The Last Peanuts Strip: Saying Goodbye to Charlie Brown

The last Peanuts strip ever drawn by Charles Schulz appeared in newspapers on February 13, 2000 -- the morning after its creator died.

Schulz had passed away the night before, February 12, at his home in Santa Rosa, California, of colon cancer. The timing was almost unbearably poetic: the final Sunday installment, drawn months earlier, landed in readers' hands just as the world learned its author was gone.

The strip was a farewell in every panel. It opened with Charlie Brown answering the telephone -- "No, I think he's writing" -- and then turned to Snoopy, seated at his typewriter in his familiar writer's pose, composing a letter to the readers. Around the letter ran small panels of memories drawn from across the decades of the strip.

The letter began, "Dear Friends, I have been fortunate to draw Charlie Brown and his friends for almost fifty years..." It went on to name the neighbors of that paper universe -- "Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy ... how can I ever forget them ..." -- a roll call of the characters who had lived in the funny pages since 1950.

The letter was the most personal thing Schulz ever put in the strip. For nearly fifty years he had spoken through his characters -- letting Charlie Brown absorb the defeats and Snoopy dream the dreams -- and now, at the very end, he stepped out from behind the pen and spoke as himself.

Schulz had announced his retirement only two months earlier, on December 14, 1999, after his cancer diagnosis made the daily demands of the strip impossible to keep up. The last daily strip had run on January 3, 2000. But he had kept drawing ahead, and the final Sunday pages were already in the pipeline when he died -- a goodbye delivered on schedule, as if he had planned the timing himself.

For nearly fifty years, Peanuts had been a quiet constant of readers' mornings: Charlie Brown's doomed kite-flying, Lucy's five-cent psychiatry booth, Linus and his blanket, Snoopy's fantasies atop his doghouse. Schulz drew the strip himself for the whole run -- a daily discipline almost without precedent in comics.

The final strip didn't try to be funny. It just said thank you and goodbye. Peanuts had changed what a comic strip could be -- melancholy, philosophical, and beloved all at once -- and its farewell, arriving the day after its creator's death, gave millions of readers a chance to say goodbye back. Few creators get to write their own ending; Schulz, unknowingly, wrote his.

Photo: Roger Higgins / Library of Congress, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons)