Today would have been the 100th birthday of the man who gave us Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the rest of the Peanuts crew.
Charles Schulz, a cartoonist, died in February 2000, the night before his final comic strip appeared in the Sunday edition.
But the characters he created and developed over five decades live on in the shape of repeats, cherished TV specials, a film, and a museum dedicated to Schulz’s work. So does the level of comfort they give.
According to Jeannie Schulz, Schulz’s widow, and Gina Huntsinger, director of the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, Calif. They discussed Schulz’s life and legacy, which Huntsinger describes as “pervasive.”
She claims he has had a global impact, from popularizing the term “security blanket” (looking at you, Linus) to motivating Peanuts lovers to visit the museum. The most common feedback she receives is that reliving something nostalgic that still makes them laugh brings them solace.
Jeannie Schulz provides a further explanation for the comic’s enduring and global popularity.
“I always say that Sparky expressed the human condition. He wrote about real emotions that kids are feeling, and it’s always delivered with a little bit of humor,” she says. “Anybody can read that strip in four seconds and get comfort from it, because it talks about humanity.”
Peanuts pioneered new territory both visually and emotionally.
Peanuts focuses on children’s adventures and opinions, notoriously shutting out any off-screen adults. It was inspired by another Schulz cartoon about clever children.
After serving in WWII, Schulz, who had always aspired to be a cartoonist, began working on a weekly panel comic called Li’l Folks at his alma institution, Art Instruction, Inc.
“One of the principals at Art Instruction Schools, where he worked as a corrector of peoples’ art lessons, said, ‘I think you should stick with the little kids,’ ” Jeannie Schulz recalls. “That’s what he turned in to all the syndicates to see if he could get a contract: Little kids, no parents.”
Schulz’s first submission to United Feature Syndicate was a panel cartoon rather than a strip, which meant it lacked “defined characters,” as Schulz recalled in a 1990 interview with NPR’s Fresh Air. He brought a half-dozen strips with him to New York to sign the deal, and the syndication business instantly indicated they’d prefer go with a strip since they were easier to sell.
“They said, ‘Well you’ll have to create some definite characters,’ ” Schulz remembered. “So I said, ‘Well, that’s no problem,’ because I already knew I liked to draw a little dog, and I just went home and I asked my friend Charlie Brown if I could use his name and he said that was fine. And so I created Patty and Shermy and those were the four lead characters.”
In October 1950, the first Peanuts comic strip debuted in newspapers across the country. And they weren’t like the other drawings on the funny pages at the time, according to Huntsinger.
Schulz’s lines were basic and minimalistic in design, employing only what was essential to communicate the tale. And, according to Huntsinger, he was a creative genius.
“We could relate to his strip, like we could see ourselves as Charlie Brown — our kite’s stuck in a tree again or the frustration of something happening,” she says. “And also Charles Schulz was the first one to really talk about emotions in the strip, so it changed the cartooning industry … he was so different than what was on the page when he first started.”
Over the years, Schulz spent a lot of time with his characters (as did the public: By 2000 Peanuts was running in more than 2,500 newspapers in 75 countries).
And he related to each of them, saying he doubted he could “perform something every day with a group of people… without each of those personalities being a little piece of myself.” That’s presumably why they evolved in little steps over time, he continued.
“I try to be consistent in their personalities but I also think that none of us is ever really consistent in the things that we do and say,” he said. “We all have our little good points and bad points; this is what the characters have.”
While the universe he created lives on, Schulz was adamant that no one revived Peanuts after him. His syndicate contract said that if he quit drawing, the comic would cease to exist.
Schulz himself told Fresh Air that his children insisted on the condition because “we don’t want anyone else drawing Dad’s comic.”
“I hope that no one else ever touches the strip because the strip is me,” he said.
While many artists have attempted to fill Schulz’s shoes, Jeannie claims that the Peanuts cartoons that people (including herself) see in newspapers now are all reruns.
“And what amazes me is that it’s still funny,” she says. “You still want to read it. Right now Snoopy’s going to Needles or somewhere to find Spike, and it’s just funny.”
She stated that many people recall being soothed by the Peanuts gang as children, such as racing home from school to lock themselves up in their room with the paperbacks, and that many still seek solace in them now. Huntsinger concurs.
“We’ve been listening to so many people talk around the centennial, and one of the cartoonists said, ‘You know, people are trying to sell us things all the time, like you’re supposed to be happy, you’re supposed to do this, and Charles Schulz sort of said it like it was.’ So people were like yeah, I get these characters, I feel a part of this, they speak to me.”