Charles M. Schulz

Cartoonist

• Born: November 26, 1922
• Birthplace: Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Died: February 12, 2000
• Place of death: Santa Rosa, California

American illustrator

Schulz was the designer, creator, and artistic hand of the long-running, popular comic strip Peanuts. In addition to being the most widely syndicated comic strip, Peanuts expanded into a successful franchise of animated television specials, a cartoon show, feature films, and countless products featuring the Peanuts characters.

Areas of achievement Art, television

Early Life

Charles M. Schulz (shuhlts) was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the only child of Carl Schulz, a barber, and Dena Schulz, a homemaker. Soon after the young Schulz was born, the family moved to St. Paul, where he would grow up. A bright child, Schulz was twice advanced to a higher grade in the middle of a school year at Richard Gordon Elementary School. Entering St. Paul Central High School at age thirteen, by far the youngest student in the school, Schulz felt awkward and somewhat alienated. He discovered his artistic talent early, and upon graduation from high school he studied drawing through a correspondence school called Art Instruction, Inc.

Before he could put his instruction to professional use, however, two major events disrupted Schulz’s life. In February of 1943, his mother died, and later that year he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He trained at Camp Campbell, Kentucky, and was shipped to the European theater during the final months of World War II and served as a squad leader in the 20th Armored Division.

Returning to Minneapolis after the war, Schulz pursued his art career at the only art institution he knew: Art Instruction, who hired him as a teacher. While supporting himself by teaching, Schulz began freelancing as a cartoonist, first with a religious variety comic book, Timeless Topix, and then with his first break in newspaper syndication, drawing for the popular Ripley’s Believe It or Not. In 1947 he got his own strip with the daily paper St. Paul Pioneer Press. The strip was known as Li’l Folks and was a prototype for Schulz’s famous strip Peanuts.

Life’s Work

Convinced that his Li’l Folks material could succeed nationally, Schulz tried for years to interest newspaper syndicates in his work. In the meantime he sold several single-panel cartoons with the Li’l Folks characters to The Saturday Evening Post. Finally, United Feature Syndicate bought Li’l Folks in 1950, requesting two changes for marketing rather than artistic reasons. First, the syndicate wanted the format converted to a multipanel strip, as newspaper editors had been complaining they had too many single-panels. Schulz gladly obliged but was horrified by the second request: Change the title of the strip to Peanuts. Schulz thought the name was silly and confusing. No character by that name existed in the strip, and no one used “Peanuts” as a name for children.

Schulz relented, and on October 2, 1950, the comic-reading public was introduced to the Peanuts gang led by Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Only seven newspapers carried the strip from the first installment, twenty-seven by the end of the first year. By 1984, two thousand newspapers carried the strip, making Peanuts the most widely syndicated comic feature in the history of the genre; it reached that milestone at a time when the number of daily newspapers was declining in the United States.

Though Charlie Brown, the strip’s main character, was named after one of Schulz’s fellow art teachers, the character is, transparently, a manifestation of Schulz as a child. Charlie Brown’s father was a barber, as was Schulz’s father. Cartoonist Schulz, like his cartoon character, pined for the affection of a “little red-haired girl.” Charlie Brown’s anthropomorphic dog Snoopy owes much to Schulz’s boyhood dog Spike. (Schulz later created a long-lost brother for Snoopy named Spike.) In the strip’s first year Charlie Brown and Snoopy shared the page with two other characters: a boy named Shermy and a girl named Patty. Late in 1951, Schulz introduced his Beethoven-loving pianist Schroeder. Lucy appeared in March of 1952, and six months later she had a baby brother named Linus. Like Charlie Brown, Schulz named Linus for a fellow art instructor, Linus Maurer.

In 1955, Peanuts received the National Cartoonist Society’s Reuben Award as best comic strip of the year. Three years later, Yale University would name Schulz its Cartoonist of the Year. In 1960, Hallmark placed Schulz’s characters on greeting cards, inaugurating a merchandising history that would ultimately make the Peanuts gang more lucrative on countless products than they would be with the strip itself. Book-length collections of Peanuts strips had been sold since 1952, but in 1962, Schulz produced an original Charlie Brown and Snoopy picture book entitled Happiness Is a Warm Puppy, a phrase that became a part of American popular culture. In 1964 a Christian minister named Robert L. Short produced The Gospel According to Peanuts, illustrating religious and moral principles through Schulz’s strips. Also in 1964, Schulz won his second Reuben Award.

