CHARLES SCHULZ INTERVIEW 1992
Marschall, R. and Groth, G. (1992). Charles Schulz Interview. Nemo: the Classic Comics Library, Number 31, January 1992, Page 5. https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6bLZeJ-DUvVy0VCiinZW0XfBdk4hhzpUiYUia4LzOqSTzxNCecKNMOZa16OWDCOWdEcZ3qJ3LtPNLS6VZFvkUDzKijaKz7d7hn1rCq26K8Hl2mNn84OiPvvFzd86Wtq78QvRU8w/s1600/Jeff+Overturf+Nemo+31004.jpg
Nemo: the Classic Comics Library
number 31, January 1992
An Interview With America's Most Enduring Contemporary Cartoonist by RICK MARSCHALL & GARY GROTH
RICK MARSHALL: I wonder if you realize how deep an impact Peanuts has had on your readers.
CHARLES SCHULZ: No, actually I'm very surprised.
And I always kind of worry about it because I realize that I'm in a medium where it's dangerous to stick your head out because there are so many people that simply don't read the comics and still don't regard it as worthwhile entertainment.
There's nothing that annoys me more than somebody coming up to me and saying, "My nineteen year old daughter really loves your strip and she still reads it." Because that's the audience that I'm really going for. And another thing that bothers me is the parents who come up to me with their two- or three-year-old child on their shoulder and say, "Look, you know who this is? It's Peanuts's father" and the poor kid and I look at each other and the kid has no idea what the mother and father are talking about and it really bothers me. Beyond that, I kind of keep to myself and try not to think about that. When people say to me, "I really admire your philosophy," I literally and honestly do not know what they are talking about because I don't even know what my philosophy is.
MARSHALL: They try to read something into the strip.
SCHULZ: Which is all right. I think that even minor art forms like this, as Robert Short tried to talk about in The Gospel According to Peanuts, do have certain truths in them, and I think that's impor-tant, and I think that people should be able to read whatever they want to into what they're looking at or reading. But as far as an overall philosophy goes, I'm really not sure what it is. Although I try to draw a gentle strip. I try to draw a strip which doesn't have any real cruelty in it, outside of things like Lucy pulling away the football. And it's not as insulting a strip as it used to be. Of course, I've gotten older, and I'm not as insulting as I used to be myself.
MARSHALL: You don't consciously put your philosophy in it like Harold Gray did in Little Orphan Annie, but it's obviously a reflection of yourself.
I'd like to ask about your background. I know you grew up in St. Paul. Your name is Schulz. Isn't that German? Do you have any ethnic flavor in your background, or has your family been here for many generations!
SCHULZ: My dad was born in Germany, but he was the only one in the family who was. Apparently, his parents went over on a year's vacation or something back to Germany, where he was born, but his brothers and sisters were all born in this country. My mother was one of nine children, and I always regarded myself really as being Norwe-gian, and not German. I think I was a little bit ashamed of being German, due to World War I, and always played that down. I never think about nationalities, and I know my own children don't think of nationalities: If you were to ask them what nationality they are, I think they are probably the first generation who would now say American.
My dad was a barber. I always admired him for the fact that both he and my mother had only third grade educations and, from what I remembered hearing in conversations, he worked pitching hay in Nebraska one summer to earn enough money to go to barber school, got himself a couple of jobs and eventually bought his own barber shop. And I think he at one time owned two barber shops and a filling station, but that was either when I was not born or very small, so I don't know much about that. But, of course, I was raised during the Depression struggle, which didn't affect me personally, because I don't think little kids are into what's going on. If you have pancakes for dinner, you think that's wonderful because you like pancakes. You don't realize that you're probably having them because your parents can't afford anything more.
But my dad ran a three chair barber shop...
MARSCHALL: Ran it through the Depression?
SCHULZ: Right through the Depression. I know at one point he was seven months behind on his rent, but he told me years later it didn't matter because the big building where his barber shop was had so many empty spaces in it that the landlord didn't really care, as long as he kept up as much as he could on the rent. But I always admired him for being a self-employed person who loved his work.
I remember his telling me several times that he loved to get up in the morning and go to work, and I think he was as totally at home in the barber shop as 1 am off doodling in my studio. Years later, I began to realize that a lot of this being at home in your place of work is not necessarily because you love it so much, but because you're secure there, and he probably had the same travel fears that I have. But he was incapable of expressing them and I knew about it, and I never had a chance to talk about these things with him. I don't know how much my dad made, but I never felt that I wanted anything. I had a baseball glove and a bicycle, for which my dad paid $24 and paid for it at the rate of four dollars a week at Western Auto. And we had the car. We never had a new car, but....
MARSHALL: Did you have friends whose families suffered through the Depression?
SCHULZ: We never knew. You know, you're just little kids and you're playing cops and robbers and cowboys and indians and you organize your baseball games. There was no little league at that time, so all of our baseball games were between neighborhood teams. We would make up our own teams and challenge another neighborhood. We literally did lose a game once 40 to 0, which is where I got the idea for Charlie Brown’s string of losses.
The highlight of our lives was, of course, Saturday afternoons, going to the local theatre. We would buy a box of popcorn for a nickel from a popcorn shop a few stores down from the theatre and then we'd go to the afternoon matinee. My favorite movie, I still remember, was Lost Patrol with Victor McLaglen. I loved those desert movies, which is why I like drawing Snoopy as the foreign legion-naire. We never went downtown to a movie to a first run theatre. I think first run theatres were about 35 cents. If we went downtown on Sunday night to a movie, it was always to a double feature where the theatre only charged 15 cents per person.
MARSHALL: I remember a J.R. Williams cartoon showing a barber shop filled with 12 to 15 men sitting around with the barber; someone's passing on the sidewalk and the barber sees him through the glass and says "You're next," meaning that was a place where they congregated and it's not necessarily for a hair cut. Was your father's barber shop like that? Did you hang around and listen to stories?
SCHULZ: No. My father never ran the sort of shop where men would sit around and tell what you would call dirty stories. His shop was called the Family Barber Shop and he didn't allow that sort of thing. But if he did rap on the window and say to somebody "You're next," he literally meant that
"Come on in because I got it figured out and it won't be too long a wait." He worked hard and I have nothing but admiration and love and memories of that.
MARSCHALL: Was St. Paul in the '20s and '30s anything like Garrison Keillor or Jean Shepherd's stories about growing up in a midwestern town?
SCHULZ: I don't know Shepherd and I've only heard four of the Keillor tapes, but that was different. He's talking about small towns. St. Paul is not a small town. I always thought of myself as growing up. really, in the city. So I always regarded myself as a city boy. I grew up on the sidewalks, not in the country.
MARSHALL: You were never tempted to make Peanuts a city strip?
SCHULZ: I don't know where the Peanuts kids live.
I think that, originally, I thought of them as living in these little veteran's developments, where Joyce and I first lived when we got married out in Colorado Springs. Now I don't think about it at all.
My strip has become so abstract and such a fantasy that I think it would be a mistake to point out a place for them to live.
MARSHALL: Your backgrounds are pretty sparse, too.
You've never committed yourself with tract homes or anything.
SCHULZ: No, I've never been able to reconcile just how those backgrounds should be drawn, or even the interiors. I admire people who can do that well.
I'm never quite sure how it should be done. I fight it all the time.
MARSHALL: Segar used to do that little roof just hanging a little bit over the horizon-every horizon.
Speaking of Segar, I would like to draw you out a little bit on the strips you grew up with, the special favorites of yours.
SCHULZ: Well, Popeye, of course. I could draw a great Popeye when I was a kid. And I could draw Mickey Mouse. I could draw the three little pigs, and, strangely enough, I used to like the black panthers that Lyman Young drew in Tim Tyler's Luck. You know, I was thinking about it today: When I was, I suppose, about 11-maybe 12, I'm not sure-I didn't really realize the value of drawing. I remember visiting some relatives one night who lived down in Stillwater, Minnesota or Hudson, Wiscon-sin. Our parents were talking and the boy, who was a couple of years older than I, showed me his looseleaf binder. He had drawn some cowboys on the front of it and he was proud of them and I looked at them and thought, "That's kind of neat."
And all of a sudden it occurred to me, I could do that. Why hadn't I ever thought of drawing something on the cover of a looseleaf binder? I started to do that, and, of course, when the other kids in my class saw me draw these things, then I had to draw them for everybody. It was a lot like autographing these days, it drove me crazy. So I didn't really know the joy at the time of drawing, or what you really could do with it.
And I remember, when I was about in the tenth grade, I think, in high school, one of the other guys in class, who was a much better student than I, had illustrated the essay that we were supposed to write. He had done some watercolors and the teacher posted them around the room. And somehow she found out that I could draw, and she said, "Why didn't you do that, Charles?" The reason I didn't do it was because I didn't think it was fair.
I really thought that maybe myself and a couple of the others were the only ones in the class who could draw and it wouldn't be fair to do something like that. And I was stunned that this teacher gave me a mild dressing down for not doing it. So it took me a long time to realize the value of drawing.
I'm always surprised at how few people can draw. Down through the years, there were never more than two or three people in any of my classes that could draw fairly well. And in my three years
number 31, January 1992
in the Army, I bet I never saw one person in any of the companies or platoons I was in that could draw better than I could-and I've never considered myself that good. There aren't very many people who can draw. I don't think you can learn how to draw. I think you can be given a few tips. Talking about comic strips, you can learn a few things that can make your strip look better and give it a better appearance and all that, but I don't think you can learn how to draw, just like I don't think you can learn how to sing. Either you have a voice, or you don't have a voice. It's not learning how to play tennis or golf or anything like that.
MARSHALL: Did you ever use your talent for drawing as some sort of power over your fellow students?
SCHULZ: No. Never.
MARSHALL: I used to love to do caricatures of the kids who'd pick on me. They'd walk into the classroom and they would see, anonymously of course, a caricature I'd done of them on the board. I thought it was a great power over them.
