Charles Schulz

December 15, 1999
Web posted at: 12:25 p.m. EST (1725 GMT)

SAN FRANCISCO (CNN) -- This is the last Christmas for Charlie Brown.

Charles Schulz will retire his beloved "Peanuts" comic strip early in January, his wife said Tuesday.

"I have always wanted to be a cartoonist, and I feel very blessed to have been able to do what I love for almost 50 years," Schulz said in an open letter made public Tuesday. "That all of you have embraced Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy and Linus and all the other Peanuts characters has been a constant motivation for me."

The creator of those comic immortals was released earlier this month from the hospital after undergoing abdominal surgery. Schulz, 77, was diagnosed with cancer at that time.

Schulz will retire January 4, the day after the final strip runs, according to syndicator United Media.

The wildly popular comic strip made its debut Oct. 2, 1950. The travails of the "little round-headed kid" and his pals eventually ran in more than 2,600 newspapers, reaching millions of readers in 75 countries.

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Cartoonists across the country reacted with disbelief.

"Do we absolutely, absolutely know this is true?" asked Cathy Guisewite, creator of "Cathy." "Nobody's ready for this."

Mort Walker, the creator of "Beetle Bailey" and "Hi and Lois," said he and his friend Schulz cried when they spoke on the phone Tuesday morning.

"He did something entirely different from what all the rest of us did. I write and draw funny pictures and slapstick; it's a joke a day," Walker said. "He delved into the psyche of children and the fears and the rejections that we all felt as children."

Bill Mitchell, a political cartoonist for CNN.com/allpolitics, said Schulz "set the standard for quality" for a generation of cartoonists, and that his retirement is "a terrible loss."

"I grew up reading the Peanuts strip, and I've been a great fan of it all these years," Mitchell said. Referring to the fact that the Peanuts strip will stop when Schulz retires, he said "not being continued by another artist, while lamentable, is a good thing."

Over the years, the Peanuts gang became a part of American popular culture, delivering gentle humor spiked with a child's-eye view of human foibles.

One of the strip's most endearing qualities was its constancy.

The long-suffering Charlie Brown still faced misfortune with a mild "Good grief!" Tart-tongued Lucy still handed out advice at a nickel a pop, a joke that started as a parody of a lemonade stand.

And Snoopy, Charlie Brown's wise-but-weird beagle, still took the occasional flight of fancy back to the skies of World War I and his rivalry with the Red Baron.

"Peanuts" was an intensely personal effort for Schulz, who has a clause in his contract dictating the strip had to end with his death.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.