In charting Schulz's life and career, Michaelis does a wonderful job of showing how both the Peanuts strip and its characters evolved. He notes that unlike Pogo and Li'l Abner, which were dense with "business," Peanuts was full of empty spaces and "didn't depend on action or a particular context" to hold the reader's attention. Rather, it "was about people working out the interior problems of their daily lives without ever actually solving them."
He observes that Charlie Brown developed from a somewhat cocky kid into a "stoical Everyman" ("a decent person," as Michaelis puts it) in response, in part, to the growing aggressiveness of Lucy, who evolved from a cute little girl into a domineering force of unreason "in the lineage of Lewis Carroll's Red Queen and James Thurber's controlling wives."
Snoopy, the beagle with Chaplin-esque moves and Quixote-like dreams, took the longest to develop fully. He started out as a smart but ordinary enough dog who walked on four legs and lived in an ordinary doghouse and became an exuberant creature who "often treated Charlie Brown and his friends as if he were their intellectual superior" while tolerating the foolish human things they did.
Snoopy skied, he surfed, he played tennis and golf, and he wrote (or at least started) a novel. His doghouse came to be furnished with a pool table, books, records and a van Gogh, and he would spend more and more time battling the Red Baron in his trusty Sopwith Camel.
At the same time his internal monologues increasingly came to reflect his creator's own musings and confusions. As Schulz's long first marriage began to unravel, Snoopy wondered about love and loss, and when Schulz became enamored with a young woman, Snoopy fell in love with a girl beagle at the Daisy Hill puppy farm. Both Schulz and Snoopy also developed crushes on the skating sensation Peggy Fleming.
By the late 1980s Peanuts had become a worldwide phenomenon, a merchandising empire generating more than US$1 billion a year and spreading "tens of millions of plush Snoopys the world over from Argentina to Zimbabwe, Congo to Togo, Norway to New Zealand, Cameroon to Canada." One of the first comic strips to deal with its characters' inner lives, a strip built upon its creator's own anxieties and losses had become, Michaelis writes, the "most widely syndicated cartoon on the planet, read by five percent of the world's literate population."
In December 1999, Schulz addressed a letter to his hundreds of millions of readers, announcing that he was going to retire; no one would succeed him in drawing the strip. Two months later, on Feb. 13, 2000, "the Sunday paper carrying his last cartoon arrived with the stunning news that Charles Schulz had died in his sleep of complications of colon cancer," Michaelis writes. "Just hours later the final Peanuts strip appeared in newspapers around the world. To the very end, his life had entwined with his art. As soon as he had ceased to be a cartoonist, he ceased to be."
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