SCHULZ: No, I never really liked caricatures and I still don't to this day. I never did caricatures. If somebody has a big nose, I'm sure that they regret the fact they have big nose and who am I to point it out in gross caricature? So I don't do it. But, knowing how to draw has brought its moments of attention. I worked once at Northwest Printing and Binding as a delivery boy and office boy and one day, I drew a cartoon of the man who worked the big cutting machine and how proud he was when he got a new board to stand on. I was inspired, of course, by J.R. Williams and that type of down home type of humor. And I brought it down and showed it to him and, oh, he was so pleased with it and all the people that worked with him in the place came and looked at it. And, for the next hour, I got lots of attention and that made me feel good.
It did demonstrate a little bit of this kind of power that perhaps you were talking about.
MARSCHALL: You mentioned Popeye and Tim Tyler's Luck and I know you've written about being a fan of Roy Crane's. Were you drawn as a kid to the continuity strips?
SCHULZ: 1 read them all. I liked every comic strip.
Skippy, of course, was fan-tastic. Although I couldn't understand why [Percy Crosby] was so careless in his later years. He didn't even take the time to rule out the panels that were on the strip.
That baffled me. There were a lot of things that baffled me when I was smaller which I didn't understand. I loved Buck Rogers. That was one of my favorite strips. Years later, I read one of the reprint books and discovered how terrible it really was. It wasn't a good strip at all. But it was ahead of its time and that puts some value into it, being ahead of your time.
Later on, as I grew older, in my last year of high school in the correspondence school, I became acquainted with some of the other great cartoonists and if that course did nothing else, it taught me to value good drawing in comics and good penwork.
Clare Briggs, I thought, was wonderful and as far as writing, I alway thought The Bungle Family was a great strip. And a couple of months ago, I spoke at a meeting or gathering here in Berkeley of some people who wanted to become syndicated and I opened my little speech by saying "How many people have ever heard of Charles Payne? Raise your hand." Nobody raised their hand. I said,
"Charles Payne drew S'matter Pop, and if you don't know S'matter Pop, frankly, I don't think I even want to talk to you." Because S'matter Pop is obviously one of the great strips of all time, beautifully drawn, and so funny. I like that and Hairbreadth Harry, I remember I loved Hairbreadth Harry. It annoyed me because Rudolph Rasendale was always so mean. And then, of course, later on, Al Capp came along with Li'l Abner and I loved Li'l Abner and then when Milton Caniff came along and put in the wrinkles where the wrinkles were supposed to be and shot all the camera angles and drew German Lugers the way they were supposed to look, it was a real revelation. There was nothing wrong with the way Chester Gould drew Dick Tracy; that was wonderful, too. But Caniff had this unique approach. As I look back upon it now, I don't think his strip was as witty as it could have been, but the drawing was marvellous. It was pure comic strip drawing, which we've never had quite enough of. It was marvelous. So those were all my heroes.
MARSHALL: Is there anyone else, maybe a certain period, that you wanted to draw like?
SCHULZ: I emulated Roy Crane when I was in my late teens, before I went into the Army. I tried to draw a strip which was similar to that and I used to observe downtown areas in St. Paul as I walked around delivering packages for these printing companies that I worked for-where would be a good setting for some action and I would try to draw it that way and my drawing was improving, but I had a long way to go. Then, after World War II, when I came home, Krazy Kat became my hero. I had never seen Krazy Kat up until then because neither one of the papers in the Twin Cities published it, so I didn't know Krazy Kat. But then it became my ambition to draw a strip that would have as much life and meaning and subtlety to it as Krazy Kat had.
MARSCHALL: Your nickname is Sparky, and that's after Barney Google's horse Spark Plug. Is that because Barney Google was your favorite strip, or did you just get the nickname?
SCHULZ: Well, I am told the day after I was born, an uncle, whom I never met [again] until I was 25 years old, came to visit my mother and me, looked down at me and said, "By golly, we are going to call him Spark Plug." Years later, I discovered that Spark Plug came into the strip in the middle of the summer of 1922 and I was born in November, so apparently Spark Plug was an instant hit, in probably the most famous strip of its day. My mother and dad from then on called me Sparky. I was never called by them Charles. I was called Charles in school or other places, but all my friends and relatives referred to me as Sparky.
MARSCHALL: Right from the start.
SCHULZ: Right from the start, I was doomed.
[Barney Google] was a great strip, you know, and I think that when Snuffy Smith first came in, it was wildly funny. I remember reading a reprint comic book of Snuffy Smith when he was first drafted. I used to just laugh at the things Snuffy said.
MARSHALL: That was a great strip-one of the strips that deserves to be reprinted. Great storytelling, characters that work. I never liked the Snuffy Smith period until recently. I acquired a run of Sundays when he first came into the strip. I don't know if you remember when hed do these big splash panels with hillbilly landscape and hundreds of hillbillies hanging around making wood shavings and stills and all this kind of stuff. Beautiful, beautiful drawings.
SCHULZ: I don't know where the guys had the time to draw those. I've been looking at some of the Popeye books that you've published and those are enormous Sunday pages-and then to draw the daily strip, I don't know how they did it. I guess they didn't have to bother about licensing.
MARSHALL: That's one thing...
SCHULZ: And they didn't have to write television shows and they didn't have to autograph things...
GARY GROTH: Or grant interulews.
SCHULZ: ...grant interviews, yeah. But they must have had somebody help them. I don't see how they could have done it.
GROTH: Can you talk a little about the current state of the strips. Are there strips you like?
SCHULZ: No. [laughter].
GROTH: I know you're not wild about the current propensity for one-panel strips..
SCHULZ: Yeah. It was a strange direction. I think Bob Thaves with his feature Frank and Ernest is good, and I suppose he was one of the first to do it, and that's perfectly all right. But now, I was looking at our own local comic page the other night
-five features were one panel comic strips. And several weeks before that, six of them were just one long panel. I don't know. It puzzles me. Is it the shrinkage of space or what is it, but it's a bad trend.
I don't think that you really build up a group of characters that way. And that's what a cartoonist is going to achieve. Something should be done about it.
GROTH: Are you fond of Gary Larson's The Far Side?
SCHULZ: Oh, yeah, he's good. He has a unique approach and he draws funny. I like the way the eyeballs are always close together. He draws funny animals and funny people. But I do resent that he is being labelled as the "new far-out humor." MARSCHALL: These are the '80s. I was on a book tour with a Dr. Seuss Book and the magazine stuff he was doing in the '20s is a lot like Gary Larson's-strange animals, bizarre situations.
GROTH: Do you find the current state of the strips despairing?
SCHULZ: I think the profession is heading in a strange way.
GROTH: Do you have any theories as to why?
SCHULZ: Oh, I suppose the number one problem would be space, that we just don't have space on which to work any more. A lot of the people don't know how to adapt to that space. And then, it's the following trends. One person does one thing and pretty soon, all syndicates are hiring people to do the same thing. I think.I don't know if I should take credit for it or not, there seems to be a lot of what they call "sophisticated humor," with characters saying meaningful things, but in so many of them the character at the end does not say anything meaningful, it's just dumb. It just lays there. The person doesn't have the knack to do that kind of thing.
MARSHALL: Has the craft gone out of strips today?
You have unique pen lines, thick and thin-1 don't know what point you use, but it's like a fingerprint.
A lot of cartoonists nowadays seem to think it's easier to use a rapidograph or a felt-tip pen or something like that. I don't think it necessarily reproduces better, and a lot of personality goes out of it.
SCHULZ: But if you use that kind of pen, you have no thickness at all. If you use felt pens, the lines are just thicker, that's all. Of course it's quicker-you don't have to dip in-but I was a great student of pen techniques back when I worked at Art Con-struction. My friend and I used to do what we called Bart pen demonstrations. The author of the original cartoon course was Charles Bartholomew and he used to send out what he called "Bart pen demonstrations," which was a little card that had three sets of three pen lines, very thin, medium, and thick, all done with the same pen. And my friend and I used to practice making those when we had nothing else to do. We used to see if we could do three sets of perfect pen lines with the space between the pen lines narrower than the line itself [laughter]. It was like the surgeon practicing with his scalpel. So, I became really pretty deft with the pen. Now my hands shake and that spoils some of my pen techniques, but sometimes, I can still do it.
MARSHALL: That's characteristic, too.
SCHULZ: No, [laughter] what is funny is that when they try to get someone helping with the licensing or something else, they copy my work and they copy this shaky pen line and say, "Gee, that's nice.
How do you do that?" I don't do it on purpose-my hands shake. [laughter]
GROTH: I was wondering what you thought of Walt Kelly's work.
SCHULZ: I thought near the end, it became boring.
I loved the older work and I bought every Pogo book that came out. I bought the comic magazine and I read it and I was influenced by it, and I would imitate his way of talking in it, the same way as when I was a kid, I would imitate Al Capp's hillbilly way of talking. But near the end, it got so wordy that I would buy the books and read the first few pages of it and just couldn't get through it. It wasn't funny any more. It's always a shame when people get so caught up with trying to give out their messages that they forget they have to be funny and entertaining. But he sure could draw. I only got to meet Walt once, I just said a few words to him one night at the Reuben Awards. I never really got to know him.
GROTH: I was wondering if you paid any attention to the underground comics of the late '60s.
SCHULZ: I stopped reading comic magazines years ago. I got so totally bored with them, with the super-heroes, all the muscles-the drawings all looked alike, and I just never read any of them. I never read any underground comics. What was strange about them was they pretended to be so different and they all turned out to be the same.
They all used the same vulgar expressions and things. I got acquainted with a few of them from the Bay area and I said, "You guys pretend to do something so great and think what we're all doing is so bland, but actually, what I'm doing is infinitely more difficult than what you're doing. I'm
drawing something that is good, but is clean and decent and I'm not bothering anybody and I'm not hurting anybody. And I said, 1 defy you to do that" They draw the same dirty pictures with the same dirty expressions and pretty soon, they're all alike.
What's so great about that? I admit that some of them are good-Crumb is good-but that has never interested me. Besides, you get back to spiritual-ity. I've always been very grateful for what has happened to me and I think it would be ungrateful of me to use whatever sensibilities I have for wrong.
So I've always been very careful about that.
