‘Peanuts’ Comic Creator Charles Schulz Dies at 77

Charles M. Schulz, the cartoonist who delighted the world with the adventures and adversities of Charlie Brown, his friends and a dog named Snoopy, died Saturday. He was 77.

Schulz, who was diagnosed with colon cancer and suffered a series of small strokes during emergency abdominal surgery in November 1999, announced his retirement a few weeks afterward. He died in his sleep about 9:45 p.m., his son Craig Schulz said.

His wildly popular comic strip, “Peanuts,” made its debut Oct. 2, 1950. The travails of the “little round-headed kid” and his pals eventually ran in more than 2,400 newspapers, reaching millions of readers in 68 countries.

His death came on the eve of the publication of the last strip he drew, showing Snoopy at his typewriter and other Peanuts regulars along with a “Dear Friends” letter thanking his readers for their support. It appears in today’s Times.

Over the years, the Peanuts gang became a part of American popular culture, delivering gentle humor spiked with a child’s-eye view of human foibles.

One of the strip’s most endearing qualities was its constancy.

The long-suffering Charlie Brown still faced misfortune with a mild “Good grief!” Tart-tongued Lucy still handed out advice at a nickel a pop, a joke that started as a parody of a lemonade stand. And Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s wise-but-weird beagle, still took the occasional flight of fancy back to the skies of World War I and his rivalry with the Red Baron.

The strip was an intensely personal effort for Schulz. He had had a clause in his contract dictating the strip had to end with his death. While battling cancer, he opted to retire it right then, saying he wanted to focus on his health and family without the worry of a daily deadline.

“Why do musicians compose symphonies and poets write poems?” he once said. “They do it because life wouldn’t have any meaning for them if they didn’t. That’s why I draw cartoons. It’s my life.”

In his final daily strip, published Jan. 3, a thoughtful Snoopy sat atop his doghouse with his typewriter. In a text message signed by Schulz, he thanked fans for their “wonderful support and love.”

“Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy . . . how can I ever forget them,” the message read.

Although he remained largely a private person, the strip brought Schulz international fame. He won the Reuben Award, comic art’s highest honor, in 1955 and 1964. In 1978, he was named International Cartoonist of the Year, an award voted by 700 comic artists around the world.

The 1965 CBS-TV special “A Charlie Brown Christmas” won an Emmy and rerun immortality, and many other TV specials followed.

There was a hit musical, “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” with Gary Burghoff, later Radar O’Reilly on “MASH,” playing Charlie. The book “The Gospel According to Peanuts” explored the philosophical and religious implications of the strip.

When Schulz announced his retirement, Mort Walker, the creator of comic strips “Beetle Bailey” and “Hi and Lois,” said he and Schulz wept when they spoke on the phone.

“He did something entirely different from what all the rest of us did. I write and draw funny pictures and slapstick; it’s a joke a day,” Walker said at the time. “He delved into the psyche of children and the fears and the rejections that we all felt as children.”

The characters also appeared on sheets, stationery and countless other products. Schulz several times was listed as one of Forbes magazine’s best-paid entertainers, most recently in 1996, when his 1995-96 income was estimated at $33 million, ranking him No. 30 on the magazine’s list.

In 1990, when the Peanuts gang turned 40, the government of France named Schulz Commander of Arts and Letters, one of that country’s highest awards for excellence in the arts.

Despite the success, Schulz struggled with depression and anxiety, according to his biographer, Rheta Grimsley Johnson. But the struggle only improved his work, she found, as he poured those feelings of rejection and uncertainty into the strip and turned Charlie Brown into Everyman.

“Rejection is his specialty, losing his area of expertise. He has spent a lifetime perfecting failure,” Johnson wrote in her 1989 book, “Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz.”

Schulz was born in St. Paul, Minn., on Nov. 26, 1922, and studied art after he saw a “Do you like to draw?” ad.

He was drafted into the Army in 1943 and sent to the European theater, although he saw little combat.

After the war, he did lettering for a church comic book, taught art and sold cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post. His first feature, “Li’l Folks,” was developed for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1947. In 1950, it was sold to a syndicate and the named changed to Peanuts, even though, he recalled later, he didn’t much like the name.

The popularity of the strip soared in October 1965, when Snoopy turned his doghouse into a Sopwith Camel for the first of many engagements with the Red Baron. The following year, a group called the Royal Guardsmen had a No. 2 single, “Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron.”

Charlie Brown, named after a friend at art school, was to some extent the cartoonist’s alter ego, and Snoopy was inspired by a dog he had as a child that Schulz recalled as “the smartest and most uncontrollable dog that I have ever seen.” The little red-haired girl, Charlie Brown’s unrequited love, was based on a girlfriend who rejected Schulz’s proposal of marriage in 1950, according to Johnson.

Schulz went on to marry Joyce Halverson in 1951. They divorced in 1972 and he married Jeannie Forsyth two years later.

In his later years, he spent much of his time at his Redwood Empire Ice Arena in Santa Rosa, about 60 miles north of San Francisco, where he frequently played hockey or sipped coffee at the rink’s Warm Puppy snack bar.

When “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” was revived on Broadway in 1999, it had a multiethnic cast that at first concerned Schulz. He said he wasn’t racist but, “I thought, ‘This is mine. I did this thing. Nobody helped me. I did the whole thing and now you’re going to come in and show me how wonderfully open-minded and liberal you are.”

He said he finally was persuaded that unorthodox casting was “a very New York thing to do.”

“So I said, ‘Well, if that’s what they’re going to do, all right,’ ” he said. “If . . . people are willing to accept it, willing to accept that Lucy’s leaning on the piano playing up to a black Schroeder. All right, let’s see how it goes.”

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A full obituary on Schulz will appear in Monday’s editions of The Times.