Charles Monroe "Sparky" Schulz was an American cartoonist, the creator of the comic strip Peanuts which features his two best-known characters, Charlie Brown and Snoopy. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential cartoonists in history, and cited by many cartoonists as a major influence, including Jim Davis, Murray Ball, Bill Watterson, Matt Groening, and Dav Pilkey.

Peanuts is a syndicated daily and Sunday American comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz. The strip's original run extended from 1950 to 2000, continuing in reruns afterward. Peanuts is among the most popular and influential in the history of comic strips, with 17,897 strips published in all, making it "arguably the longest story ever told by one human being"; it is considered to be the grandfather of slice of life cartoons. At the time of Schulz's death in 2000, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of roughly 355 million across 75 countries, and had been translated into 21 languages. It helped to cement the four-panel gag strip as the standard in the United States, and together with its merchandise earned Schulz more than $1 billion.