GROTH: Were you familiar with Harvey Kurtzman's work?
SCHULZ: Oh, sure, sure.
GROTH: Did you like it?
SCHULZ: I'm just familiar with it. A lot of them are wonderful. And the guys who used to draw for MAD magazine were sensational. Boy, some of them can draw.
GROTH: Are you at all familiar with Carl Barks?
SCHULZ: Oh, sure. But I never saw them when I was a kid, and I don't know why. I never read any Barks.
GROTH: Did you read comic books when you were a kid?
SCHULZ: Oh, I not only read them, I bought every one that came out. I had the original first Famous Funnies that came out. Some stupid friends of mine tore the cover off it and it disappeared. But I had it for years. I used to buy Tip-Top Comics and I can still remember the day when Superman came out in Action Comics. I took it over to a friend of mine and we though, wow... I knew this guy had some-thing. The drawing was nice to look at. It wasn't as....
MARSHALL: It was half cartoon.
SCHULZ: It wasn't as slick as the latest Superman.
But it was fun to look at. I knew that boy, this guy really had something.
GROTH: Did the EC comics leave any impression on you?
SCHULZ: What would that be?
GROTH: Well, of course, MAD comic books. They had also published Harvey Kurtzman's..
SCHULZ: By then, I had stopped reading them. My own kids read Archie comics and that was about it. But I used to buy the Big Little Books, I bought every Big Little Book that came out until I got overwhelmed by them. I was the librarian in my neighborhood because the kids would come over and borrow my Big Little Books and my comics magazines [laughter]. All of my Big Little Books got lost in the fire in my dad's apartment.
MARSCHALL: You've said that a lot of Charlie
Brown's school experiences come from your school-age experiences.
SCHULZ: Oh, yeah. It took me a long time to become a human being. I was regarded by many as kind of sissyfied, which I resented because I really was not a sissy. I was not a tough guy, but I was good at sports. I was a good baseball player. When I was 15, I became instantly a good ball-player. I was good at any sport where you threw things, or hit them, or caught them, or something like that. I hated things like swimming and tumbling and those kind of things, so I was really not a sissy. We never had the chance in those days to do some of the athletic things we wanted to because the coaches were so intolerant and there was no program for all of us.
So I never regarded myself as being much and I never regarded myself as being good looking and I never had a date in high school, because I thought, who'd want to date me? So I didn't bother.
And that's just the way I grew up.
I was telling somebody, I think it was just yester-day, that it wasn't until I came back from the war that I really had self-confidence, because I went into the Army as a nothing person, and I came out as a staff sergeant, squad leader of a light machine gun squad. And I thought, by golly, if that isn't a man, I don't know what is. And I felt good about myself and that lasted about eight minutes, and then I went back to where I am now.
MARSHALL: You've said it, and Al Capp and I guess a lot of text humorists have said it: The basis for humor is pain, suffering, or humiliation. You can intellectualize about that now, but when the strip started, did you see that as a formula?
SCHULZ: No. When my strip first started, it was so totally different from what it is now that I don't even know what it was when it first started. I had experimented with many different types of fea-tures. I used to get on the train in St. Paul in the mornings at breakfast on the train and make that beautiful ride down to Chicago, get there about three in the afternoon, check into a hotel by myself, and the next morning I would get up and make the rounds of the syndicates. My first few trips, I really didn't have enough to show them and only one man treated me nicely. I met him years later and we talked about that and I was able to express to him my appreciation of how polite and nice he was, because some of the other syndicate people were very rude and most of them didn't even let me in the door. But as my work improved, I began to sell this thing called Li'l Folks to the St. Paul [Pioneer Press]. While I was doing this, I was also working at the art instruction correspondence school, drawing funny little figures, and I developed this three-panel strip which was unique in that what happened in the story was an incident that was only a couple of seconds. And so, when I sent in the panels that were finally accepted by United Fea-tures, I hadn't....
MARSCHALL: Excuse me, it was a panel? It wasn't a strip?
ScHULZ: It was unique. This was something which nobody knows about, and it annoys me that the editor lost my original submissions. For years, he kept promising me he'd send them back and he never sent them back and somebody had them someplace and I would love to know who has them.
Either that, or they got thrown away.
But I was looking for an angle. I figured if I'm going to break into this business, I've got to do something which is a little bit different. I had developed this very simple style of drawing and I took all of the best ideas that I sold to the St. Paul
paper and I re-drew them in a panel format. I took Grin and Bear It as my size to pattern after and, instead of drawing one single panel, I drew one above the other: I figured I'll be smart, I'll give the editor two cartoons for the price of one and this will be a good sales gimmick. So I sent it in and they were really good and I was very proud of them. And this is what the syndicate editor finally said to me:
"We kind of like it. Would you like to come to New York and talk about it?" So, when I went to New York, I brought along a half dozen of these comic strips that I had been working on that I have been telling you about, which were really unique....
MARSCHALL: These were two tiers?
SCHULZ: The panel was two tiers. It was called Li'l Folks. And that's what the syndicate editor saw in my submissions. But then when I went to New York, in person, I brought along these other things because I wanted to show what other things I could do. And they opened up that package while I was out having breakfast, and decided that they would rather have a strip. And then, [laughter] like syndicate people do, they began to fiddle around with it. The sales manager said, "How about if we make it even broader in its appeal and we have one little kid strip at the top and a teen-age strip at the bot-tom?" So I thought about it and said, "Oh, all right, I have to do what they tell me," so I did that and they really didn't care for the teen-age thing. And then they said, "We'll just have the kid thing." And then...I'm kind of lost now, as I tell this story, but somewhere in there, they decided that they'd rather have a strip, and right then was when they made this fateful decision that it was going to be a space-saving strip, which I have resented all my life. Now it may have gotten me started, but I'm not sure, so I had to overcome the fact that I was drawing a space-saving strip under the title Peanuts, which was the worst title ever thought up for a comic strip.
It's totally ridiculous, has no meaning, is simply confusing, and has no dignity-and I think my humor has dignity. Those are two things that have hung over me and I've resented my whole career.
MARSHALL: Thirty-seven years hasn't softened that?
SCHULZ: No, no. I hold a grudge, boy.
MARSHALL: By "space-saving strip," you mean that it was reproduced smaller than the average comic strip?
SCHULZ: It was reproduced smaller, it was drawn in four equal panels so that it could be run vertically, horizontally, or in a square, two below two. Now, the ironic part of it is, about a year later, they came out with Twin Earths, which was enormous in its size, and Long Sand, which was also enormous in its size. Then they told me that newsprint is kind of short and we're having trouble and we think having this as a space-saving strip will help. Well, you know where Long Sand is and you know where Twin Earths is. I've always been proud of the fact that quality won out over size and space.
MARSCHALL: You've kept to that four-panel square format, though you don't have to now.
(EDITOR'S NOTE: In the years after this interview was conducted, Schulz converted the strip to three equal-sized panels and then began varying the panel size from strip to strip, a format that continues to this day.]
SCHULZ: I'm a great believer in loyalty. I'm not a believer in dictating to the newspaper editor how he should run my strip. And I've had some papers with me now for 36 years and they have run my strip in the same spot all this time and who am I suddenly to say "I'm too good to draw a small strip like this, I want more room, I want more space, I want more this or that." I believe in being loyal to these editors who have been loyal to you. And that's just the way I look at things. I don't want to break this agreement here and cause the editor to have to shuffle around everything that he's done and to change all of it.
GROTH: How do you feel about [Garry] Trudeau's demanding more space [for Doonesbury]?
SCHULZ: [pause] That he's not professional. He's never been professional.
GROTH: How do you mean that?
SCHULZ: I don't think he conducts himself in a professional manner in the things that he does.
MARSCHALL: You're not just talking about the artistry on the strip?
SCHULZ: It's his whole attitude toward the business.
GROTH: You don't admire the strip.
SCHULZ: [shakes head]
MARSCHALL: You just talked about the title Peanuts and you've written about that before. Bill Anderson made a list of 10 names and Peanuts was chosen.
Do you know where he'd come up with that?
SCHULZ: Well, he told me, a couple of years after-ward,
"I never saw the strip. Somebody came to me and said: We're gonna start a new kids strip and we need a title. Can you think of anything?" He said, "I wrote down ten ideas and one of them was
'Peanuts' and that's what they took."
MARSHALL: Do you know where he got Peanuts from?
SCHULZ: No.
MARSHALL: He told me it was because thinking of a kids' strip, a kid's milieu, Howdy Doody was the hottest thing on kids' TV at that time and where the kids sat in Howdy Doody was the Peanut Gallery. That seemed logical to him.
SCHULZ: But you see what bothers me. In the first place, it has no dignity. I don't even like the word.
It's not even a nice word. They didn't realize that I was going to draw a strip that I think has dig-nity. I think it has class. But, of course, and I've said this before, when a young person goes into the president's office, what that syndicate president is buying is the potential of this young person. He's not even buying the work that he is looking at, he's buying the potential 10, 20 years down the road, and how does he know? They didn't know when I walked in there that here was a fanatic. Here was a kid totally dedicated to what he was going to do.
And to label then something that was going to be life's work with a name like 'Peanuts' was really insulting.
Now, we'll go to the next step, which is that little kids are never called "peanuts" as they said they were. They never are. The only peanuts that are referred to is something that is insignificant, something with no color, or else it might be the nickname of a ball player or some little kid. And I said they're going to confuse Charlie Brown with the name "Peanuts." "No, no, no, no," they said.
"No, no, it's just a catchy name that will attract the editors." So, what happens the very first year, I begin to get letters saying, "I love this new strip with Peanuts and his dog." Oh geez! That aggravates me.
MARSHALL: It astounds me it still happens. I have relatives who know I love comic books who say "I love that little boy, Peanuts."
SCHULZ: I never mention (the name]. If someone asks me what I do, I always say, "I draw that comic strip with Snoopy in it, Charlie Brown and his dog."
MARSHALL: You've never pictured adults, parents or otherwise, in the strip. Maybe once or twice you've had the hand of an adult at a magazine counter or something like that. Was that something you set out to do?
