peanuts, and Father Lombardi, a Catholic priest with whom Dad played golf. He loved engaging both these men and other church people in conversations illuminating Biblical and theological topics, but he also held firm to his own beliefs, which were both traditional and fluid.

During his youth, he belonged to the Church of God, yet maintained later in life that he was a humanist. His favorite quotation from the Bible came out of Hosea and says that God desires mercy, not sacrifice. He believed in a personal understanding of theology, and that point of view directed his use of the Peanuts characters in expressing and discussing a variety of philosophical conundrums.

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What do you think of the comics contained in this volume? Do you remember what you thought of them at the time of their creation?
The early 80s were a strange time for us. In 1981, Dad underwent quadruple bypass surgery after feeling in poor health for most of the previous year. The idea of surgery terrified him, but the medications he’d been taking had left him so debilitated that surgery became the option he was forced to consider. So he had the procedure and survived, and found a wealth of material from the experience, which he poured into his strip. Even before leaving his hospital room, he drew his characters on the walls, took a get-well phone call from President Reagan, and discovered a new strength of purpose after having undergone that traumatic experience.

I think that stressful time in his life gave him new enthusiasm about simply being alive and healthy. Also, he and Jeannie built a home together in the foothills above Santa Rosa, finally solidifying their life together. Dad traveled quite a lot, back and forth to France and England, and those experiences inevitably found their way into the strip, which took on a more expansive and varied tone, and I believe this volume proves that out.

It's often assumed that Charlie Brown was your father's surrogate, but did your dad have anything in common with Snoopy?
I’m not sure there was any specific surrogate for my dad, at all. Certainly there are elements of Charlie's personality and point of view and sensibility that could have been found in my father, but the same can be said for many of his characters. In, Snoopy, though, I guess we could argue that his sense of wonder and imagination is given room to expand and travel in an extravagant direction. Like any of us, Dad had a silliness and fun and foolishness that he drew into Snoopy, and I think that’s how this character evolved. I think Dad realized it was possible for Snoopy to be more than a real dog, just as in our lives we find now and then the opportunities to be more than our everyday selves.

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This book introduces another sibling of Snoopy's—his brother, Marbles. Marbles seems even more aware of how weird Snoopy is than the human children. When introducing a new character do you know if there was a lot of consideration given to the balance of the cast? Was Marbles added on a whim to serve the jokes that your father came up with?
Yes, it seems to me that most of the characters arose out of Dad’s need to expand situations within the strip, or to give voice to something occurring to him out of blue skies. I don’t think he had a carefully considered plan of characters. That’s not really how he thought. He just let his imaginations travel in many directions, and if he thought an idea seemed funny, he’d usually let it find expression. And if the idea of Snoopy having a brother or a cousin allowed something funny to occur, he’d create that character.

Likewise, the idea of an opposing neighborhood baseball team competing against Charlie Brown’s gang gave appearance to Peppermint Patty and Thibault, just as having the characters play tennis allowed him, or compelled him, to create a Molly Volley.

What's your reaction to Fantagraphics’ Complete Peanuts series as a whole?
I’ve always felt the Complete Peanuts were the best commercially licensed product to come out of the Peanuts strip, because these books are the strip itself. Before I knew anything about Fantagraphics or had ever spoken with Gary Groth, I loved how those books were presented. They’re lovely. I was thrilled. And I’ve been impressed by the introductions to each volume, by the variety of personalities and what each has had to say about my father’s work. It’s been fantastic.

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I understand that you've assumed the reins of the Santa Barbara Writer's Conference, which my grandfather created a few decades back. Charles Schulz was a frequent guest. When did you start attending? What led you to reviving the conference?
The first conference I attended was back in 1975 when I was writing poetry. I drove down to Santa Barbara with my girlfriend and spent the week at the Biltmore and sat in on the poetry workshops where I read a long narrative poem on California I’d written that year. It had resonances of Carl Sandburg’s longer pieces, both lyrically and thematically, and received a wonderful response from my audience, which made my dad proud. I came back the following year with another long poem, and enjoyed Santa Barbara so much that I applied to the graduate program at UCSB for English.

