Charles Schulz, the creator of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the entire
PEANUTS gang, has decided that he will retire in order to concentrate on
beating his newly diagnosed cancer. This desicion will end almost five
decades of Schulz's world-famous comic. Schulz, who has always refused to
let another artist draw PEANUTS, said he would stop producing new daily
panels as of January 3, 2000 but allow his syndicators to recycle comic
strips from 1974 if newspapers still wanted to run the strip. On a daily
basis, Peanuts is published in more than 2,600 newspapers around the world,
reaching 355 million readers in 75 countries and 21 languages. There have
been more than 50 Peanuts animated TV specials, more than 1,400 books
selling 300 million copies and four feature films, not to mention museum
retrospectives and Web page tributes. The first Peanuts strip appeared in
seven newspapers on October 2, 1950. Since then, Peanuts became the most
widely syndicated comic strip in history. Schulz will retire to his home in
Santa Rosa, about 50 miles north of San Francisco, where he will focus on
his recovery. "I have always wanted to be a cartoonist, and I feel very
blessed to have been able to do what I loved for almost 50 years," the
77-year-old Schulz said in an open letter to his friends and fans
worldwide. "That all of you have embraced Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy and
Linus and all the other Peanuts characters has been a constant motivation
for me." Good grief! What shall we read on a Sunday morning? We salute the
master and wish for a quick and easy recovery.