SCHULZ: Oh, I never thought about it at first. It was the way I drew the characters, they filled up the strip and I drew them from the side view. The type of humor that I was using did not call for camera angles. I liked drawing the characters from the same view all the way through because the ideas were very brief and I didn't want anything in the drawing to interrupt the flow of what the characters were either saying or doing. So there became no room for adults in the strip. At one point, I think, years and years ago, I drew a whole bunch of adults in a gallery where Lucy was playing in a golf tournament which is something I never should have done. But it was an experiment.
MARSHALL: In the background?
SCHULZ: leah, in the background. I drew these adults. I never should have done that. And then I used to have off-stage voices, which again was simply because I didn't know how to handle it. Now, the strip has become so abstract that the introduction of an adult would destroy it because you can't have an adult in a strip where a dog is sitting on a doghouse, pretending he's chasing the Red Baron.
It just doesn't work. So, it's taken all these years really to learn some of these things. You make mistakes, but fortunately it's a medium that allows for mistakes if you recognize them right away. It's possible, I think, to make a mistake in the strip and without realizing it, destroy it. My best exam-ple, I think, and this will surprise you, I think Eugene the Jeep was a mistake. I think Eugene the Jeep took the life out of Popeye himself, and I'm sure Segar didn't realize that. I realized it myself a couple of years ago when I began to introduce Snoopy's brothers and sisters. I realized that when I put Belle and Marbles in there it destroyed the relationship that Snoopy has with the kids, which is a very strange relationship. And these things are so subtle when you're doing them, you can make mistakes and not realize them. You've got to watch that very carefully. What made Popeye great was that he solved all his problems by whopping somebody, but then by having Eugene the Jeep be able to predict the future and do all of these things, I think, was just the wrong direction. And once you go there, it's almost impossible to pull back. I think the Jeep was a great idea, but it shouldn't have become as dominant as it became.
MARSHALL: It introduced a whole lot of other fantasy characters.
SCHULZ: The same with Superman. Superman was destroyed on several levels. In the first place, a comic strip cannot appear in its original form in too many areas because then, the tension goes out of it. You cannot have a daily strip going, a Sunday page going, Action Comics going, another Superman comic book going, a movie going. You can't have all these things going because he can't be damaged in one area and be undamaged in another. There are too many things going on at the same time. Now, Superman was great until he began to be able to see through things and fly.
Superman shouldn't fly, Superman should jump. So they made a lot of mistakes.
MARSHALL: Before we leave the first period of your life, when you took the correspondence course, was it federal school then, or...
SCHULZ: Yes. It was the federal school. I was sitting at home at night and I used to draw on the dining room table. I had to push back the beautiful table cloth my mother had made, put newspaper down, and draw. I remember I fooled her one time. I brought a magic ink blot and pretended the ink bottle had fallen over and she came rushing in and I said "Mom, look." She screamed and ran out to get a dish towel. When she came back in, then I laughed-great sense of humor.
She came in one night and she said, "Look here in the newspaper. It says 'Do you like to draw?' Send for a free talent test." So I sent in and a few weeks later, a man knocked on the door and it was a man from the correspondence school. And he sold us the course.
MARSHALL: They went door to door?
SCHULZ: Yeah.
MARSHALL: Did you ever finish the course?
SCHULZ: Oh, sure.
MARSHALL: I don't think I've met a cartoonist who's had the Famous Artists course who actually finished one. They thought the world of them, but. ...
SCHULZ: I may be wrong, but the percentage of people that finish the course was very low, because it just takes a lot of drive to do this on your own at home. Now, this is a good course, and they were all good instructors, dedicated people. They were always sending out material to encourage you to do your work and all of that sort of thing. All my friends work there.
MARSCHALL: And you worked there, eventually. ...
SCHULZ: After the war, yeah.
MARSCHALL: Correcting the students?
SCHULZ: Yeah. See, I was afraid to go to art school.
I could not see myself sitting in a class with 30 other people who could draw circles around me. It just didn't interest me. So I didn't do anything after high school. I had a couple of jobs. And then, of course, the war came along, and that was the turning point for all of us. I remember visiting the service club one Sunday afternoon and seeing a show of originals of gag cartoons that had been in Colliers and the New Yorker, or wherever they were, looking at them, and admiring how beautifully drawn they were. And before that, when I was still a teenager, drawing some kind of adventure strip, my mother noticed in the paper that there was a show of originals in the downtown library. We went down there that afternoon, and I walked around the room and I saw Roy Crane drawing boats in the water, then went home and took all of my work and tore it up and threw it away and started over again.
I knew I had a long way to go. But I used to go over then to the correspondence school which was in Minneapolis-although I mailed in all of my lesson work—I didn't even have the nerve to take that over in person, although we were allowed to do it. But then later on, after I got my diploma and graduated, I used to take my comic strips over and I would show them to an older man named Frank Wing and he used to draw this thing called Yester-day. He was a great believer in literal drawing. He could draw beautifully and he tried to encourage people to draw from life-you know, if you have to draw a shoe, put a shoe down on the ground and learn how to draw a shoe. You can't draw a cartoon shoe until you learn how to draw a real shoe. And he would look at my work, but he couldn't really tell me what was wrong with it and I used to say
"Well, look at Popeye. He doesn't draw real people." He never could explain to me why Popeye was good.
And that always puzzled me.
MARSHALL: Did he really think it was?
SCHULZ: Oh, yeah. He liked Popeye, but he couldn't tell me what marvelous quality was there. So, later on, after I got a job, he used to sit with me and we used to laugh and joke about things and talk about comic strips and stuff. But I learned a lot from Frank Wing.
MARSHALL: You sold gag cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post and, am I right, no other magazine?
SCHULZ: No, nope.
MARSHALL: That's incredible. I mean, just starting out....
SCHULZ: The [other magazines] just didn't buy the things.
MARSCHALL: Yeah, but if you're going to sell to some magazines, it's going to be This Week or American Legion or something like that. The Post is the cream of the crop.
SCHULZ: I did it all wrong. I drew this little cartoon of a boy sitting out on the ends of a chaise lounge, with his feet on the little stool. Then I finished it up and just sent it in all by itself.
MARSHALL: As a finish?
SCHULZ: Yeah. I'd been sending things to other magazines. And I came home, I used to get mail from my dad's barber shop, when I lived in an apartment around the corner and upstairs. It said
"Check Tuesday for spot drawing of boy on lounge."
So, I put it away. My dad and I went out for dinner that night, as we usually did, and I said "I got a note today from the Post. Gee, now I understand that. They're going to send me a check on Tues-day. I thought it meant I should check the mail on Tuesday, they were going to send it back." And, sure enough, that Tuesday, I got a check for $40.00 and it was my first sale. My first major sale. I had been selling cartoons, Li'l Folks, to the Pioneer for two years and I had been doing lettering for the Catholic comic magazine Timeless Topics for several years.
MARSHALL: That was located.
SCHULZ: That was in St. Paul. I used to letter the whole comic magazine by myself: I would letter it in French and I would letter it in Spanish and it seems to me once I lettered the whole thing in Latin, sitting in my kitchen at night. I didn't know any of those languages, but they gave me the translations. I loved it.
MARSHALL: Did you do any other drawings for them, maybe fillers?
SCHULZ: Once, I sold them two pages of little gag cartoons, four to a page, called Just Keep Laughing.
He was going to run them regularly and then, after the second one, he said, "No. The priest that runs the place doesn't like it, so I have to tell you we don't need any more." And then, one day, I had done a special rush job for them. I went down after work, picked up these pages, went home, lettered the whole thing, and had it down there the next morning for him and as a show of gratitude, he let me do a four-page story and that was the only thing 1 ever got to do for him. You know, I saw him last year down in Santa Barbara and we reminisced about this.
MARSHALL [showing Schulz some old roughs from his collection): After you made that initial sale to the Post, did you then start submitting roughs like these. .
SCHULZ: Yeah...Where are those from?
MARSHALL: I think I got them from Jim Ivy.
SCHULZ: Yeah, but where would he get them? You know, David Stanford sent me some Xerox copies of things like this several months ago. Where did it come from? Because if they are Post submissions, they should have been sent back to me. I mean, they were rejected.
MARSCHALL: And if they'd been bought, they would have been sent back with notes on them or some-thing.
SCHULZ: No matter what. But they weren't bought.
Isn't that weird? Better keep them. So, I sent in ten every week and over a period of two years, after a couple of years, I hit a terrible slump. You know, John Doly was kind enough to tear off little notes and clip them to each cartoon and tell me why he didn't buy it. I've never met the man, but I've been told that he was very kind that way and very considerate of cartoonists. And then I began to get on track and I made most of my sales using the gimmick of little kids using something the way it shouldn't be, like they were playing football on the bed and one of them said, "We're close enough.
Let's try for a field goal," and the bed posts were the posts. And in another, they were going to have a race down this long davenport and the davenport was made to look like a race track. In another one, they were playing hockey on top of the birdbath.
I've had Snoopy do that now for years. That was the kind of idea I sold.
MARSCHALL: Props?
SCHULZ: Yeah. And the first good line I thought up was one that was jotted down on the wall over there.
Somebody permafaxed it for me. It was a girl standing in front of a desk talking to a guy and she says,
"We're taking up a collection for one of the girls in the office who isn't getting married or leaving, but feels that she's stuck here for the rest of her life." I think that was my breakthrough of doing something that was reasonably literate. Anyway, I sold 15 over a period of two years, and then I sold Peanuts, and when I went to sign the contract, I said "Would it be all right to continue to submit ideas to the Post?" And he said, "No, I don't think you should, because an editor who buys your strip usually buys your name and your work and we think he should have exclusive use of your work." That was all right by me. I wanted to draw a strip.
I couldn't stand that freelancing and that bitter blow of opening the envelope and seeing a note that said, "Sorry, nothing this week." It was so crushing.
MARSCHALL: Well, it's got to be like baseball players, when a successful ball player fails two out of three times at the plate. No matter how much you sell to the magazines, most of the gags are rejected.
