‘Funny Things: A Comic Strip Biography of Charles M. Schulz’
By Luca Debus and Francesco Matteuzzi
Top Shelf Productions, 440 pages

Charles Schulz, in his comic strip “Peanuts,” achieved extraordinary effects that I have never been able to explain. I suppose that is the point: There is something magical about the lives of characters that he, too, in this comic strip biography cannot articulate.

For me, Schulz’s art is epitomized in one word: “Lambcake!” The name is what Floyd — his name is not divulged until a later strip — calls Marcie. She is outraged at the interloper and bonks him. She thinks he is making fun of her, when in fact it is his term of endearment.

As soon as I saw “Funny Things,” I thought of “Lambcake!” and tried again to figure out why it was so funny and why I’ve never been able to forget it, and why telling Schulz’s life in a comic strip seems like such a satisfying way to do biography.

I noticed on Amazon a disgruntled reader complained the book lacked depth. That’s like saying a film is not a novel, or a novel is not a poem. The panels of “Funny Things” capture Schulz’s life as that of an artist whose joy and despair were packed into creating his strip, which he doggedly worked at in his early years while encountering rejection after rejection. In scene after scene, Schulz is shown in panicky fits, worrying when nothing seems to work.

As I write, I’m looking at “Funny Things” on my iPad, which allows me in an app to deploy nine panels at a time, as if I’m storyboarding the biography, the way a filmmaker establishes mise en scène.

I scroll down to the sequence in which Schulz opens an 8 x 11 envelope with the caption, “Fragile: Contains Dreams.” In the next panel, young Schulz tells his teacher it is from Collier’s, followed by a panel in which he reads the message, “Does not suit our present needs.” In the next panel, Schulz stares at the words, dumbfounded, before he erupts in the following panel with an irate shout: “You betrayed me!”

Subsequent panels depict Schultz stuffing mailboxes with submissions, saying to the Saturday Evening Post, “You’re next.”

“Funny Things” captures an artist’s relentless pursuit of his art and his self-doubt, a maniacal cycle that has to be seen to be believed. What is so pleasing about this book is the sense of anticipation, of what is about to happen — and then how it happens, a panel at a time, perfectly framed.

Schulz’s family life, his religious faith, his romances and his divorce are all on view — as is his openness to experience even as, like many artists, he has periods when he shuts himself away from loved ones in an obsessive devotion to drawing that becomes impossible to explain to anyone, including himself. 

A few panels get at precisely the appeal of “Peanuts,” when Schulz tells his beloved: “I take pride in pioneering the—what I call—slight incidents in comic strips, where situations are funny rather than actions.” That panel shows Schulz with a meditative look and with one finger raised, as if in instruction.

The next panel is a work of genius: Schulz’s characters are shown in the bottom third of the panel as tiny figures in silhouette, as if emerging from the artist’s imagination just below the surface of consciousness: a boy — it is not clear which Schultz character it is — points at a similarly undefined little girl as if he is telling her something. Two-thirds of the panel is taken up with the elder Schulz continuing his point: “I was one of the first cartoonists to implement very strong and idiosyncratic personalities in a strip, mixing situations and characters to achieve humor.”

Schulz does not sound off this way very often in “Funny Things,” but at this later stage of his career he has earned the right to pontificate, and he does so only momentarily.

In the main, this is a media reas book. Like a conventional biography, “Funny Things” has a beginning and an end, but it is saturated with the idea of a life, and an art, that is on the go.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Marilyn Monroe Day by Day,” “William Faulkner Day by Day,” and “Sylvia Plath Day by Day.”