Charlie Brown left the world as he entered it: confused
For his last starring role in Peanuts, Charlie Brown cleans out his mailbox in the hope of getting a love letter. None arrives. Published on February 6, 2000, the Valentine’s Day strip gives him no romantic breakthrough, only an opportunity to teach his little sister Sally about something he hasn’t experienced himself.
That quiet disappointment wasn’t part of a planned farewell story. Failing health forced Charles Schulz to announce his retirement on Dec. 14, 1999. His vision had deteriorated, he’d received a colon cancer diagnosis, and he needed to put his health first. Newspapers continued publishing the strips he’d already drawn, exhausting that backlog nine weeks later.
On Feb. 12, 2000, Schulz died in his sleep. The final Peanuts strip appeared the next day. Across roughly 49 years and 4 months, he’d produced 17,897 strips without taking a sabbatical or working with assistants.
For years, readers had wondered whether the ending would finally resolve the strip’s recurring disappointments. Would the Great Pumpkin appear? Would Charlie Brown kick the football? Maybe the often-mentioned but never-shown red-headed girl would turn up, or Charlie Brown would finally manage his baseball team to a win. None of it happened.
The closing weeks were business as usual. Polygon’s Thomas Hindmarch finds possible farewell subtext in a couple of those stories, especially Peppermint Patty’s last appearance. But, he argues, Schulz’s medical retirement came too abruptly for him to prepare a coordinated ending. The goodbye message was all he had time to offer.
One unfinished running joke did trouble Schulz. Speaking to Al Roker in his last televised interview, he described an unusual moment of regret while drawing the final strip: “All of a sudden, I thought, ‘You know, that poor, poor kid, he never even got to kick the football!'” Maybe he would have done something with that given more time, but we’ll never know.
Strictly speaking, Charlie Brown and Snoopy make their last appearances in the opening two panels of the Feb. 13 strip. Those panels, however, function mainly as an optional lead-in to Schulz’s farewell. Sunday newspaper comics in the United States often put a disposable gag in the first two panels, allowing a local paper’s layout staff to rearrange the strip to fit the page.
That makes February 6, 2000, the last complete Peanuts story, Sally Brown’s final appearance and Charlie Brown’s last starring role. It’s a Valentine’s Day strip, and as usual it’s about Charlie Brown’s lack of luck in love.
Love’s labors lost
The story, reproduced in The Complete Peanuts from Fantagraphics and credited to Charles M. Schulz/United Feature Syndicate, returns to one of the series’ sadder rituals: Charlie Brown waiting at his mailbox for a love letter that doesn’t come.
This time, he’s cleaning the mailbox as he waits. “The inside of a mailbox should always be kept clean in case you get a love letter,” he tells Sally. Then a sudden storm drives them both indoors.
After they’ve both dried off, he carries on explaining the rules of love letters, including why he won’t return to the mailbox in the rain. “When it’s raining, the only letters you get are those that say, ‘I never want to see you again!'”
“You seem to know a lot about love letters,” Sally says.
“If I ever got one,” Charlie Brown says, “I don’t know what I’d do.”
Hindmarch sees two familiar Peanuts ideas at work here. There’s Charlie Brown’s seemingly endless losing streak, but also the way children invent rules as they go along. Charlie Brown speaks with the authority of someone who understands love letters, even though he doesn’t know how they work. His certainty is part of the joke.
Earlier in the series, Hindmarch argues, this would simply have been another self-effacing story about Charlie Brown’s disappointments. Its place near the end adds sadness: he leaves much as he arrived, still trying to be hopeful in a world built around his misery.