In 1965 the Peanuts characters were animated in a half-hour Christmas special A Charlie Brown Christmas, which gained new readers for the daily strip and won both an Emmy and a Peabody Award. A series of holiday specials followed: It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966), A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973; also an Emmy winner), It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown (1974), and It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown (1976). Other specials included the Emmy-winning You’re a Good Sport, Charlie Brown (1975), Happy Anniversary, Charlie Brown (1976), Life Is a Circus, Charlie Brown (1980), and the Peabody-winning What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown? (1983).

After the first few specials, Schulz’s characters and gags appeared in several other media. The hit Off-Broadway musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown opened in March of 1967 and ran for four years. Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy, and Linus appeared in Ice Follies (1970), Holiday on Ice (1971), and Snoopy’s International Ice Follies (1972). Having become icons of popular culture, Schulz’s characters graced the covers of Life (1967), Saturday Review (1969), and Newsweek (1971) magazines. In 1969, the U.S. space program named the Apollo X command module “Charlie Brown” and the Lunar Excursion Model “Snoopy.”

In November of 1999, shortly after seeing the fiftieth anniversary volume of Peanuts strips, Schulz was hospitalized after suffering a stroke. In the process, doctors discovered colon cancer that had spread to his stomach. Chemotherapy made cartooning difficult, so Schulz announced his retirement on December 14, 1999. On February 12, 2000, Schulz died of a heart attack in Santa Rosa, California, at age seventy-seven. His last original strip was published the next day. Most major American comic strips ran a tribute to Sparky, Schulz’s nickname, on May 27, 2000.

Significance

Syndicated in 2,600 newspapers in seventy-five countries, Schulz’s Peanuts became the most popular comic strip in the world during its fifty-year run. Most modern American cartoonists have defined themselves in light of Schulz’s work, even those few who disliked it. By creating Charlie Brown, the lovable loser; Lucy van Pelt, the “fussbudget”; her brother, Linus, the studious contemplative; and others, Schulz captured the neuroses of the twentieth century in pen lines and word balloons and helped readers come to terms with these neuroses through laughter and “good grief.” “Good grief,” the expletive “rats!” and the term “security blanket” became standard elements of the American English vernacular, originating in the panels of Peanuts.

Schulz’s lifelong interest in ice sports, which figured largely in the Peanuts strip and its characters’ involvement with the Ice Capades, was crowned by his 1993 induction into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame. His legacy includes a museum in Santa Rosa and a character franchise so extensive that Forbes magazine has identified the late cartoonist’s posthumous earnings as one of the two largest of any deceased person, second only to that of Elvis Presley.

Bibliography

Bang, Derrick, with Victor Lee. Fifty Years of Happiness: A Tribute to Charles M. Schulz. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, 2002. First published in 2000, this comprehensive work provides a wide-ranging history of the Peanuts comic strip.

Johnson, Rheta Grimsley. Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz. New York: Pharos Books, 1989. An authorized biography of Schulz, written in close consultation with the cartoonist. The author does not hesitate to explore such delicate areas as Schulz’s depression and insecurities.

Kidd, Chip, ed. Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz. New York: Pantheon Books, 2001. Provides an appreciation of Schulz’s popular strip from an artistic perspective. Kidd, a graphic artist specializing in book-jacket design, offers unique insight into Schulz’s style.

Michaelis, David. Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography. New York: Harper, 2007. A lengthy, well-researched, and well-documented biography of Schulz, which focuses more on his character and personality than on his art and its legacy. An updated look at the brilliant cartoonist and the entertainment “empire” he helped to create.

Schulz, Charles M. Li’l Beginnings. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, 2003. A complete archival collection of the Li’l Folks comic strip, with commentary by the editors.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Peanuts: A Golden Celebration. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Schulz’s own retrospective of his nearly fifty-year run drawing Peanuts. Features reproductions of hundreds of strips, by decade, with Schulz’s commentary in the margins opposite each milestone.

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