Henson, I get, but
Schulz? That made me Google...
Peanuts ran for nearly 50 years, almost without interruption. During the life of the strip, Schulz took only one vacation, a five-week break in late 1997 to celebrate his 75th birthday; reruns of the strip ran during his vacation. At its peak, Peanuts appeared in more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries.
Schulz stated that his routine every morning consisted of eating a jelly donut and sitting down to write the day's strip. After coming up with an idea (which he said could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours), he began drawing it, which took about an hour for dailies and three hours for Sunday strips.
He stubbornly refused to hire an inker or letterer, saying that "it would be equivalent to a golfer hiring a man to make his putts for him."
In November 1999 Schulz suffered several small strokes along with a blocked aorta and later it was discovered that he had colon cancer that had metastasized.
Because of the chemotherapy and the fact he could not read or see clearly, he announced his retirement on December 14, 1999.
This was difficult for Schulz, and he was quoted as saying to Al Roker on The Today Show, "I never dreamed that this would happen to me. I always had the feeling that I would stay with the strip until I was in my early eighties, or something like that. But all of sudden it's gone. I did not take it away. This has been taken away from me."
In his later years, Schulz also suffered from Parkinson's Disease. As a result, he experienced hand tremors that made his linework shaky. He admitted that the tremors sometimes were so bad that while working, he had to hold onto the side of his desk with one hand to steady himself. In addition, he had to reduce the strip from four panels to three (starting on February 29, 1988) to reduce the amount of drawing.
Charles Schulz died in his sleep at home around 9:45 p.m. on February 12, 2000. Although he was dying of cancer, he suffered a fatal heart attack. The last original Peanuts strip was published the very next day, on Sunday, February 13, 2000, just hours after his death the night before. Schulz was buried at Pleasant Hills Cemetery in Sebastopol, California.
Schulz indicated that his family wished for the strip to end when he was no longer able to produce it. Schulz had previously predicted that the strip would outlive him, with his reason being that comic strips are usually drawn weeks before their publication.
As part of his will, Schulz had requested that the Peanuts characters remain as authentic as possible and that no new comic strips based on them be drawn. United Features had legal ownership of the strip, but honored his wishes, instead syndicating reruns of the strip to newspapers.
New television specials have also been produced since Schulz's death, but the stories are based on previous strips, and Schulz always stated that Peanuts TV shows were entirely separate from the strip.
Schulz had been asked if, for his final Peanuts strip, Charlie Brown would finally get to kick that football after so many decades. His response: "Oh, no! Definitely not! I
couldn't have Charlie Brown kick that football; that would be a terrible disservice to him after nearly half a century."
Yet, in a December 1999 interview, holding back tears, he recounted the moment when he signed the panel of his final strip, saying, “All of a sudden I thought, 'You know, that poor, poor kid, he never even got to kick the football. What a dirty trick — he never had a chance to kick the football!'”
He was posthumously honored on May 27, 2000, by cartoonists of more than 100 comic strips paying homage to him and Peanuts.
From
Charles M. Schulz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
