Monte Schulz's novella by its very length proves his point: No son would write so much in the service of his father's memory if the father were as distant as Michaelis' book claims. Monte's essay, however, does more than persuade by sheer weight. In quoting Michaelis' letters, Monte shows us how glib the biographer is, how deft at saying what his listeners want to hear. I don't mean to say that Michaelis deliberately misled his interviewees: At the time, he doubtless had no precise idea of the range and extent of the book he would get published, and he remained, throughout, a sympathetic witness to Sparky's life and quandaries, a sympathy no doubt extended to those Sparky left behind.

Still, he had an inkling: He knew enough about what he suspected would be the main theme of the book that he could be accused of employing an unctuous empathy to cultivate candor among those he interviewed. The interviewer's hoary ploy is to agree with whatever the interviewee says whether he believes it or not, a duplicity that, as most inquisitors know, often yields truth.

Beyond the letters and what they reveal, Monte's nearly point-by-point refutation of much of Michaelis' diagnosis is convincing in every instance. Among the most telling to me is the explanation of the seemingly hypnotic appeal of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, which Michaelis alleges the cartoonist watched more than 40 times, implying that its attraction to Sparky was that the movie "resonated" with the themes of Sparky's own life.

In fact, Monte says, his father told him that "he thought Citizen Kane was the greatest movie ever made because of the cinematography, its innovations and artistic achievement. He never made one mention of its astonishing insights, or any connection to his own life." In short, Sparky's engagement with Welles' masterpiece was exactly what you'd expect in a cartoonist: He was fascinated by the moviemaker's manipulation of visuals.

Michaelis missed this insight in the same way, and for the same reasons, that he missed other key aspects of the cartoonist's life: Because he is not attuned to what cartooning is and what a cartoonist does, he cannot apprehend the significance of some of what he encounters. Besides, he was looking for something else, as we have noted.

Monte's description of his father playing sports with his sons and playing "war" with him, shouldering "a couple retired Franco-Prussian War-era rifles" and lurking through the woods, is wonderfully evocative of a childhood happily lived. After reading this passage, I can understand Monte's disappointment and rage at Michaelis' interpretation of his father's life.

Some of the errors Monte discusses are likely no more than simple instances of carelessness, which, were it not for the distortion that results, we could easily overlook, but we cannot ignore the effect on the version of Sparky that emerges from Michaelis' having left out vast reaches of his subject's life — the hockey games Sparky played with his "tournament team" ("growing old with friends and foes alike"); the cartoonist's involvement with the annual ice show that grew and grew, finally becoming a "spectacular" in which his daughters Amy and Jill performed for years; the father's pride in their performance, his tennis-playing, his passion for golf, for music, for books, for writing (especially as revealed by his annual attendance at the Santa Barbara Writer's Conference).

By the end of his essay, Monte has amassed enough evidence to support his contention that "the sins of omission truly drive the central error of this biography." Moreover, his insight into the biographer's apparent method is more than adequate to explain the reason Michaelis' book seems so true: "By leaving out, disregarding, ignoring or compressing huge aspects of my father's life, David is able to tell a story whose coherence masks its basic untruthfulness" (my italics) — coherence achieved by canny selectivity in reporting the facts and by the sheer rhetoric of highly skillful writing.

Kent Worcester and Jeet Heer (coeditors of a landmark collection of long-lost erudite essays on comics by notable critics of yore with the catchy title, Arguing the Comics) provide a chorus of similar criticism in a minor key, but both excuse Michaelis' sins by applauding his writing ability.

If, as Worcester claims, Michaelis is "more engaged by the person" of Charles Schulz "than by the strip" into which the cartoonist poured his thought and emotion, then it seems to me that Michaelis failed at his self-imposed task, which was to "reveal" the man who was the cartoonist. Moreover, the "insights" with which Worcester credits the book — chiefly, that the "entire population" of the strip exhibited the cartoonist's characteristics — are scarcely astonishing: As I said earlier, Sparky repeatedly asserted as much himself. Worcester is more accurate than he may realize, though, when he calls the book "a study of a major cartoonist." A study rather than a biography. A "study" may be excused its "slight" of Schulz's later years, its dramatization of his emotional ups and downs, even its errors. A biography, however, cannot be so casually pardoned its omissions even if it is, as Worcester says, "well-written."

Heer also thinks the book "wonderfully well-written" — its prose "a form of cartooning, limning characters and places in well-executed brush strokes." Heer finds it marvelous that Michaelis connects "the mirrors in a barbershop with comic strip panels." I, on the other hand, think this admirable conceit, inventive though it is, reveals through its very metaphorical ingenuity Michaelis' naiveté about cartooning: Neophyte cartoonists such as Sparky was at the time this passage refers to tend to think about figure drawings, not sequential panels. And when they start thinking in narrative terms, they are likely to think of the panels in the comic strips they see in newspapers rather than mirrors on barbershop walls.

Despite its failure to be "definitive," the book is "a great work," Heer says, although he acknowledges that it might be "a compelling story which links life and art in a nice tight knot" but isn't, quite, true. Heer's own opinion of Schulz is, he says, "quite different" from the man Michaelis describes. Still, he doesn't "hate the biography" but sees greatness in it.

(Heer, by his own account, is struggling both with the book and with his own earlier enthusiastic review of it — in which he says "part of Michaelis' achievement is that he clearly understands how cartoonists think," an assertion I severely question. Heer manages, with candid rhetoric, to extricate himself from this a predicament by remembering that he also accused Michaelis of leaving out evidence that contradicted his thesis, an observation I happily agree with.)

In sum, both Worcester and Heer take considerable pains to find merit in a work that they also contend is ridden with faults, faults that ought to lead them to less favorable opinions than they espouse. Admittedly, I do somewhat the same. Perhaps all of us are bending over backward to avoid ganging up in the "psychodrama of fan culture" that Worcester acutely sees as prone to inflate the limitations of the book in a stampede of backlash over an "outsider's" presumption in writing about an iconic cartoonist.

Then, too, we are all, by one measure or another, writers like Michaelis, and we admire good writing when we see it. But good writing, however engrossing the linguistic legerdemain, is not enough for a biographer. Verbal facility is not a good substitute for the honest open-mindedness that enables the biographer to find his subject's authentic personality. Good writing cannot excuse biased reporting. It can mask the problem, but it cannot change distortion into truth.

(To read the rest of this essay, please see The Comics Journal #290.)