The Cartoonist Who Hated to Draw in Front of People

Charles Schulz drew Peanuts every day for nearly fifty years, and he drew it alone. He did not use assistants to ink his strips, as virtually every other major cartoonist of his era did. He did not hand off the lettering or the backgrounds. He drew each panel himself, in a studio that he kept, by most accounts, in meticulous order, because he understood that what he was doing required absolute solitude and absolute control.

He had grown up the son of a barber in Saint Paul, a quiet boy who read comics obsessively and who was voted most likely to succeed by his high school class, which was, as he later described it, baffling, since he had not been outstanding at anything that high school measured. He submitted cartoons to his school yearbook. They were rejected. He submitted cartoons to a national syndicate at eighteen. They were rejected. He studied correspondence courses in cartooning. He was, in most conventional senses, not getting anywhere.

Peanuts debuted on October second, nineteen fifty, in seven newspapers. The strip had a quality that was immediately recognizable and almost impossible to describe: it was sad in a way that made people feel less alone. Charlie Brown could not kick the football, could not win, could not stop trying. Snoopy understood the gap between imagination and reality, and lived in it. The strips about anxiety and failure and the courage of continuing ran seven days a week for forty-nine years.

Schulz moved to Sonoma County in nineteen fifty-eight and spent the rest of his life here. He drew his final daily strip on January third, two thousand. His final Sunday strip ran on February thirteenth, two thousand, the morning after he died. He had made clear that he did not want anyone else to continue drawing Peanuts.

No one has.