On November 26, 1922, a baby boy named Charles Monroe Schulz was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Two days after his birth, an uncle nicknamed him Sparky, after a comic-strip horse called Spark Plug. The name stuck for the rest of his life. As a kid, Sparky was shy, skinny, and crazy about comics. He read every Sunday newspaper page he could find. He doodled constantly in school notebooks, including pictures of his family's black-and-white dog, who could eat razor blades and tacks without flinching.
After serving in World War II, Schulz worked at a cartooning correspondence school, mailing lessons to students. On the side he kept submitting his own little comic strips to newspapers and getting rejected, again and again. Finally, in 1950, a small newspaper deal led to a comic called Peanuts, starring a round-headed kid named Charlie Brown who never quite won at anything. The dog he eventually invented, Snoopy, was based on his childhood pet. So was Charlie Brown's never-flying kite and never-winning baseball team - Schulz had failed at both as a kid.
For the next 50 years, Schulz drew every single Peanuts comic himself, never letting anyone else hold the pen. By the end he had drawn 17,897 strips that appeared in 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries. His characters became holiday TV specials, Broadway musicals, and stuffed animals you can hug. Schulz died in February 2000, just hours before his final original Sunday strip ran in newspapers. Generations of kids have grown up with Charlie Brown's losing baseball team and Snoopy's imaginary doghouse adventures - proof that a quiet, doodling kid from Minnesota could fill the whole world with comics.
