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“It
seems beyond the comprehension of people that someone can
be born to draw comic strips, but I think I was.” -
Charles M. Schulz
PEANUTS creator Charles M. Schulz – “Sparky”
to his friends and family – was born in Minneapolis,
Minnesota on November 26, 1922. Schulz’s father –
like Charlie Brown’s – was a barber. Each week,
he’s sit with young Sparky and read the Sunday comics
from four different newspapers. As Schulz reached his late
teens, his parents encouraged the young artist to enroll in
a correspondence course in cartooning. Their early support
provided a strong foundation for his later success.
In his art courses, Schulz wasn’t always a star student.
He actually received a C+ in “Drawing of Children.”
But he never gave up, later affirming, “My ambition
from earliest memory was to produce a daily comic strip.”
In 1943, soon after the United States entered World War II,
Schulz was drafted into the Army, where he served in Europe
as an infantryman and then a staff sergeant. After returning
from the war, Schulz’s first big break came in 1947
when the St. Paul Pioneer Press picked up his weekly cartoon
feature called “Li’l Folks” – the
strip that would eventually be renamed PEANUTS.
Schulz didn’t choose the new name. In fact, he was never
crazy about it. But when United Feature Syndicate placed the
strip in seven of their newspapers across the country in 1950,
they rechristened PEANUTS. The strip caught on slowly but
steadily over the next several years – and before long,
Charles Schulz became a household name. Between October 2,
1950 and February 13, 2000, newspapers around the globe published
thousands of original PEANUTS comic strips – 17,897
to be exact – every single one of them drawn by Schulz
himself.
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