Family Made Wealthy By Some of the World's Most Depressing Comics Objects to 'Depressing' Label

Rats.

David Michaelis first contacted the family of Charles M. Schulz seven years ago about writing a biography of Schulz, the creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip. It turned out that Schulz had read Mr. Michaelis’s biography of N. C. Wyeth, and that Schulz’s son Monte also liked the writer’s work. He ended up helping persuade the rest of the Schulz clan to cooperate with Mr. Michaelis, granted full access to his father’s papers and put aside his own novel writing to help him.

But Monte Schulz said that when he read Mr. Michaelis’s manuscript in December, members of the family were shocked by the portrayal of a depressed, cold and bitter man who was constantly going after different women.

Right. Where would anyone get the idea that Schultz might be a cold and bitter depressive? (Those two beams of sunshine are the first Peanuts strips.)

Sarcasm fully off now: WTF, Schultz family? Were you all raised in the Joe Cool era, when the entire comic enterprise had been irreparably Garfield-ified? Schultz's good stuff obviously came from a dark place, and a person's depression doesn't just go away once the MetLife endorsement checks start rolling in.

If Charlie Brown Schultz was able to put aside an obviously pitch-black view of humanity and deliver an an idyllic childhood unto you, that makes all the more worthy of a biography. And a better than average dad.