SCHULZ: Right. And I never got into the real pro-fessional pattern, which you have to do I think. You have to have a lot of markets and be very practical about it. I never got that far in it. I just sold the strip too quickly so I never became a real gag car-toonist.
MARSHALL: Peanuts really was the renaissance-do you agree with this?-of the intellectual strip.
Growing up, Peanuts played a large role in my not being embarrassed about using big words in front of the other kids, and the Beethoven thing made me interested in Beethoven and Mozart. Do you agree with that definition of the strip? Did you have something like that in mind when you started the strip, or was this just a next generation Skippy? scHuLZ: I didn't have anything in mind. I was just drawing. [Looking at promo brochure] This came out later, though. See, Violet didn't come into the strip for at least a year and Shirley didn't come in for over a year. I never did figure out how to draw Shirley's hair. Why did they buy that? That looks terrible.
MARSHALL: But it's marketed here as a little kid's strip.
SCHULZ: Yeah. Well, I've fought that all my life, too.
And I fight it with licenses today. I don't draw for little kids... Well, I draw for myself, which is who I think we all draw for. We draw for ourselves and hope that people like it. But the licenses keep driving it down for little kids. We did the first television show, A Charlie Brown Christmas, we did the best show we could do and what happens? We win an Emmy for the best children's animated show of the year. We didn't draw it for kids. We drew it for grown-ups. I just draw for myself and draw it as well as I can. I'm not pretending to be modest, I know I'm not an intellectual. I don't even think I'm very smart. I really don't. I think I'm witty and I think I know how to skim the surface of a subject and take out enough for me to use and to make it look like I know a lot about the subject. You really don't have to know much to be a cartoonist. So if it's an intellectual strip, I've never really even thought about it. I'm glad. I never thought about it, but I did want to draw something that was good.
MARSHALL: Comic strip history breaks down into the the pre-Peanuts era and the post-Peanuts era.
It seems to me one of your main contributions is a technical construction of the strip. You started with a small cast of characters in the beginning, and then it got large. You drew them all with very, very strong personality traits, and then established a lot of premises and a lot of situations for them to fit into.
So many strips before that were basically situational
-"What are we going to do next?" —or humorous continuity. Since you established this type of strip-large cast, strong personalities as opposed to situ-ations-virtually everything since that has come down the pike has been in that format. Doonesbury, certainly.
SCHULZ: Few people give me credit for having started this, but I think a lot of them don't realize that I did start it. I think, too, they used to say Peanuts has brought humor back into the comics page, because there is no doubt that, during the war, we had a lot of adventure things, and gag strips and humor strips had virtually disappeared.
I think the great tragedy is now we have lost the continuity strip. We've lost, especially, the humorous continuity strip. They're all turning into gag strips, they're all saying what they think are meaningful statements-they're not meaningful at all, they're just dumb. And that's a tragedy, too. A lot of it is due to the shrinking of the size. Poor Al Capp would die if he had to draw at the size of these things these days. Now, we have this terrible trend, which has just suddenly burst upon us, of the one-panel comic strip. I don't know where that's going to lead.
MARSHALL: It's cheating.
SCHULZ: And boring. Not only that, but it's robbing a creator of a chance to develop a group of characters and some good situations. Now, Ilike what you said before, the way you expressed that about from the characters, we went to certain situations, and I think this is the key to the whole thing. I created Beethoven's birthday, I created Linus and his blanket, I created the pursuit of the Red Baron, I created the pulling of the football, I created the Great Pumpkin-all of these, these are the things that make up a comic strip. You can't sit down and say, "I think I'm gonna draw a comic strip and this will be my main character." The main character has nothing to do with it. What you really need are the situations and that's where you should start. Nobody wants to start with that. They want to start by thinking up a character which will be a good gimmick and will make good plush toys. That's the wrong direction.
MARSHALL: More strips today start out based on animated TV shows. Seventeenth on the list is, “Oh, yeah, let’s do a comic strip to base this thing on.” It's not based on it.
SCHULZ: It's interesting, too, you mention anima-tion. Animation doesn't make good comic strips.
Animated characters are drawn to revolve. They're drawn with a slick brush line and the eyes and nose and ears, everything placed in a rubbery way, so that the character can revolve and do certain things. That kind of drawing does not fit in the comic strip page. The comic strip page has drawing which is a scratchy pen technique. Usually, in some of the great old strips, the characters are only drawn from a couple of different views. Popeye was usually drawn from the left three quarters or the right three quarters. When you turn him into an animated character, he has to become rubber and it doesn't work. Bill Melendez and his animators had a terrible time with the Peanuts characters.
Fortunately, we're in semi-animation, and it works.
I told him "This is just a cartoon. Don't worry about making it so lifelike. They don't have to turn if you don't want them to, just have them flip from one spot to another. That's all right. It's still a cartoon.
We're not trying to do Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs."
MARSCHALL: You once said in the development of character, "I don't think the cartoonist can show a character. He's got to expose a character, maybe, hrough situations and explain it as you show it." When Snoopy started thinking, that told more about him and the things you had him do. Did that just evolve, too? Snoopy didn't think at first.
SCHULZ: No, he didn't think. He actually barked and ran around on all fours and was just kind of a cute little puppy and I don't know how he got to walking and I don't know how he first began to think, but that was probably one of the best things that I ever did.
MARSHALL: Linus and the blanket? Was that Just...
SCHULZ: My own kids all had blankets, so that was something I observed. And I said many times that I was glad I did because I know if I hadn't done it Mort Walker would have come in with it a few months later for sure. Since then, I've seen other comic strips with blankets, and they've used the same ideas I had already drawn. In fact, lately, I'm beginning to see ideas in comic strips which I drew 20 years ago, which makes me happy to know I beat these guys. But I remember being beaten by J.R.
Williams by 30 years. And I was beaten by Gus Arriola by 10 or 15 years, so that happens. But I do see people using ideas which I've done a long time. Well, it's just a pattern of thinking; I don't say that it's stealing. I know it's not stealing, it's just a pattern of thinking.
MARSCHALL: The sincerest kind of flattery.
SCHULZ: Yeah.
MARSCHALL: Okay, we mentioned Snoopy and the blanket. Charlie Brown evolved. He was almost like a wise guy, at the beginning?
SCHULZ: Yeah. Little by little the characters begin to fall into place. I think there is a similarity to the lead characters in a lot of scripts. There is one simple character who is kind of innocent. He's not too strong in his personality; if he were, then he would dominate the strip. He's the one that holds everything together, and it's the other characters who have the unique personalities. He can't be a terrible character, but he has to be somebody that you like that holds things together. And that's what Charlie Brown is there for. Although, sometimes I think I should use him more-but I've got so many characters now that it's difficult to know who I should use the most. For a while, I received a couple of letters from somebody that said, "Don't use the dog so much. Get back to the little kids." I never pay attention to letters like that. But maybe he was right, maybe I was using Snoopy too much. I'm always trying to be selective. I'm always trying to do different things. And I always wanted to have some girls in the strip, which is why I have drifted more toward Peppermint Patty and Marcie.
There is something else here which is worth mentioning, I think, which again it's important towards building personalities and characters, in that Peppermint Patty calls Charlie Brown "Chuck." She's the only one in the strip that does that, where Marcie calls him "Charles." Everybody else calls him "Charlie Brown." Those are the little things. If you have enough of those little things, then I think you take on some kind of depth. I'm not a believer in funny names. I think a funny name is fine for one gag or one idea, but I don't think people are going to laugh at that funny name every day. You can't count on that. That's why my strip doesn't have many funny things like that in it, where you're trying for that extra laugh all the time.
MARSHALL: In that vein, were you planning for the April Fool to take off like the Great Pumpkin did?
SCHULZ: No. That was just a one-time strip. I didn't even like the way I drew it. I like the Easter Beagle.
For a long while, I wouldn't do anything on Easter.
I'm very sensitive to not offending anybody and I thought I shouldn't do anything with Easter. But then I thought, "Oh, the heck with it. It's fun-"the Easter Beagle," so I did it anyway.
MARSCHALL: My next question was going to be about Robert Short's two books. Do you think he went too far in analyzing the strip?
SCHULZ: Well, I don't know if he really analyzed. I think what he was really trying to do was use a comic strip as a springboard toward some kind of spiritual ideas. Robert's a great guy. We didn't even know each other when he wrote the book. I think the book had been out for a year before we finally met, but since then, we've become close friends and we love being together and talking about different things. I think he likes to just draw little spiritual thoughts from everything that goes on in his life and it occurred to me Peanuts was providing some spiritual jumping off place. Now I know it didn't come off that way, but I know that's what he was intending. The book was never mine and it was never meant to be my idea. That was part of the original agreement that, sure, he can use the strips, but it's not my writing.
MARSHALL: It's his interpretation. You just talked about readers being offended-you've probably gotten complaints when you've used Scripture, which you have more than any other artist.
SCHULZ: I think I've done more authentic scriptural strips than anybody. I hate cheap spiritual innu-endo. I hate strips showing the kid praying, talking about what mean things he did in the daytime. I just despise that kind of thing. I'd like to think that mine was done on a better level than that. I'm a reasonable student of the Scriptures, a typical Midwestern scholar. I think I use the Scripture very well in the strip in ways nobody else has ever thought of doing it, or would have the nerve, or even has the scholarship to do it. I'm proud of that, and also very sensitive to it. I've always done it in a nice way, never offensive. I was amazed when we put out the book called The Beagles and the Bunnies that we had enough to fill out the whole book.
I never dreamed of that.
MARSCHALL: You're a committed Christian?
SCHULZ: I think I'm becoming a secular humanist [laughter], but I don't want to get into that.
MARSHALL: I've heard that term applied to you. Did I read once that you were a lay preacher?
SCHULZ: Oh, well, I was very active in the church group right after World War II. We were all in our twenties and we went to Sunday morning services.
We went to Sunday evening youth meetings-although we weren't really youths-we went to Sunday evening services and Wednesday night prayer meetings and we were all very dedicated to the church. And now and then, I might be asked to speak on a Sunday evening. I have even spoken out on street corners, which I never should have done.
