Release date: October 21, 1998 | Series: Festive Peanuts
It's New Year's! And Snoopy, the unflappable life of the party, is off to a black-tie event. The rest of the Peanuts gang is ruminating over their New Year's resolutions and their party hats.
Ring in the new year with lots of good cheer and a small dose of wisdom from the Peanuts crowd.
Charles M. Schulz, is the world-renowned creator of the Peanuts comic strip. He is the recipient of two Reuben Awards from the National Cartoonists Society and has been inducted into the cartoonists Hall of Fame. He lives with his wife, Jeannie, in Santa Rosa, California
Charles M. Schulz was born November 25, 1922 in Minneapolis. His destiny was foreshadowed when an uncle gave him, at the age of two days, the nickname Sparky (after the racehorse Spark Plug in the newspaper strip Barney Google).
In his senior year in high school, his mother noticed an ad in a local newspaper for a correspondence school, Federal Schools (later called Art Instruction Schools). Schulz passed the talent test, completed the course and began trying, unsuccessfully, to sell gag cartoons to magazines. (His first published drawing was of his dog, Spike, and appeared in a 1937 Ripley's Believe It Or Not! installment.) Between 1948 and 1950, he succeeded in selling 17 cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post--as well as, to the local St. Paul Pioneer Press, a weekly comic feature called Li'l Folks. It was run in the women's section and paid $10 a week. After writing and drawing the feature for two years, Schulz asked for a better location in the paper or for daily exposure, as well as a raise. When he was turned down on all three counts, he quit.
He started submitting strips to the newspaper syndicates. In the spring of 1950, he received a letter from the United Feature Syndicate, announcing their interest in his submission, Li'l Folks. Schulz boarded a train in June for New York City; more interested in doing a strip than a panel, he also brought along the first installments of what would become Peanuts--and that was what sold. (The title, which Schulz loathed to his dying day, was imposed by the syndicate). The first Peanuts daily appeared October 2, 1950; the first Sunday, January 6, 1952.
Diagnosed with cancer, Schulz retired from Peanuts at the end of 1999. He died on February 13, 2000, the day before Valentine's Day--and the day before his last strip was published--having completed 17,897 daily and Sunday strips, each and every one fully written, drawn, and lettered entirely by his own hand--an unmatched achievement in comics.
I am a huge Peanuts fan, and I was given this as a gift for Christmas. There just aren't enough comics to justify purchase of this. Stick with one of the longer books, so that you can get more laughs for your money.
