You likely know all about Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus and the rest of the Peanuts cast, but how much do you know about their creator? Top Shelf Productions, a division of IDW, has released a new biography of the man his friends called “Sparky,” but it’s unlike any other biography on the market. This one is told through the medium he forever affected, the form of a comic strip.
There have been plenty of books written about Schulz at this point, but none that “speak his language” quite like this does. Luca Debus and Francesco Matteuzzi recreate the events of Schulz’s childhood and young adult career through four-panel dailies, properly timed gags and “throwaway panels” in the Sunday editions.
“Charles Schulz stated several times that he never created any art in his lifetime,” says artist and co-writer Luca Debus. “He believed cartoons belonged to the fleeting nature of newspapers and therefore couldn’t stand the test of time. With this book, we want to prove him wrong. By narrating his life, we celebrate his legacy as arguably the most influential cartoonist to ever live and try to understand his complex identity as both the man and the artist behind Peanuts.”
“While Schulz was working on his last strip, looking back on five decades of Peanuts characters and situations, he laughed and said: ‘I really drew some funny things,’” says co-writer Francesco Matteuzzi. “That phrase, Funny Things, stuck with me since I first read it: it’s both accurate and a huge understatement of what he accomplished. So simple, and yet so powerful, just like the strips he left us which we will cherish forever.”
Funny Things: A Comic Strip Biography of Charles M. Schulz is now available online and at bookstores everywhere.
