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Comics by Charles Schultz Born in St. Paul on November 26, 1922, Schulz's fascination with comic strips began early as he read the Sunday comics from four different newspapers with his father each week. With encouragement from his father and mother, Schulz enrolled in a correspondence course in cartooning at what is now the Art Instruction Schools, Inc. , in Minneapolis. He became one of Americas most endearing artists whose characters are recognized and empathized with all over the world.
Schulz passed away at the age of 77 on Saturday, February 12, 2000. The National Cartoonists Society was to honor Schulz with a lifetime achievement award at their convention in New York on May 27. His last comic strip, appearing in Feb. 13 Sunday editions, showed Snoopy at his typewriter and other Peanuts regulars along with a Dear Friends letter thanking his readers for their support. In a television interview on December 29, 1999 discussing his retirement, Schulz was brought to tears when he read his farewell letter. In part, it reads: I have been grateful over the years for the loyalty of our editors and the wonderful support and love expressed to me by fans of the comic strip, Schulz wrote. Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy...
how can I ever forget them... As with every comic strip he created, the letter ended with his signature. His career in cartooning was interrupted in 1943 when he was drafted into the army and embarked for Europe. Upon his return, Schulz landed his first job in cartooning at Timeless Topix, a Catholic comic magazine. Soon after, he took on a second job teaching cartooning at Art Instruction, where he developed the characters Charlie Brown, Linus, and Freida, who later became the Peanuts comic strip.
Schulz's first big break came in 1947 when he sold a cartoon feature called Lil Folks to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In 1948 Schulz sold a cartoon panel to the Saturday Evening Post and would go on to sell 15 more panels between 1948 - 1950. After mailbox upon mailbox full of rejections, Schulz boarded a train from St.
Paul to New York with a handful of drawings for a meeting with United Feature Syndicate in 1950. On October 2 of that year, Peanuts, named by United Features, debuted in seven newspapers. Today Peanuts appears in over 2, 600 papers worldwide, timeless icons for the enjoyment of young and old alike. In 1964, Schulz teamed up with animator Bill Melendez to create one of the most loved and watched televised specials of all time A Charlie Brown Christmas. Melendez would later produce many animated productions with Schulz including, Charlie Browns All Stars and Its the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown earning Melendez and Schulz the praise of both audiences and critics. Schulz, unlike many cartoonists, drew every comic strip without the assistance of an art staff.
Among numerous honors, Schulz received two Reuben Awards from the National Cartoonists society in 1955 and again in 1964, and has been inducted into the Cartoonists Hall of Fame. He was named as International Cartoonist Of The Year in 1978 by 700 cartoonists. His contribution to popular culture and the art of America will be remembered for generations to come. Other comic strip proprietors certainly acknowledged that Schulz was a path-breaker. Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau said in the December 16 Washington Post that Schulz revolutionized the art form, deepening it, filling it with possibility, giving permission to all who followed to write from the heart and intellect. After the official debut of Peanuts on Oct. 2, 1950, the appeal of the adventures of a boy and his dog has stretched far beyond the United States.
Peanuts appears in more than 2, 600 newspapers in 75 countries with more than 355 million daily readers. It is published in more than 21 languages and remains the worlds most widely syndicated comic strip. Peanuts has been honored at the Smithsonian in Washington, the Louvre in Paris, and an exhibition in Rome. Santa Rosa, California, Mr. Schulz's home, recently approved the construction of a Peanuts museum.
The strip has spun off countless products: more than 50 Peanuts animated TV specials, more than 1, 400 books selling 300 million copies, four feature films, and a Broadway show. Australia sells Peanuts peanut butter. Japan sports three Snoopy Town stores. Charlie Brown and Snoopy - the nicknames for the command module and lunar module of Apollo X - traveled into space. The characters have inspired philosophy and philanthropy.
In 1991, Robert Short wrote Short Meditations on the Bible and Peanuts - his second book linking the strip with the Gospel. Project Linus, started in 1995 and named after Lucy's blanket-toting younger brother, distributes blankets to seriously ill children in more than 300 cities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japan. By delving into his own life, Schulz created something that spoke to millions. Charlie Brown and Linus were named after friends from his days at art school. That is also where he met a certain redhead who broke his heart. Readers responded to the emotional truth in the lives of a group of children living in a nameless suburb.