I would never do it again because I no longer feel I'm in a position to tell anybody anything, so I don't do it. But, anyway, I did all those things and it was a good group; they were nice people. I still have contact with a few of them and I'm in contact with the minister, who is now retired. We studied the Scriptures and discussed them avidly. That's where my background for all of those biblical things comes from and I have an honorary doctorate from Anderson College, which is the Church of God college.
MARSHALL: When you go from your knowledge, or maybe you turn to Proverbs or some of those parables, you don't do it in a subversive way to get a point across.
SCHULZ: I'm never grinding an axe, I'm never doing it to teach anybody anything. Very seldom. Maybe if we looked through them I could point out a few where I might be trying to say something against hypocrisy, I really don't know. It's hard to say overall. It's just that certain phrases pop into my mind and I think that would be funny, so I look up the Scriptures or else I remember a Scripture and suddenly, I find something comes into my mind, a certain way of using it, that's all.
GROTH: You said something earlier that I thought was potentially fascinating, that you were becoming a secular humanist?
SCHULZ: Well, I don't go to church any more. I taught adult Sunday school class in Minneapolis and came out here to a local Methodist church, but I never became a Methodist. They were just a nice group of people and they were all quite educated I enjoyed the class and I did it for about ten years.
Finally, I just ran out of things to say and it became an effort to do all the studying. Besides, this business of always having to think of something gets to you after a while. It got so that I could never be invited to a banquet without having to get up and say a few words. I have to think up a daily strip and I have to think up a Sunday and I was drawing youth cartoons for Church magazine and trying to think of a Sunday school lesson and studying and oh, gosh.Finally, after a while I just had to say, let somebody else do it, because I just don't have any more to say. So I haven't been back to church.
GROTH: Is there a sense that you're questing for....
SCHULZ: [laughter] No, I'm not questing for any-thing. I don't know anything, frankly. I think it's all a total mystery. I have no idea why we're here and I have no idea what happens after you die. My class wasn't one so much of teaching as it was just getting people to say things. I know I led them through the Bible verse by verse four times and each time, I would learn something more. I was not at all anxious to teach them what I thought about Every now and then, someone would say,
"Well, what do you think?" and I would say "It doesn't matter what I think. I just want to hear what you think and get you to talk about these things and actually read the Scriptures instead of saying, Well, I've heard about that in this or that."
MARSCHALL: An awful lot of people haven't.
ScHULZ: Oh, I know, 1 know. Idon't even know what secular humanism is. Have you ever heard of the book, I'm sure you have, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden? I know the author very well. She asked me what I believed. I said what I thought I believed in, and she said, "You are a secular humanist, that's what you are," and I said, "I am?" and she said, "Yeah, that's what I think you are." (laughter) But she's a marvelous lady.
GROTH: Was there ever a time when you questioned your religion?
SCHULZ: Well, it's not a matter of questioning....
My religious thing all started, it must have been a matter of gratitude. I was brought up Lutheran, but my dad liked to go fishing on Sundays, so we almost never went to church. I was never really brought up in church. But my mother was extremely ill with cancer when I was just turning 20. She was just coming out of the hospital. She suffered terribly. I used to wake up at night and hear her down the hall crying in pain. It was a terrible time.
I got drafted as soon as I turned 20 and I had to report. I got to go home a couple of weekends as they were deciding what ought to be done and one Sunday night I was home, she was so ill. I was saying good night to her to her back and she said,
"Well, goodbye, Sparky. We'll probably never see each other again." It has to be one of the most heart-breaking things in my life. It's bad enough to get drafted, but to know that your mom will die.
She was only 48. And sure enough, she died the next day. Then I came home from the funeral and the next thing I knew, I'm back with the army on a troop train and I'm traveling through the night with a bunch of guys I've never seen before in my life without knowing where I'm going. And I started going to church just out of a feeling of gratitude that I survived all of that. I felt that God protected me and helped me and gave me the strength to survive because I could have gone off in all sorts of wrong directions. I always felt that I was helped to live through those three years and come home because I never got shot or anything.
I knew about this Church of God-my dad and I used to go now and then-but one night, it was a Wednesday night, I was feeling very lonely and I knew they needed a new sign out in front of the church. It was a very poor church, so I walked all the way down several miles through the snow to the church. I told the minister I would make him a new sign if he wanted me to. He was a great man.
I made a lot of friends there. That's how it all hap-pened. And then we came out here and my first wife didn't care much about getting involved in the church once we got out here, so we sort of drifted away from it. But now I've ended up with one daughter becoming a Mormon and going to Eng-as a Mormon missionary (laughter]. We've become very close because of it, even though I don't like Mormons. I think that it's drawn us close together, we can talk about the scriptural things that she was never interested in before and she has a fine husband. My family has gone in all different directions, but they're all good kids.
MARSCHALL: Do you want to tell us your kids' names?
SCHULZ: Well, Meredith is the oldest. She lives in Colorado and raises mules.
MARSCHALL: Raises mules?
SCHULZ: [laughter] leah. Monty is the next. Monty lives in Santa Barbara. He's just finishing his novel. Craig is a pilot, and Jill is a professional skater with the Ice Follies, Holiday On Ice, and she's starring in my new venture, a new movie called The Girl in the Red Truck. It's an idea I got one day where Spike sees somebody drive by in a red truck and he waves to this girl and the girl waves back and he says,
, "Wow, that was great." So
he waits for her to come back and I thought to myself as I was drawing these strips, "This is too big for a comic strip. A comic strip really cant carry a story like this. It would make a good television show." Then I thought, "Gee, it would make a great movie." [laughter] Finally, after fiddling around with it for, oh, almost two years, I settled for an hour television movie, 47 minutes, and I'm paying for the whole thing myself. We went down to Arizona last November and filmed the whole thing with Spike and Jill meeting on the desert and his happiness is destroyed because she has a boyfriend (laughter). Of course, Jill is a great skater, so we have a great roller-skating sequence where Jill and Spike skate together. Now Bill Melendez is adding Spike to the film. It's live action and animation.
MARSCHALL: It'll have a typical Peanuts ending? scHULZ: Yeah. [laughter]
MARSHALL: None of the other characters will be in it?
SCHULZ: Only at the very beginning, where we had to solve the problem of explaining what's going on at the time, because Spike can't talk, and I refuse to give him a voice-so Charlie Brown is reading Snoopy a letter he got from Spike. Spike says, "Life in the desert is good. I go for walks and things and the other day, the most wonderful thing happened that has ever happened in my whole life-" So we have a voiceover, if we need it.
MARSHALL: When will this air?
SCHULZ: Probably after the first of the year because we have too many other things. We've got eight shows this year. We're doing a show on the Con-stitution, where the characters are back in 1787 when the Constitution is being formulated and the characters...
The kids are all working around the building.
MARSCHALL: Will they be in costume?
SCHULZ: Yeah.
MARSHALL: Do you consider that educational?
SCHULZ: Well, I hate to. That's another thing. It's like being dragged down to little tiny kids. Everybody wants me to make what you do, if it's a suc-cess, make it educational.
MARSHALL: We talked about continuity. It seems to me that one thing that could revive the newspaper comic strip, the humor strip, would be the return of humor continuities. And you use them. How do you plan them? Do you know the ending before you start, or do you just let it run and surprise yourself when it comes to an end?
SCHULZ: I never have any idea where I'm going with it and I discovered something, which is why I don't think—and I suppose I'll always offend somebody someplace-1 don't think you can write a comic strip on a typewriter. I think you're robbing yourself of the ideas that come from drawing, so what I'm more interested in is a good, standard, day-to-day group of ideas, which is more important than where the story goes. I'm doing a story right now and I have no idea where I'm going with it, but I'm very interested in trying to make each day funny. If you think of an overall story, you're liable to end up with a weak strip on Tuesday and Friday or Saturday and I don't want to do that. I'm more interested in making each day as funny as I can.
I don't know, maybe I've had some stories run five weeks, five or six at the longest. I haven't had any lately. They're awfully hard work and you have to have time to think about them. But I do agree that some kind of stories and strips can bring the reader back so he doesn't want to miss the next day's strip.
It's very important in building circulation.
MARSHALL: You've got characters with neuroses— Charlie Brown with his inferiority complex and Linus being insecure and Lucy ketching and all that. Does anyone advance the observation that you have done sort of Yiddish humor in WASP clothes?
SCHULZ: Not really. I have become a fairly good friend, through the mail, of Leo Rosten. He sends me all of his books, and I think I'm the Captain is one of the greatest humor books ever written.
Otherwise, I don't know much about it.
There is one thing I do resent. I resent the fact that when we talk about America's great humor-ists, comic strip artists are never mentioned, not even the great people that draw for the New Yorker.
Where's George Price?
MARSHALL: A couple of characters-Frieda and Faron. Are you a fan of country music?
SCHULZ: I was. I'm not a fan of any music any more.
It's very personal, but when Joyce and I were separated and divorced, and I was living alone and I was very unhappy, and I was separated from my children for a few months there, I couldn't stand to listen to the radio or any music. So I stopped listening to music and I really have not gotten back into it. I used to love country and western music.
The whole business of Charlie Brown and the red-haired girl came from listening to a Hank Williams song. I was home alone one night listening to it and it was so depressing that it occurred to me that I would do something with Charlie Brown and the little red-haired girl and that's how it all started. (laughter]
MARSHALL: You'll never show her, right?
SCHULZ: No, and I think it was a mistake to even show her on television, but you make a lot of mistakes when you do a lot of media. But I could never draw her into the strip now. You reach a point where the reader has already drawn her. And you could never live up to the way the reader has drawn her in his or her imagination.
MARSCHALL: Was that a temptation because of the animated format, or....
SCHULZ: I'm not good at drawing pretty little faces.
That would be the number one fear. I could probably be tempted into drawing her, if I could draw a real knock-out of a cute little girl, but I don't think I could. So I don't think I will. I like the little face on the girl that keeps telling Linus, "Aren't you kind of old for me?" Even that face was a struggle to draw.
MARSHALL: You named Woodstock during the Woodstock era. Were you speaking of your reader-ship, or did you just hear the name and think it was neat?
