They’re not just for laughs

“I think what we’re waking up to is how much of the culture was expressed through the work of 20th century cartoonists, whose lives are still obscure to us,” says David Michaelis, whose “Schulz and Peanuts,” a landmark biography of Charles Schulz, was just released. Landmark, in that it’s the most significant work written about one of the century’s undisputed pop culture giants but also in that it’s the most exhaustive biography ever of an American cartoonist.

Michaelis’ book is part of a wave of cartoon history reclamation -- a public recognition, much as when cinematic talents like Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray were reclaimed by filmmakers and critics in the 1960s and ‘70s. The same questions surrounding their films are now asked of cartoons: What is their worth? Can pop fun double as deeper art? And as Peter Bogdanovich once put it, who the devil made them?

The artists in question in two published books, and one upcoming, are Schulz, Milton Caniff and Jack Kirby. They turn out to have been men struggling with life in a changing post-World War II America, a complicated, frequently touching struggle they put on the comics page.

“Cartooning has been entering a period of reasonable cultural acceptance,” says the graphic novelist known as Seth (“Palookaville,” “Wimbledon Green”). “That window could close at any moment, but right now, thank God, we are getting a detailed, loving biography of Charles Schulz out of it.”

Los Angeles plays a central role in this new conversation. MOCA and the Hammer Museum launched the “Masters of American Comics” show in 2005, and movie studios and television networks release seemingly monthly adaptations of comics and graphic novels. In the literary world, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, Rick Moody and Michael Chabon essay cartoonists as earlier writers once fancied boxers and bullfighters. Chabon’s Pulitzer-Prize winning “The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” was based on the early days of the comic book world, specifically men like seminal superhero creator Kirby.

The new bios appear alongside complete reprintings of their life works -- respectively, “The Complete Peanuts” (Fantagraphics), “The Complete Terry and the Pirates” (IDW), and “The Complete Dick Tracy” (IDW) -- and in Schulz’s case, that’s more than 17,000 strips. According to the biographers, the interest comes from old fans in high places and new fans just discovering the work. “It coincides with the emergence of the graphic novel as a legitimate literary form,” says R.C. Harvey, author of the nearly 1,000-page Caniff bio “Meanwhile . . .” (Fantagraphics). “The sophistication of the writing and skills of the artists have brought about a dawning public awareness of the comic book as an art form.”

Michaelis, whose biography of N.C. Wyeth was the last book Schulz read before dying in 2000, says: “There’s this generation of Chris Ware, Seth, Dan Clowes and, of course, godfather to them all, Art Spiegelman. The graphic renaissance that we’re in has a profound grounding in comics history.”

Indeed, Ware himself designs and packages the complete reprint series of Los Angeles cartooning genius George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” (Fantagraphics) as well as Frank King’s “Gasoline Alley” (Drawn & Quarterly). Seth currently designs “The Complete Peanuts.” For DC Comics, screen and comics writer Mark Evanier coordinates the first chronological reprinting of Kirby’s “Fourth World” books, on which he worked as a teenage assistant 37 years ago.

“People who grew up on this stuff are now book publishers and editors, and they have buying power,” Evanier says. “There’s also a sense that a lot of people have that we’re losing a generation. There’s a rush to encapsulate history.”

In Kirby’s case, the man who gave us the Hulk, the Fantastic Four and Iron Man spent much of his life as part of the postwar “lonely crowd,” struggling to fit into one corporate environment after the next. Despite a rough childhood in New York’s Lower East Side tenements, he grew up tremendously self-confident. Before enlisting as an infantryman in World War II, he created Captain America, the blond, blue-eyed all-American hero. Shipping out, Kirby the street kid shrugged it off, saying, they “handed me a chocolate bar and an M-1 rifle and told me to go kill Hitler.”

However, Kirby came home from a particularly violent tour of duty in Europe. He started up a suburban family on Long Island but suffered weekly nightmares from the war until he died in 1994. After 15 years of struggling in the comics business, with bullying editors demanding kickbacks from him in exchange for work, he landed at Marvel in 1961, a bottom-of-the-barrel publisher. There he co-created outsider heroes like the X-Men, a far cry from his Captain America. He offered angry, depressed monster-heroes like the Thing and the Hulk, who looked like the villains in Superman stories. “Before Jack, a superhero comic was about one thing. It was about beating the bad guy. The world changed when Kennedy was shot,” Evanier says. “It was changing before that, but now you had a generation of kids come in, the baby boomers, and just as they were ready for something new in music like the Beatles, they were ready for it in comics.” Kirby turned Marvel into a powerhouse, quit for rival DC in 1969 and moved his family to Irvine. There, in the finale to his career, his “Fourth World,” he created the first comics epic, a “Lord of the Rings”-size dysfunctional family vision portraying good and evil as too entangled to ever be truly separate.

Caniff’s “Terry and the Pirates” debuted in 1934 and soon introduced a cinematic storytelling technique to the comics page, so early into the sound era that filmmakers like Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock told him they cribbed ideas from him for camera set-ups. He found stories in the day’s headlines, and American kids reading Terry’s adventures saw a kid like themselves smack in the middle of the Japanese invasion of China. “He made characterization a driving mechanism of his stories,” Harvey says. “The tragic thing about Caniff, in a way, is that the story of his life is the realization of the American dream. From a small town in southern Ohio, he was the first of his family to go to college and made a huge success of himself with ‘Terry and the Pirates.’ When World War II came along, he was among the first to put his characters on the battlefield with a hard-nosed, realistic portrayal of men in war.”

Then “he took Canyon [star of his second major strip, ‘Steve Canyon’] into war in Vietnam much in the same spirit as he had Terry in World War II. But suddenly that kind of patriotism was no longer popular, and he lost newspapers in droves.” As for Schulz, his strip was a phenomenally popular touchstone for the nation, and for more than one world if you count the Apollo astronauts landing on the moon in their capsule, Charlie Brown, and their lunar rover, Snoopy.

Michaelis’ book has surprised some Peanuts readers (and Schulz family members) with the emotionally distant, not always cuddly genius he describes. Schulz was drafted after Pearl Harbor, went to Europe and saw combat during the last weeks of the war. We can add to that his mother’s death from cancer the week he left for the army, his conversion to evangelical Christianity during the war, his division discovering the Dachau concentration camp and a heartbreaking postwar romance with, yes, a red-headed girl. That all happened by age 27, when Schulz’s first “Peanuts” strip came out. “I’m being a bit reductive,” Michaelis says, “but the 1950s were called the Age of Anxiety. This was a comic strip born in the Cold War, a neurotic age, an age of uncertainty, masked with great abundance and prosperity. For Charlie Brown to say, ‘I’m depressed, I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to,’ is a recognition of Eisenhower’s America, what was just beneath the surface of it.

“Schulz wasn’t a rebel. He was a true subversive within the system. In the ‘50s, so many things were supposed to have been solved, by World War II, by American supremacy and military power, but also in medicine, like the Salk vaccine. Schulz reminded people, subversively, that we should really be puzzled by the world. That underneath all this abundance were still these little incidents in life that you couldn’t account for. In Charlie Brown’s world, the happiest person is the dog, and that by itself is a subversive notion in the American vision of childhood.”