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The AAUGH blog:

Charles Schulz: A Career

by Nat Gertler

Charles Schulz was born to be a cartoonist.

Born on November 26th, 1922, Schulz was quickly nicknamed "Sparky", after Sparkplug, the horse in the comic strip Barney Google. He took to drawing at an early age, often trying to duplicate the styles of the strips that he saw in the newspaper. His first glimpse of the fame this would bring him was when his fellow students would gather around and ask him to decorate their notebooks with their favorite comic characters.

Schulz's mother was very aware of her son's predilection. Spotting one of those famous "Do you like to draw? Send for our free talent test!" ads, she showed it to Sparky, who was enthusiastic about the idea of a correspondence course in art. Federal Schools accepted him and charged him one hundred and seventy dollars tuition. That money was not easy to come by at that time, but it proved a good investment, as reasonable estimates suggest that Schulz went on to make more than double that much in the art field.

His professional artwork started at the Associated Letter Service, for whom he drew advertising photos, wrapped packages, and made deliveries. He soon found himself in demand by another employer: Uncle Sam, who drafted him for a stint In the army, he learned much about loneliness and loss (his mother passed away), emotions which were painful but which would inform his work for decades to come.

Leaving the army as a sergeant, Schulz tried to find work as an artist in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. He was strongly considered for two jobs as a letterer. One job, as a letterer for tombstones, he was turned down for. He snagged the other job, lettering strips for Timeless Topix, a Catholic-oriented comics magazine. Starting with lettering in English, he later expanded to other languages, facing the difficulty of writing things he was unable to read. Timeless Topix eventually became the first publisher of Schulz's cartoons. Two issues of the magazine featured Schulz doing pages of cartoons about little kids, a topic he discovered he liked.

Simultaneous with his lettering career, Schulz began working as an instructor at the same correspondence school that he had studied with. Now renamed Art Instruction School, this proved a vital place for his personal growth. During his time at the school, Schulz fell in love with (and was ultimately rejected by) his own little red-haired girl. He was also encouraged by a coworker to submit some of his cartoons to a local paper.

Schulz then made his move into newspaper strips; Li'l Folks debuted in the St. Paul Pioneer Press on December 7th, 1947. The strip appeared only in the Sunday women's section. Each installment contained three or four single-panel gags. Aiming to improve his exposure, Sparky asked for the strip to be made daily and moved to a section of the paper that was not designed to turn away half of the audience. The paper said no, and Schulz stopped creating the strip, with the last installment appearing January 22, 1950.

While putting out Li'l Folks, Schulz also tried to sell very similar cartoons to magazines. The Saturday Evening Post, a respected outlet for one-panel gags, snapped up seventeen cartoons by Schulz, which were published between 1948 and 1950.

Sparky tried to find a syndicate to distribute Li'l Folks. He peppered the syndicates with samples. He aroused interest from one syndicate who signed a contract with him, only to break the contract and pay a kill-fee for the work. Eventually, Li'l Folks aroused the interest of Jim Freeman at United Features Syndicate. Freeman liked the work, but thought that it might be a hard sell in a field glutted with single-panel gags. He suggested that Sparky try doing some multipanel samples and bring them to the syndicate's headquarters. In June of 1950, Schulz took the train to New York City, dropped the new samples off at the syndicate, and headed out for breakfast. By the time he came back, the syndicate made their decision: they wanted the strip.

The syndicate deemed the name "Li'l Folks" too likely to collide with the titles of two other strips, "Little Folks" and "Li'l Abner", and changed the name to "Peanuts". This new name did not ring well with Schulz, who felt that the name indicated something unimportant. The syndicate then went to work promoting the strip, emphasizing the strip's small size and adaptability to different layouts rather than its content. By the time of the strip's debut on October 2nd, 1950, they had placed the strip with seven papers, including the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune.

Peanuts came out six days per week at first. The Sunday strip was added in January, 1952. The popularity of the strip grew rapidly through the 1950's. This was no longer just a strip that was resizable and rearrangable. The first licensed Peanuts product, a strip reprint book entitled simple Peanuts, was issued in July of 1952. This was the start of an empire that today covers everything from toothbrushes to theme parks.

The late 1950's saw Schulz handling other material in addition to Peanuts. He did illustrations for Art Linkletter's best-selling book, Kids Say the Darndest Things, and later for a sequel to that book and a book of kid's letters to LBJ. These illustrations were all of small children, and very much matched the style of his Peanuts work. For Warner Press (the publishing division of the Church of God), Sparky drew a series of single-panel gags about teenagers. These all-too-ignored strips show Schulz's sprightly hand bringing forth images of gorgeously gawky teenagers and their squat, confused parents. That run came to an end in the mid-1960's.

Happiness is a Warm Puppy, released in 1962, is the first in a string of original Peanuts material created for books. This collection of sweet, humorous sayings and illustrations grew quickly popular and just as quickly imitated.

December 9th,1965 was the day that Peanuts began to move for most people. They had first been animated years before in ads for Ford automobiles, but it was A Charlie Brown Christmas the burned the images into people's minds. Written by Sparky, produced by Lee Mendelson and animated by Bill Melendez, this was a production that did everything wrong. They tried to use kids as voice actors, to use jazz music, to have an entertainment special that was only half an hour long, to actually have long bible quotes in a Christmas special. The result of this failure is a special that grabbed forty-five percent of that night's viewing audience, won Emmy and Peabody awards, and has become a Christmastime mainstay. It also led to a long series of animated TV specials, a TV series, and four feature films.

Schulz was less directly involved in some 1960's records with Peanuts themes. The first, an album by performer Kaye Ballard featured Peanuts humor, but didn't really catch on. The second, however, was a collection of Peanuts-oriented songs which would later form the basis for the musical play You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Debuting off-Broadway in March 7, 1967, it would run for four years, spawn numerous road shows and a popular TV version, and become a staple of local little theater productions.

Faced with a quadruple heart bypass in 1981, Schulz had built up a sufficient backlog of strips that the strip did not stop appearing. The only real break in the strip's run came in 1997, when Schulz took a vacation. For five weeks, strips up to a decade old were rerun.

Sparky has always been very proprietary about the work on the strip itself, avoiding the reliance on art assistants that so many cartoonists uses. In 1979, his children signed an agreement with the syndicate to assure that no one would take over the strip once Schulz retired or died. The effect of this agreement was seen starting January 4th 2000, when the syndicate started filling the Peanuts slot with reruns from the middle period of the strip.

Fighting a series of health problems, including cancer and strokes, Schulz passed away in his sleep at 9:45 PM on February 12th, 2000, the day before the publication of his final strip, a farewell note from the retired cartoonist.

This did not mean the end of Peanuts, however. There are still plenty of books of strips available, still productions of the plays, still new animated adventures on the way. The echoes of Peanuts live on in the multitude of other strips it has influenced, and the memory of Peanuts should live on for well more than fifty years to come.

This article is a slight variation of one that saw print in The Comics Buyer's Guide issue 1364, January 7th, 2000. Nat thanks Derrick Bang for his Peanuts Frequently Asked Question list, as well as the authors of the various Schulz biographies that were consulted in writing this piece.

Nat Gertler is the proprietor of AAUGH.com, an online Peanuts book, video, and CD shop with a book collector guide.