Viewers like Charlie Brown even though he rarely succeeds. His baseball team perpetually loses. Whenever he tries to kick a football, Lucy always pulls it away at the last moment. (And she has been doing that for 47 years) His dog, Snoopy, is arguably more popular than he is. Despite these reversals, Charlie Brown always picks himself up and, perpetual optimist that he is, tries again. This is one of the ways in which Peanuts really mirrors the American society. Optimism is something that is so typically American, something that made this country what it is now.
Americans laugh at the comic strip because they recognize themselves, non-American laugh because it is just hilarious. Meanwhile, the tributes still keep rolling in. One Internet fan put it this way: From Jeff, one of the millions of Charlie Browns out here who wishes we were Snoopy, but know better... thanks for telling us its all right. Or as Lucy would say, Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, youre the Charlie Browniest.
Schulz never hid his personal religious commitment. He was a member and Sunday School teacher in the Church of God (Anderson), a conservative Protestant denomination in the Pietist and Wesleyan tradition. In fact, Biblical themes and references were a common feature of Peanuts throughout its 50 -year run. By one estimate, 10 percent of the 18, 000 strips involved religion. There also was Robert Shorts 1965 best-seller, The Gospel According to Peanuts, which used individual strips as modern-day Christian parables.
Thus far the book has sold 10 million copies, a figure that has no doubt topped the number of sales of all books in theology-not-associated-with-cartoons published since 1965, writes Martin Marty in the foreword to a new edition out this year. An awareness of this Schulzian conviction might have helped steer some stories away from unqualified happiness is a warm puppy readings. A Christian Science Monitor headline announced implausibly that Peanuts was an Oasis of Optimism in a Jaded Time. Quoting TV producer Mendelson, Diane Either story in the Denver Post blithely linked Peanuts to the core values of the country. The Hartford Courant quoted Randolph-Macon College humanities professor M. Thomas Inge's belief that Charlie Browns recurring problem with Lucy and the football was about maintaining faith in ourselves a very American theme again.
Such characterizations ignore the misanthropic moods of Peanuts and what Non Sequitur creator Wiley Miller called its deliciously subversive quality. As Linus once explained, I love mankind... Its people I cant stand! ! In one of the many strips with the football gag, Lucy stands over the humiliated Charlie Brown and offers her own sardonic commentary: Your faith in human nature is an inspiration to all young people.
Over the years Peanuts has expanded beyond the realm of daily comics, growing beyond Charles Schulz's wildest dreams. In 1952 John Selby of Rinehart and Company took a risk when he published a collection of comics as Peanuts the book. Little did he know the idea would inspire an entirely new genre in publishing. In 1961 Connie Boucher, a housewife from San Francisco, approached Schulz with the idea of creating a Peanuts calendar. Schulz agreed to the idea and, putting a second mortgage on her home, Boucher produced the very first Peanuts Datebook. Snoopy put character merchandising on the map.
Later Snoopy dolls, T-shirts, bedding, wristwatches, toothbrushes, and a host of other trinkets took the merchandising market by storm. Today people can visit with Snoopy and the gang in person at the local shopping mall, watch them on videotape on television, enjoy them in a school play or off-Broadway musical, marvel at their maneuvers in an ice arena, or even interact with them on CD-ROM on the computer. On May 27 th, 2000 over 100 cartoonists paid tribute to Charles M. Schulz in their respective comic strips. Recently, CBS aired a Peanuts tribute special titled Heres to you, Charlie Brown, which featured animated shorts and several celebrity tributes to both the Peanuts characters and Charles Schulz, himself. The Postal Service has issued a Snoopy/ WWI flying ace stamp.
A ton of new books are out. Many new memorabilia items have surfaced from dolls to books to ornaments. The list grows every year. It is remarkable that the Peanuts characters will be immortal forever and will entertain people for countless generations.
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