Once I was admitted to the UCSB, and moved down there, I went to the conference each year to hear Dad, and eventually started dropping in on the late-night workshops to read parts of a novel I’d decided to write. Viking published that book, Down By The River, in 1990, and ten years later, a year after Dad died, I began teaching a workshop in style and voice at the SBWC. The founders of the conference, Barnaby and Mary Conrad, eventually sold the conference to Marcia Meier of Santa Barbara, and our recent economic downturn forced her into bankruptcy, putting the conference dark for two years. By then I’d written a thousand-page novel set in the spring and summer of 1929, called Crossing Eden. I read sections of it at the conference during the 90s, then broke it into three books, and found a publisher, of all places, with Gary Groth. Since the conference reminded me so much of my dad and had given me the forum in which to exhibit my book, I finally decided to buy it out of bankruptcy, and this past summer my fiancé, Nicole, and I put it on again. Barnaby Conrad III came down to help me MC the event, and it was a great success, pleasing both of us quite a lot.

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I have a copy of Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life, which you edited with my grandfather, on my shelf. Tell me more about your career as a writer.
I suppose it’s clearest to say that I became the writer I am today back in about 1972, when I discovered music. Although I remember writing a couple of stories when I was in grade school, loosely based on the H.G. Wells novels I was reading back then. Really nothing I write today has anything to do with that. I began writing by creating my own lyrics to songs by the Rolling Stones or Donovan or the Beatles, then teaching myself guitar and composing my own melodies. When Dad saw I had a facility for lyric phrases, he gave me Carl Sandburg to read, and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, then Joan Didion’s essays, and finally John Steinbeck’s East Of Eden, and, his favorite of all, Thomas Wolfe.

I gave three years to poetry, then wrote two short stories, a handful of Didionesque essays, and decided I wanted to write my own Great American Novel. Of course, being in my early 20s, that first attempt was awful. Some turns of phrases and lyrical descriptions were pretty good, but the story was clunky and the dialogue pretty terrible. So I gave it up and entered grad school and began reading and reading and reading, and learning how to write.

Reading was very important, and both my dad and my graduate classes provided a conduit in the literary world I would never have discovered on my own. So writers such as Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ross Lockridge Jr., Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurty, James Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, and dozens of others, inspired stylistic and structural improvements to my own writing. I wrote my master’s thesis on small town America and wrote a crime novel set in a small town that was published in 1990, called Down By The River.

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Writing and researching and constructing Crossing Eden took ten years, and when I was done, my dad told a friend that had I continued to write and sell books like Down By The River, he would’ve been happy for me, but that he was proud of me for tackling a truly big and ambitious literary novel. He read most of the manuscript before passing away in 2000. Two years later, with the blessing of my literary agent at the time, Sterling Lord, I broke the book into three novels, eventually selling them to Gary Groth for Fantagraphics, which had just published its first prose novel, Alex Theroux’s 800-page Laura Warholic.

The idea of my big book was to say as much about America in the spring and summer of 1929 as possible, and I decided to do this by creating essentially three novel-length stories set in three distinct geographical locations and linked by related characters. So, one story takes place in the five states of the Midwest—This Side Of Jordan. The main character is a tubercular farm boy named Alvin Pendergast.

The other two parts of the big novel involved a husband, Harry Hennesey, and his wife, Marie (whose cousin is Alvin). Harry’s novel is called The Big Town, and Marie’s story is The Last Rose of Summer. The essence of these two stories came from my mother’s experience when her father sent his family to East Texas for a year or so while he worked in St. Paul, trying to improve his financial situation. In my book, Harry Hennesey sends his wife, Marie, and their two children down to his mother and sister’s house in a small town, Bellemont, in East Texas, while he takes a room in a boarding hotel in the city somewhere. Marie’s story illuminates issues of family, racism, and religious intolerance in the deep South during that era, and Harry’s novel recreates the atmosphere of metropolitan America where love, death, business, immigration, prohibition, crime, social status, and one’s place and purpose in the society are debated and experienced through a variety of characters and circumstances.

Two of the novels, The Last Rose Of Summer and This Side Of Jordan, are in the marketplace right now, and are available in bookstores, on Amazon, or directly from Fantagraphics. The Big Town will be published this winter. I am incredibly pleased with all three and look forward to the entire thing being put back together and published as Crossing Eden, probably in 2013.

Thanks for talking to me, Monte!

I'll see you all you comics fans next week in this very column.

NICK GAZIN