In his retirement letter to the public printed in part in Variety, Charles M. Schulz maintains that the only thing he "really ever wanted to be was a cartoonist and I feel very blessed to be able to do what I love for almost fifty years." A great admirer of Roy Crane, George Herriman, Al Capp, and Milt Caniff in his youth, he had a hard time selling his own comic strip at first; United Feature Syndicate finally bought it in 1950 and named it "Peanuts." Preferring to name the strip "Li'l Folks," Schulz always disliked his comic being called "Peanuts," a title that endured for nearly five decades. "Peanuts" started in eight newspapers and brought a ninety dollar a month income; by the time of Schulz's retirement, he had written over eighteen thousand strips and had an estimated income of over "one million a week from comic-strip syndication...