SCHULZ: I had been reading the Life magazine article about the Woodstock festival and I had the little bird in the strip. It was a she and she was Snoopy's secretary and I was doing secretary jokes quite often so then I thought Woodstock would be a good name for this bird and also, it will get the attention of these people that liked that kind of thing. Suddenly, she was not a secretary, she became Woodstock, the boy. [laughter) It just hap-pened. But that's what's good about a comic strip-you can just do it.
MARSHALL: Have licensing and merchandising or reader reaction ever influenced you to do things with characters and storylines?
SCHULZ: No. There are a lot of temptations and that would be easy to do, but I've never drawn anything with the thought that it would be good for licensing. I've never even emphasized a certain character because I thought it would be important.
Right now, it's very tempting because we're working on this movie starring Spike and it's very tempting to push Spike in the strip just to give him more attention, so that people will be ready for him. I don't think I could do it if I wanted to because I can't think of that many ideas for him.
But I like drawing Spike in the desert and I love drawing those rocks and the cactuses. [laughter]
GROTH: Do you impose a substantial amount of authority over how your work is licensed?
SCHULZ: Well, I have control over everything. My contract gives control. They can't do anything without my okay and I can do anything I want, as long as it does not destroy the property.
GROTH: Are there certain ways that you would not want your property licensed, that you would veto?
ScHULZ: Yeah. They're always dropping it down to make it too childlike and I don't like that. But I just can't get around it. Now they're coming out with the Snoopy quarterly magazine, which will be for very small children. But they promised it would be good quality. They're the same ones that put out Muppets magazine. It's a good outfit, I guess. They came out and visited us last week.
Well, what do I care. (laughter]
GROTH: Do you ever feel like you're losing control?
SCHULZ: No. But I'm getting old. I'll be 65 in November. And I wonder what is happening to me?
Someday, you're going to be old. [laughter]
MARSCHALL: Does that mean you're thinking of withdrawing to the strip and letting other people pay attention to the merchandising? That doesn't show in the strip. I mean, you have introduced new char-acters.
SCHULZ: Oh, no. No, the only reason that licensing keeps getting bigger is the fact that it's simply more popular now. United Features, which never even had a licensing department before, suddenly had this enormous licensing property and we had people devoted exclusively just to looking at other companies and finding licensed properties and things, which we never did. Everything we ever did came to us, really. We never went out and sought anything. So now licensing is very big, but I'm involved with it only to the point where I want to see it done as decently as possible.
MARSCHALL: Would you go through the story of how
A Charlie Brown Christmas happened?
SCHULZ: Well, we'd have to go back to the animated Ford commercials. J. Walter Thompson got the idea that they wanted to use the Peanuts characters to advertise Ford products and, immediately, they went to the Falcon. The Falcon was the car that was just starting then. So we did animated com-mercials, newspaper ads, billboards, everything, and I drew them all too. And I used to help them write the newspaper ads and the animated commercials and that's how I met Bill Melendez.
He learned how to draw the characters and so, when Lee Mendelson called me one day, he was doing a series on Bay area personalities, an hour television special. He had just finished one on Willie Mays which I had just seen and I thought it was great, so I said sure, come on out. Let's talk about it. So, he started filming the hour documentary and he wanted me to include some television stuff, some animated stuff, so I said,
"Well, then,
you have to meet Bill, then, because he's going to be the one to do it." So they formed their little organization and they started on this documentary and then they couldn't sell it. The way the story goes, a man from Coke who used to buy air time, called Lee and said, "We're looking for something for Christmas. You wouldn't happen to have a Christmas show, do you?" He said, "Well, we might." He called me and I said, "Well, sure, we can write one." So, me and Bill came up and we sat in my room and we wrote the Christmas show. We did the whole thing in four months and it won an Emmy and suddenly we were in the television business.
MARSCHALL: Were they interested because of the popularity of Peanuts?
SCHULZ: les. They were pretty popular by then.
MARSHALL: Did Coke see a sample, or the boards?
SCHULZ: They must have seen the boards. I don't know really know. You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown came about because this young man wanted to write some songs about the Peanuts characters-Clark Gesner-and put them in an album. And so the business manager asked me if it would be all right, and I told him yes and he sent me the test record and it sounded wonderful. I remember saying at the time, "This would make a good Broadway show, these are great songs." He had a little trouble selling it at first, but finally, MGM Records recorded it with Orson Bean as Charlie Brown. The girl that played Lucy took it over to her friend, Arthur Whitelaw, and said, "I just made this album and I think it would make a good show" and Arthur heard the songs and said, "Yeah, it's good" and so he asked the syndicate if they could put together some more things and make it into a show and that's how You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown came about. I never saw the thing for a couple of years. I never went to New York.
MARSHALL: Well, I know you weren't there opening night.
SCHULZ: You were there?
MARSHALL: I saw it as a kid when I was palling around with members of the NCS.
SCHULZ: That, to me, has been the most gratifying thing out of all the things that have happened. It's become the most performed musical in the history of American theatre.
MARSHALL: Is that right?
SCHULZ: Yes, because every school and church and high school and grade school and kindergarten you can think of has put this thing on and it had taken a terrible beating but it survives. And, of course, the music is good and it's not cute. That was the main thing. It was incredible that they could have made so many mistakes putting it together, but everything just fell right into place just right and that's very gratifying. I used to go down to the theatre in San Francisco and it was a great pleasure to stand out in the lobby when the show was over and seeing the families coming out and everybody smiling because they had had a good time (laughter].
MARSCHALL: And it was just you, no chorus girls or anything like that.
SCHULZ: No, no. That was the only thing I told them when it first started. I said "Don't try to make it... Don't do anything to it. Don't try to make it sophisticated. Don't try to do something to it to make it appeal to New York audiences." I said just play it straight, and that's what they did.
Something that almost nobody knows is that before that Kaye Ballard made an album that included some of the songs, but CBS ruined it by putting in a lot of strange sounds and things like that. But Kaye Ballard wrote me once and she said
"I'm using some of your things in my act" and I had heard Kaye Ballard, but I had never seen her perform. I read in the paper that she was performing at Hungry I. I called up and found out where she was staying and she was so pleased that I called her and I was so pleased to talk with her and she said "You gotta come down and see my act. I'm using some of your things in my act and I want you to come down and see it. You come down and be my guest at dinner and see the show." So we did and she put on a marvelous show and she could sing so well. But every now and again in her act, she would turn to her pianist. She used to say
"Arthur is now going to play a medley of these hits." She'd lean on the piano and she'd say Charlie Brown and then shed go through her little Charlie Brown-Lucy thing and she hadn't asked for permis-sion, she was just doing these things.
MARSCHALL: From the script?
SCHULZ: Yeah. And then we talked about it and she said "I'd really like to do an album of all these things. You really should, they're so funny." So she did, but the album never sold more than four copies,
I think.
MARSCHALL: How did Vince Guaraldi get involved?
I thought that was so inspired.
SCHULZ: Lee and I were just talking about that yesterday because we have a show and we had to have some music and Lee didn't know what to do and I guess he had heard Vince or something. He was playing in the Bay area and he just asked him to do the songs. And now, "Linus and Lucy" has become a minor classic.
MARSHALL: A Boy Named Charlie Brown. ...
SCHULZ: Oh, the first movie. We were victims of making the movie too long. I think it did have a few good parts and it was very successful, but it was just too long and it stretched out. I don't know quite how to handle it. I don't think any of the movies hold up except Snoopy. Come Home-that I think is going to last for a long time. It has a lot of funny things in it. That's a difficult medium.
There are so many other people involved. My problem is just trying to draw the daily strip and then the Sunday page and just keep track of these things. Sometimes I wish I were like Walt Disney and have my own big studio and be there every day and listen to the musicians and watch what's being done and have story conferences and just do it all the time. But I have to sit and draw this strip every day. You can't do everything. And yet, the animators do some things.
MARSCHALL: Have you gotten into any animation, the techniques and such, or do you just do the storyboards?
SCHULZ: I've never even learned how to animate.
MARSHALL: Do you want to mention Determine Productions?
SCHULZ: Well, Determine Productions came about when Connie Boucher called me and she wanted to put out a date book, and I thought it was a good idea. They sold out the first batch of their date books, so the next year, they doubled them and sold them out again and they talked about what else they could do. So, in passing, she mentioned could we do a book of some kind? And I said Yeah. Id always wanted to do an original book rather than just the reprints, and so she was looking through some scripts and saw the one that ended with
"Happiness is a Warm Puppy" and she said this would be a good book. And I said, "Yeah, but I can't think of any more ideas" and she said, "Why don't you try?" So she went to San Francisco and the next day I sat down and I wrote the whole book in about an hour. I drew it up and it was a number one bestseller of 1963. And that got Connie Boucher going. [laughter] From then on, there was no stopping her.
MARSCHALL: For a while, I think, she handled Peanuts material?
SCHULZ: Everybody, Rick, starts off with me and gets going, then tries to leave me, tries to go out and do something else and then always comes back to me. (laughter]
MARSHALL: Snoopy going to the moon. Did they come to you for permission, or...
SCHULZ: A man named-I'm amazed I can remember all these things-a wonderful man named Al Chop came to me and they had just had that tragic fire where the astronauts were killed and so they wanted to start a new safety program and he had an idea to bulld the program around a cartoon character and he asked me if Snoopy could be the character and I said, "Sure, I'm very flattered." So they made posters and all sorts of things. They made beautiful little metal things which were really nice pieces of jewelry and if a person on the assembly line has a good safety record, one of the astronauts would present him or her with the pin and of course, those pins were taken to the moon and the moon landing. So Snoopy, literally, is the first character to go to the moon. That of course always pleases me. There are a lot of things that have happened that please me to no end.
MARSHALL: Other things being the Rose Bowl where you were named the Grand Marshal?
SCHULZ: Yeah. I never dreamed I would be Grand Marshal of the Rose Bowl Parade. It was fun. Some things end, though, before you know you're having fun. Before you know it, the parade is over. [laughter] That was great. And I've made so many good friends in all of these things. The man who was the president of the Rose Parade that year, Eddie Wilson, he and I became close friends. We still correspond, and all of these things are very gratifying to me.
