In 1943 young Charles was drafted and shipped off to Europe. later that year however his mother lost her fight with cancer and Charles returned, with a sergeant's rank, to St.Paul.

After his return he began cartooning for different publishers, even having some work published in one of the most famous magazines in history, the Saturday Evening Post. To many artists, having one cartoon published in that magazine would have been a career event. His work appeared in several issues!

The Peanuts daily strip made it's first appearance on October 2, 1950, but not to immediate success! By the end of 1953 it was still only appearing in just over fifty papers, whereas by comparison the Dick Tracy and Blondie strips were in over three hundred newspapers. In 1952 the Sunday page debuted in ten papers.

In 1955 however, even though the public at large had not yet caught "Peanuts fever" Schulz was awarded the National Cartoonists Society's "Reuben Award".

From the beginning Peanuts, much like Blondie, has been a microcosim of American life, echoing American cynicism in it's showcasing of Charlie Brown's constant failures, resulting in his continual befuddlement.

Of course the other star of the strip, the indomitable Snoopy and his Red Baron episodes invigorate the dour tone of the strip itself.

In the almost six decades since the strip's first appearance, the Peanuts characters have been on the big and small screen, in books reprinting their adventures and in tv commercials hawking insurance of all things, every form of print publication imaginable and until the final strip appeared, the strip reportedly was syndicated in thousands(!) of papers.

In early January 2000, "Sparky" announced he was going to retire the Peanuts strip on February 13, 2000 so that he could focus his time on beating the colon cancer he had been diagnosed with. In an unusual twist of fate, Schulz passed away in his sleep during the night before the last strip could appear.