Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum honors Charles Schulz and Peanuts in 'Celebrating Sparky'

It’s Charles Schulz’s 100th birthday, Charlie Brown!

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is featuring an exhibit on the Peanuts creator titled “Celebrating Sparky.” Sparky was the nickname Schulz was known as by his friends, family and colleagues.

Lucy Shelton Caswell, the founding curator of the Billy Ireland museum, curated the exhibit around actual quotations from Schulz himself, who died in 2000.

“I am hoping that visitors will get to know him a little bit through his own words,” Caswell said. “I'm hoping that they will learn something about him that they didn't know when they see this exhibition.”

Caswell also serves as a member of the board of directors for the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, California. She worked with Benjamin L. Clark, the head curator at the Schulz Museum, to borrow some items for the “Celebrating Sparky” exhibit.

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“I had been developing an exhibition here and was planning on borrowing some things from them,” Clark said. ”It actually ended up working out really well that we could swap back and forth some things in our collections for our exhibitions … So we were pretty enthusiastic about it.”

“Celebrating Sparky” has more than 70 high-resolution images of pieces from the museum in Santa Rosa. This type of exhibit is called "fabricate on site." This allowed Caswell to exhibit the first three editions of Peanuts that were published while the same editions are on exhibit in Santa Rosa.

“It's a really wonderful use of technology,” Caswell said. “I think that really strengthens our exhibition... I think that it's very exciting to have been able to work with folks in Santa Rosa, to obtain all these things.”

There are also high-resolution images from exhibits in the Snoopy Museum Tokyo in Roppongi. 

“I would like people to think about how different it is,” Caswell said. “(They have) giant sculptural renditions of Snoopy. That is not something we would do. It's a very different cultural approach …. I want people to think about how different cultures read the same thing and filter it in a different way, and they clearly love it.”

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Clark said that he has run into many visitors who are surprised to learn that Peanuts was created in America.

“I think it's because Schulz was unafraid to address these really big ideas that really are just deeply human things,” Clark said. “Experiences are not necessarily tied to culture. Things like wondering does life have a purpose? Can it even have a purpose? I have friends, but I feel lonely. It's stuff that isn't necessarily tied to culture, but just being human.”

Schulz worked alone. Many of his contemporaries at the time utilized gag writers and a group production, but Schulz did not.

“Every line is his,” Clark said. “Every word is his. He pulled so much of it out of his own soul, frankly. It’s his history. It's what's within him. When we read the strip, we really get to know this man and this artist who is a daydreamer. A person who is creative but can be insecure … I find that really hopeful and I love looking at his stuff every day.”

Schulz was adamant about not being called "the father" of Snoopy, Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang as he had five children of his own. He preferred to be known as the owner of the Peanuts characters.

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While the exhibit certainly shows how different parts of the world have different connections to Schulz’s work, Caswell wants people to learn more about the person behind the pencil.

“This character took on a life of his own,” Caswell said. “That is not uncommon for artists to say that, this thing, this person, this cat, this monster, whatever lives in their mind, goes off on its own as the creative process unfolds. I think that's one of the wonders of someone who is creating that they can allow their imagination to grow in that way.”

At the time of Schulz’s retirement in 1999, his strip ran in more than 2,600 newspapers, was translated into 21 languages in 75 countries, and had a daily readership estimated to be 355 million.

At a glance

"Celebrating Sparky" runs until Oct. 23 at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at The Ohio State University, 110 Sullivant Hall, 1813 N. High St. Admission is free. The museum is open from 1 to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. More information can be found at https://cartoons.osu.edu/visit-us/. 

Facts about Schulz and Peanuts

• Did you know that in book form, the complete Peanuts collection would be over 5,000 pages long?

• Did you know Schulz added the character of Franklin in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.? He initially was hesitant to do so as he didn't want to seem condescending in trying to write from the experience of a young Black child, but after letters from a father in California, Franklin was born. 

• Did you know that the last edition of Peanuts that Schulz produced came out on Feb. 13, 2000, the day after Schulz passed away from colon cancer. 

David Kwiatkowski is a features intern for The Columbus Dispatch. You can reach him on Twitter @kwiatkdm or his email dkwiatkowski@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Charles Schulz: Exhibit honors Peanuts creator on centennial of birth