The world's richest cartoonist; the world's most popular cartoonist: which rates first? To Charles Schulz, who died on February 12th, aged 77, it was definitely the second. His comic strip creation, Peanuts, a catch-all title for a group of knee-high kids in a world no taller than their heads never changed beyond a certain shakiness of line, after it made its debut in American newspapers on October 2nd, 1950.
Although at first only eight mid-western newspapers printed the strip, today over 90 million people read Peanuts worldwide.
Charles Monroe Schulz was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1922. His father was a smalltime barber. He published his first drawing when he was 14. His pet dog Spike, a mongrel with a touch of hunting hound, had a predilection for eating certain unlikely objects, such as pins and razor blades. He sketched Spike and sent the results to the world-famous Robert Ripley, whose Believe It Or Not panels had world circulation. The picture was signed "Sparky" and Ripley reproduced it.
Called into the US army in February 1943, he was discharged with the rank of staff sergeant. Shortly after he joined an art class.
He worked under Frank Wing, a perfectionist who was the first man to spot the potential in the cartoons Charles Schulz sketched in his spare moments. Wing persuaded him to submit them to the local newspaper, the Saint Paul Pioneer Press.
For a while he was delighted enough just to see his Peanuts drawings appearing regularly, but when the time came for him to ask for an increase in recompense, the editor promptly dropped the feature.
It was 1950 when fortune at last smiled in the shape of the United Feature Syndicate. Charles Schulz had sent them a batch of sample strips. They signed him and sent them out to their world-wide customer list. Eight papers responded; all small circulation, but it was a start.
A year later he married Joyce Halverson; they divorced in 1972.
From the very first strip Charlie Brown - the champion chump, the favourite fall-guy, the typical, real-life American hero - was the star, and the first character to be named. Then one by one came Linus van Pelt, the first kid to own a security blanket; (Charles Schulz's own term, now in Webster's Dictionary); his sister Lucy; Schroeder who plays perfect Beethoven on his toy piano; scruffy Peppermint Patty; grubby Pigpen and, of course, Snoopy, the dog given to daydreaming he is a first World War flying ace, and his friend, the yellow bouncing bird, Woodstock.
Charles Schulz's first acknowledgement came from his fellow newspaper cartoonists: they gave him their Reuben Award in 1955, the first of many honours including, in 1978, international cartoonist of the year. Peanuts made the cover of Time magazine in 1965. The first Peanuts book was published in 1952 (20 years later there were 190 of them); the first of 16 television cartoons was made in 1965; the play, You're A Good Man Charlie Brown opened on Broadway in 1967; and the first feature film cartoon was produced in 1969, the year that Charlie Brown and Snoopy went truly out of this world - as mascots of the Command Capsule and Lunar Module of NASA's Apollo 10.
Charles Schulz is survived by his wife, Jeannie Forsyth, and two sons and three daughters from his first marriage.
Charles Monroe Schulz: born 1922; died February, 2000