CNTL# 10349048 FN dialog(R)File 640:San Francisco Chronicle CZ (c) 2002 Chronicle Publ. Co. All rights reserved. AN 10349048 Title GOOD GRIEF! "PEANUTS" TO END AFTER HALF-CENTURY, SCHULTZ WILL PUBLISH FINAL STRIP IN FEBRUARY Newspaper name San Francisco Chronicle JC (SF) Date - WEDNESDAY, December 15, 1999 Author Torri Minton, Phil Frank, Chronicle Staff Writers Edition FINAL Section heading NEWS Page number A1 word Count 1,529 Memo RELATED STORY Chronicle staff writers Pamela J. Podger and Sam Whiting, and Chronicle news services contributed to this report. < Dateline SANTA ROSA - Lead paragraph Charlie Brown may never win the heart of the Little Red-Haired Girl. Snoopy may never down the Red Baron. Lucy may never make a fortune from her 5- cent advice stand. Sally may never get over her fear of going away to camp. Charles Schulz, creator of the most successful comic strip ever, said yesterday that he will retire next month after having drawn his comic strip, Peanuts, for 49 years. TX_TX His last daily strip will be published January 3, and his final Sunday strip will run February 13, according to United Media, the syndicate that distributes Peanuts. Schulz, 77, said he needs to concentrate on his treatments for and recuperation from colon cancer. "All of a sudden it occurred to me, if I survive all this and I feel good -- do I want to start all over again? Why?" he said from his home in Santa Rosa. "I thought I should maybe start to live, enjoy life. "You know, I can do some things for television and all that. I can do the stories and let the animators do the drawings, but to start with the strip again, to start all over -- that would be crazy. So that's what I decided." The decision saddened him. "It occurred to me, that's the end of Charlie Brown," Schulz said. Schulz was diagnosed with colon cancer on November 16, spent two weeks in a Santa Rosa hospital and was forced to take time off for chemotherapy. Since Peanuts started in seven daily newspapers on Oct. 2, 1950, Schulz's only extended break from creating the strip happened two years ago -- when he was 75. His wife, Jeannie, said yesterday that Schulz suffered a series of strokes while in the operating room last month. "While doing a comic strip may appear to be a simple thing, it is a tremendous amount of pressure," she said. "Making the decision to stop the daily strip was very hard. As Sparky said the other day: `It's been my life.' " Schulz, nicknamed "Sparky" after comic strip character Barney Google's horse Sparkplug, has been surrounded by his family, including five children, two stepchildren and 19 grandchildren. "I've got a pretty good chance they're gonna cut this thing down," he said of the cancer. "I wouldn't doubt it." Schulz drew every line and lettered every word of Peanuts, the most widely syndicated comic strip in history. Peanuts has 350 million readers and runs in 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries and in more than 20 languages. "There is not a cartoonist alive who is not indebted to him," Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury said yesterday. Historian Richard West said Peanuts "truly remade the cartooning landscape. When Schulz came along, adventure strips like Flash Gordon were all the rage. Schulz brought back the gag strip, but he imbued it with a wisdom and heart it never had before. And behind it all, he's such a gentleman, so incredibly solicitous of his fans." The strip spawned a separate industry, including greeting cards, records, four feature films, more than 50 animated television specials, 1,400 books and even a hit Broadway musical. Peanuts produced peanut butter in Australia; Snoopy Town stores in Japan; and Peanuts television specials in Russia. A 1989 review of the book "Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz" by Rheta Grimsley Johnson said that Peanuts earns Schulz "about a million (dollars) per month." Schulz is a paradoxical American icon -- at once, read by millions of fans, yet notoriously private; internationally known, yet reluctant to travel. He expressed his nervousness about taking faraway trips in the character of Sally, Charlie Brown's little sister. She hated going places, even on school outings. Schulz leads a simple and orderly life in Santa Rosa, where he has lived and worked for more than 40 years. For decades, his daily routine began at a reserved table in the Warm Puppy cafe at Snoopy's Redwood Empire Ice Arena, which Schulz built in 1969. He also is a creature of habit: He likes his ice cream, for example, with the vanilla on the bottom and the chocolate on top. Not the other way around. Schulz worked five days a week, creating his strip from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., in