MARSHALL: I would like to ask you about Peanuts Prelude That's your most recent book, right?
SCHULZ: I think it was either that or You Don't Look 35, Charlie Brown. I don't know which came out first.
MARSHALL: But you are moving on to a new pub-lisher?
SCHULZ: They just didn't print enough books and distribute them. You know, The Peanuts Trivia books, they printed 10,000 of them. I said "You can sell 10,000 of them in New York City alone." That's ridiculous. There must be 10,000 book stores in the country and if they each sold one, that's all you need. I don't understand it. They were never able to give us a reason why they didn't print more of the books and get them into the stores. You could go into B. Dalton's, Walden's, and you'd see Garfield by the millions, and you would see no Peanuts books. Now, I have sold over 300,000,000 books in my life. Why can't I have them in these stores? So that's why. And it wasn't my decision. It was a decision on the part of the syndicate.
MARSHALL: Can you tell us about the new publish-er?
SCHULZ: It's United Features, an imprint called Pharaoh Books. A fellow by the name of David Hen-din, who's the vice-president in charge of these things and they promised me they were really going to get these things out.
GROTH: Why do you think they weren't printing enough books? Pure incompetence?
SCHULZ: 1 wish I knew, it's a mystery. We've never been able to solve it. We'd keep asking and asking but we've never been able to solve it. I've had books on the best-seller list and it used to be that just automatically we'd sell 100,000 of these things, but all of a sudden, they're not there any more. I could never figure that out. I would rather them not print them at all than just print a few.
GROTH: Do you think there is a greater concern for commercial consideration now than there was, say, twenty years ago?
SCHULZ: I don't know. I really don't. I know that people in United Features deny it. But it's hard to think that they're not. We tried doing Saturday morning, but we couldn't keep up, it was just too much. Bill couldn't handle it all.
MARSCHALL: Did you work on them, too, story ideas and such?
SCHULZ: Well, they took all of them from the strips, so I didn't have to. That was just too much. Too much to draw.
GROTH: I have a couple more questions I would like to ask you. One thing I am curious about is if you are a politically oriented person.
SCHULZ: No. I was brought up Republican. I saw Herbert Hoover get off the train in St. Paul when he was running for re-election. And I saw Eisenhower once when we went to Minneapolis and we all stood out on the street... but I was very taken by Wendel Wilkie when I was young. I was calling myself an Eisenhower Republican, because he was the first person I ever voted for that got elected [laughter]. Gosh, you know, for 20 years we were under Democratic rule. Twenty solid years and then... But I sold a cartoon because of Dewey losing that morning. When I came back to Art Instruction that morning, of course Truman had won and some woman came in who had voted for Wallace. She still was glad Dewey had lost. Somebody said, "How did you sleep last night?" I said,
"Oh, I sleep well enough at night, it's living during the day I find so hard" and I sold it to the Saturday Evening Post. So I figure I got $80.00 out of the election anyway. But I've never been involved in local politics or done anything. I've met President Carter and President Reagan. He called me on the phone when I was recovering from surgery, which was quite flattering.
GROTH: Do you have any loosely defined political leanings?
SCHULZ: No, no, I don't even want to get into that.
It's the same as the religious thing. I'm not especially fond of of all political cartooning. I think a lot of it is irresponsible. These guys write about things they really don't know anything about. They leap on the band wagon the day after something happens and draw things that aren't even true. And some of them are terribly petty on both sides. I've had troubles with them in times past with them using my characters. Only one time in maybe 30 some guy drawing for one of the Chicago papers was using my characters for something the exact opposite of what I believed in. It reminded me of Bill Mauldin and his suit against the Los Angeles Times...
MARSHALL: Conrad?
SCHULZ: Conrad. Yeah, because he used Willie and Joe in a cartoon in a way that offended Mauldin, without asking him.
GROTH: One of the remarkable things about the strip is that there is no perceivable ideologies.
SCHULZ: [laughter] Sort of a wishy-washyness.
GROTH: No, no, not at all. It's really remarkable, because there are so many shrill ideologies.
SCHULZ: Well, I do think about it. I really don't want to offend people and I don't think it's neces-sary. I think it can be funny and remain kind of innocent and yet I don't think you have to be sugary sweet or stupid.
GROTH: This is a sort of cliched question, but I'll ask it anyway. Can you tell us what you think the future or potential of comics is?
SCHULZ: Depends on the editors. I don't think we have any choice. I think we're totally at the mercy of the editors and whatever they're going to do with these comic pages. And if it keeps up the way it's going now... I think there are good futures for a lot of people. I know they're buying all sorts of new things and all that. I don't think it's necessarily going to produce great new superstars. And I'm not just talking about just making a lot of money, I'm talking about somebody really great. Obviously, Calvin and Hobbes is one that seems to have the opportunity to do something really great and I don't know if it will or not. It's difficult because of the space you have.
GROTH: Do you think that the new formats coming out, such as book-length comic books, will have some..
SCHULZ: I don't think comic books have anything to do with it, do you?...Oh, do you mean the reprints of comic strips?
GROTH: No, I'm talking about the new formats that are being published.
SCHULZ: I haven't seen them.
GROTH: Have you heard of Art Spiegelman's Maus?
SCHULZ: Oh, sure, sure.
GROTH: Okay. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. Because you get away from the space restrictions and the editors.
SCHULZ: Yeah, yeah. But I suppose, again, that they're at the mercy of the publishers and the distributors and it's a whole different profession. It's something which is totally foreign to me. What I think is a pity is something like that can't be transferred to the comics page. The newspapers won't even listen to this, but the potential is there and I think there's a lot of great children's book illustrators who should be in the comic pages, but are not.
GROTH: Have you resisted the temptation to take a vacation?
SCHULZ: Quit for a year? So far I've resisted it.
GROTH: But you've had the temptation?
SCHULZ: I never thought I would, but the last few years, all my friends are retiring and I'm beginning to wonder if I hadn't wasted my life. Yeah, wait
'til you're 65 or 64.
MARSCHALL: You mean that literally?
SCHULZ: Mn-hm. Not that I don’t think I’ve done as best as I ever could with what abilities I have.
I'm very happy and I've done more than I've ever dreamed I would do. Things have happened to me that I never dreamed of, and so I'll die content, as far as that goes. But there's still a big world out there that I don't know anything about and I'm married now to a woman who loves to travel and I'm thinking, Gosh, maybe there is more. And of course, I'm not very well educated so maybe I should get back to school and learn how to speak French or something like that, or go to Cambridge.
There are just so many things that I could be doing.
And after you've had heart surgery, too, and were on the brink of dying at 58 and you begin to wonder, then, too. How do I know when the arteries are going to close over and bang, it's all over. Do I just want to sit here and just draw another daily strip?
MARSHALL: Sparky, this is my last question. On your heart operation, you did one of the tenderest continuities you've ever done after that. That's the only word I can find. I was different than other things, but it wasn't out of step with the strip.
SCHULZ: That was where Charlie Brown was in the hospital?
MARSHALL: Charlie Brown was in the hospital and it was like a composer shifting to a minor key for a while. You survived a quadruple bypass?
SCHULZ: Yes. That's like what I was telling you about coming home from the Army and suddenly, I'm a man, you know. I've done this and I'm feel. ing good about myself. I thought, "Boy, I don't want to go to the hospital, they're going to saw my chest open. I'm not that brave. I don't want to go any place. I don't want to do anything. I don't know if I can stand this." But I remember my kids saying
"But you'd better do this, dad, if you want to play tennis and hockey again. You'd better do it." I went to the surgery and they explained what they did and they said, "It doesn't hurt when they saw your chest in half. It doesn't hurt at all." Well, [my wife] Jeannie and I thought about it for a couple of months. So I did it and I thought, "Boy, if I do this, I'll really feel good about myself." But that first night in the hospital, when they take you in and they take away all your clothes and you've got to take a shower and they come in and give you a pill, I thought, "Do I want to do this?" I've got-ten on airplanes and I've gotten off before the plane has taken off because I didn't want to travel, I've backed out of things for years. I said, "I could get my clothes now and I could go home. I don't have to do this. I could go home and just take it easy and maybe survive, but I'll make a complete fool out of myself if I do it and my wife will be ashamed of me and my kids will be ashamed of me." So I went to sleep and the next morning, it all hap-pened. So I thought, "Boy, if I survive this, I'll feel great." But I'm still the same person now [laughter] that I always was. It didn't change me much. I still had the same fears I've always had. But if you don't have the surgery-I've talked to other guys-every time you go to sleep at night, you wonder if you're going to wake up in the morning. If you go away, if you go to New York and you're in a hotel room and maybe had too much to eat or something that night, your stomach is feeling kind of funny and you twist and you wonder,
"Is this the night that last artery closes?" You can't live that way, which is why I decided to go ahead to do it. I've never put in my years that I promised that I would put in.
MARSHALL: Promised to whom?
SCHULZ: The syndicate president, when he took over—see, I was ready to quit—we argued with the president for almost three years over what was going to happen. I said, "I want to own this thing.
I'm tired of you selling Charlie Brown razor blades in Germany without telling me. I want to be able to do what I want to do and I don't want you doing anything but the strip. Either I get my way, or I'm going to quit." This guy, he couldn't understand it at all. "You make more money than everybody else.
You've got more." I said, "Yeah, but I earn more, I've done more. You see, I don't want more money.
I just want control so you guys don't ruin it." Well, fortunately, he retired. [His successor] came in and he and I sat down and within five minutes, he could see how sensitive it was. All I was asking is that they don't ruin it.
GROTH: Mr. Schulz, if you were as militant about controlling the strip as that, why wouldn't you be similarily militant about newspapers running it large?
SCHULZ: Because of what I said before: I don't think it's fair for me to dictate to the editors who are really my customers. And because so many of them, for so many years, like the The Chronicle, run it in the same place for 35 years now and suddenly, to force them to change the whole thing around just because I want more space, I just think that would be too egotistical.
But if it's something that I really want, I'll go for it. I never quit, too.
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