Move over Paris and Britney. I’ve made The New York Post Page Six today.

Nothing scandalous. Just a clever plug for the new coffee table art book, Not Just Cartoons, Nicktoons!. It was my sincere pleasure to interview all the creators of Nicktoon series for this project, and the book turned out to be quite a visual feast. You’ll find it at your local bookshop this week. It’ll be easy to spot – It’s the one with a dust jacket covered in green slime.

In case you haven’t been following it, the debate over David Michaelis’ Charles Schulz bio rages on. Fresh comments from daughter Amy Schulz Johnson, Peanuts comic book artist Dale Hale and Peanuts animation producer Lee Mendelson add to the conversation. Join the discussion here.

I like the honest name of this new how-to book: How to Cheat in Flash CS3: The art of design and animation in Adobe Flash CS3. Forget honing your skills and mastering the craft of animation like those classic artists, just cheat your way into thinking you’re an animator by moving some crap around in Flash. Why not, everybody else is doing it.

Storefront and interior. Click for bigger version

A few months ago, I solicited suggestions from readers about what to see and do while in Paris. I never did a follow-up but today I wanted to write about a highlight of that trip: Un Regard Moderne, one of the coolest bookstores I’ve ever visited. The tiny shop, located at 10 rue gît le coeur 75006 Paris, is a place that claustrophobics would be well advised to avoid. It houses thousands of volumes, mostly related to art, comics and pop culture, in two crowded rooms, with all the books precariously piled atop one another, in seemingly random order, and quite ready to topple at any given moment. The store is cramped so much so that the owner only allows four to five people in the store at any time. When we there, there were only four people and it was quite a challenge moving around.

What impressed me most was the owner’s stock which was extremely up-to-date. In fact, we found many books there that we didn’t find at the better known comic stores in Paris, including titles like Three Trees Make A Forest, I Am 8-Bit and The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora.

Also fascinating was the owner’s encyclopedic knowledge of every book crammed into his shop. My travel companions were author and video game designer David Calvo and Marseilles-based musician Guillaume Pervieux, and when my friend David inquired about an obscure graphic novel that he’d been looking for, the owner had dug the book out of one of the piles within a few minutes.

The owner generously allowed me to take a video of his store and I posted it onto YouTube a while back. The quality is fairly poor but it should offer some sense of what the store is like. Definitely worth a visit if you’re in the neighborhood.

Charles Schulz’s son, Monte Schulz, has posted a new in-depth comment on Cartoon Brew detailing some of the family’s specific objections to David Michaelis’ new book. If the book’s gross inaccuracies (which Schulz points out) are true, and I have no reason to believe they’re not, this would be a seriously flawed work of historical research. I feel it’s important to draw attention to the family’s complaints as it provides valuable information to potential readers of the book. It’s also a viewpoint that counters some of the raves that are appearing in the maintream, like this glowing New Yorker review by John Updike.

(Note: To keep the discussion from breaking into numerous threads, comments are closed for this post but can be continued in the other post with Schulz’s comment.)

Earlier Stories:
Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography
More on the Schulz book

There’s a lot more reaction appearing online to David Michaelis’ new book Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography. In the Wall Street Journal, Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson gives the book a positive review, saying that Michaelis has written a “a perceptive and compelling account of Schulz’s life” that “finally introduces Charles Schulz to us all.”

Editor & Publisher has an excellent piece highlighting many of the revelations in the book and the family’s objections to them.

Charles Schulz’s son, Monte, who we’ve already pointed out isn’t pleased with the book, posted a comment on our previous Cartoon Brew post further detailing his objections. Here’s his comment in full:

“The point of objection to this biography of my father is how much is simply untruthful, and deliberately so. There are many factual errors throughout the book; there are people who are give authority to speak about our family who have no insight to do so; and there are so many elements of my father’s life that David deliberately left out of the book, that it really is impossible for anyone outside of our family, or Dad’s circle of friends, to come to any genuine conclusions. I can tell you absolutely that he was not a depressed, melancholy person, nor was he unaffectionate and absent as a parent. Honestly, the quote I’ve really wanted to give the press, after reading both the early of the manuscript and the final book, is this: “The book is stupid, and David Michaelis is an idiot.â€? That said, I had a six year on-going conversation with him about this book, and like David quite a lot. But I was shocked to see the book that emerged, because it veered so drastically away from what he told us he intended to write. Which is why we’ve been so militant in our response. Incidentally, the material David edited out of the book is even more outrageous. The fact is, after reading the book, I decided I’d learned more about David Michaelis than I did about my dad. I found that interesting.”

UPDATE: A new in-depth comment from Charles Schulz’s son, Monte Schulz, as well as his sisters Amy and Jill, can be found in the comments below.

The printing is now finished on the first-ever Cartoon Brew book, Inside UPA, and the book is currently en route to LA. They are scheduled to arrive the week of Oct. 15-19 and they’ll be shipped out to people who pre-ordered shortly thereafter.

Of the 1000 books in this very limited edition, the first 50 of them are a super-limited signed edition which come with a bookplate autographed by surviving UPA veterans. Tee Bosustow, son of UPA co-founder, Steve Bosustow, is currently in the process of getting the bookplates signed, and he should have them completed by the end of October. The artists who have signed them so far include Fred Crippen, Bob Dranko, Alan Zaslove, Erv Kaplan, Bob McIntosh and Willis Pyle, and there are many more signatures to come. Twenty-three of the signed copies are already gone, twenty-seven remain. You can purchase a signed or unsigned copy at UPApix.com. And remember that all proceeds go towards the completion of Tee Bosustow’s UPA documentary project.

Below are some pics from the signing sessions so far. From top to bottom: Erv Kaplan, Bob Dranko, Alan Zaslove, the signed cards, and Willis Pyle, yours truly and Bob McIntosh. About that last photo, I have to say that it was a real thrill to be in the room with not one, but two amazing artists who not only contributed to countless UPA classics like Gerald McBoing Boing and the Mister Magoo shorts, but who also worked on Pinocchio and Bambi. Doesn’t happen often nowadays.

David Michaelis’ much awaited Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, the first comprehensive bio of Charlez Schulz, is arriving into bookstores next week. Nat Gertler offers an in-depth review of the book on his blog, calling it “by far the best and the fullest biography of Schulz to date,” though he tempers that by questioning how Michaelis overreached in some of his conclusions about Schulz. Furthermore, according to this article in yesterday’s NY Times, Schulz’ children are none too pleased with the book’s portrayal of their father as a “depressed, cold and bitter man who was constantly going after different women.”

UPDATE: Commentary from Monte Schulz, Charles Schulz’s son, can be found in this followup post on Cartoon Brew.