Episode Details

His high school yearbook rejected his drawings, and his first published sketch was a Ripley's Believe It or Not entry about his dog Spike, who ate pins, tacks, and razor blades. This episode traces how Charles M. Schulz turned personal grief, romantic rejection, and everyday anxiety into the most successful comic strip in history. We begin in Minneapolis in 1922, with a nickname borrowed from a comic strip horse, and follow him to the death of his mother from cancer days before he shipped out for World War II, where he led a machine gun squad and once forgot to load his weapon at the decisive moment.

Back home, he graded student art for a correspondence school, fell in love with a red-haired accountant named Donna Johnson who married someone else, and saw his early strip Li'l Folks dropped by a St. Paul newspaper. When United Feature Syndicate bought his four-panel comic in 1950, they forced a title derived from the phrase peanut gallery that he hated for the rest of his life. We examine how nearly 18,000 strips drawn entirely by his own hand mapped his real life onto the page, his shifting faith from Sunday school teacher to secular humanist, his jealousy of and mentorship toward the creator of a lasagna-loving cat, the ice arena he built, the essential tremor that shook his later lines, and the football he never let the poor kid kick.

• Spike, the razor-blade-eating dog, and the yearbook rejection that started it all
• The loss of his mother, the war, and the unloaded machine gun
• Donna Johnson, the little red-haired girl, and how real people became the cast
• Why he despised the name the syndicate gave his strip and what that says about creative control
• Mentoring a rival, the tremor, the cancer diagnosis, and dying hours before his final strip ran