a modest studio at the real-life address of 1 Snoopy Place. To those who dared question whether he did the strip entirely on his own, he had replied, "Boy, that's an insult." An assistant is helping Schulz complete his last two strips, said Amy Lago, executive director of United Media. "His deadlines have always been a point of honor," Lago said. "He is a consummate professional. About 20 years ago, when he had a bypass surgery, he worked ahead to make sure he didn't miss anything." Peanuts was such a personal endeavor for the perfectionist Schulz that he had a clause in his contract dictating that the strip had to end with his death. In a Chronicle interview in 1989, Schulz disclosed that he suffers from a lifelong depression. "I suppose I've always felt that way: apprehensive, anxious, that sort of thing," he said. "I have compared it sometimes to the feeling that you have when you get up on the morning of a funeral." Ten years later, however, he told a reporter that "depression" really is not the right word. "It's too complicated to talk about. I suppose I'm an anxious person, but it's not debilitating except in not wanting to go places." Drawing Peanuts, he said, made him feel better. "I think I've just become addicted to drawing these pictures and become obsessed by it so that it's more than just a job," he told The Chronicle. "With me, it's almost a form of security that when everything else in life seems difficult and you have fears and anxieties and everything, I feel most at home sitting here in this room drawing these silly pictures." Schulz found his first job in cartooning doing lettering for "Timeless Topix," a small Roman Catholic magazine. It was when he took a second job as a teacher with Art Instruction Schools that he met many of the people who inspired his later work -- including a friend named Charlie Brown and a red-haired girl who broke his heart. Eventually, Schulz sold a number of single comic panels to the Saturday Evening Post. His weekly comic feature, "L'il Folks" ran in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, featuring Charlie Brown and Shermy. United Features Syndicate bought "L'il Folks" and distributed it under the title Peanuts, a name Schulz dislikes because, he has said, it sounds insignificant. People have analyzed Charlie Brown, Sally, Lucy, Linus and Snoopy over the years in wildly imaginative ways. "The poetry of these children is born from the fact that we find in them all the sufferings of the adults," wrote author Umberto Eco. "These children affect us because in a certain sense they are monsters: They are the monstrous infantile reductions of all the neuroses of a modern citizen of the industrial civilization . . ." Schulz avoided analyzing his work. He claimed that he was just a very simple man just trying every day to be funny. He had high standards. "It is easy enough to criticize political leaders in cartoons and to make statements about the plight of mankind as it stumbles on from day to day . . ." Schulz once wrote. "It is the varieties of relationships within the human condition that interest me. The little boy and girl talking about a subject that is really way beyond them, and the little boy somehow sensing that a father has told him something very profound . . ." Schulz said, in a 1989 interview, that he kept creating the strip year-after-year, with no talk of retirement, because there were too many people he did not want to let down. "I could sit around all day and watch `Jeopardy' with my dog," he said, with a crinkly smile. "but he never knows any of the answers." United Media will continue to offer Peanuts "classic" comic strips from 1974 because it incorporates characters from both early and later days. "It's a loss, not only for this newspaper, but for a good part of the American public who read the strips religiously," said Chronicle Editor William German. "This was more than a comic strip. This was part of American life." What about the future -- the day when Sparky Schulz again finds himself seated in the comfortable chair in front of the drawing board in his Santa Rosa studio? "He wants to continue working on the videos that are currently in process and possibly draw new strips in a comic book format," said his wife, Jeannie. "In the meantime" she said, "everyone should send Sparky all the good energy and good wishes they can muster that he makes a quick recovery." Caption PHOTO (3) (1) Charles Schultz, (2) At home in Santa Rosa, cartoonist Charles Schutz relaxed at his desk with a Peanuts comic strip. John Burgess Santa Rosa Press Democrat, 1997 Copyright Copyright 1999 The San Francisco Chronicle Subjects SANTA ROSA; COMICS; RETIREMENT; BIOGRAPHY; BAY AREA; CHARLES SCHULZ; PEANUTS