Another passing; and some bonus thoughts

Gary Gygax, the founding father of Dungeon and Dragons, has died. For those of us who spent our youth (and adulthood as well) buried in thick manuals full of charts, monsters and descriptions that opened the door to a new world, I offer my condolences.

The New York Times offers another story of a memoir that turned out to be absolutely false. From all reports, the book is a compelling read -- so why go the route of memoir in place of a novel? I'm sure there are some market pressures here, and there certainly is a perception that a "true" story is more real, even though that runs counter to millennia of storytelling. Whether or not the incidents in the Illiad, or in the writings of Charles Dickens or Virginia Woolf or any other master author took place is immaterial. It's about the truth within the characters and the stories, not whether or not you actually lived with foster parents and had to duck drug deals.

After reading the recent Charles Schulz biography, I found myself with a desire to reread his run of comics. The first 15 years or so have been reprinted by Fantagraphics -- though that doesn't get to a point where I am most interested in from the run. The book more than implies that an affair Schulz had in the early 1970s appeared in not-so-veiled code within the run of the strip (it involved Snoopy romancing a girl with "soft paws"). Peanuts was also far more complex than it appeared on the surface, reflecting Schulz's well developed anxieties and fears, but who would have guessed there was real "puppy love" behind the story line?

My illo is finally up at MinnPost! As is a fantastic article about a recently donated comic book collection.