Phil Weis - Charles Schulz Comic Strip Art, ca. 1960

Extraordinary Find: Charles Schulz Comic Strip Art

Transcript

HOST: "Peanuts" fanatic Phil Weiss found his so-called ideal scenario in Los Angeles in 2006, when a guest named Arnold brought in a knockout portfolio of Charles Schulz comics. But Arnold's special connection with Schulz made this cartoon collection extraordinary.

APPRAISER: It's one of those things where, when you go to do a ROADSHOW, you're always saying, "Gee, what would be your ideal scenario for a show like that?" And this was it-- this was it.

GUEST: I worked for Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, Missouri, before moving to California 33 years ago. I was a "Peanuts" fan for a long time, and came up with the idea to use "Peanuts" on greeting cards, and I had to sell the idea to the creative committee. As a result, they ended up with a whole big line of Hallmark "Peanuts" products, and I went out to work with Charles Schulz in 1960 for the first time, and worked with him for 12 years in developing all the Hallmark "Peanuts" products. And he gave me some of this original strips and some of the original artwork. This was a group of drawings that he did for a product we called "Snoopy's Daily Dozen." It was an exercise booklet.

APPRAISER: Okay.

GUEST: And this is an original strip that he signed. These are pencil drawings of some of the greeting cards that we develop. We would come up with the ideas for the greeting cards, he would do the pencil sketches, send them back, and we'd come back with, with little fixes, like, "Make this a full figure," or, "Add bells here," and this is Schulz's pencil, and these are my penciled comments on them.

These are Sunday strips, and then this is an original strip that he did from 1957 to '59, and it's called "It's Only a Game." He was a great, humble person that had a tremendous insight into human nature, as, as millions of "Peanuts" fans will tell you.

APPRAISER: Sure.

GUEST: I idolized this man's talent. To meet him and work with him for 12 years

was, was just great.

APPRAISER: That's great.

APPRAISER: Well, you could see all the roughs and all the ideas, and Arnold said he would look at them, and they'd come back and forth, and they were kind of collaborating on the stuff. If you think about it, um, he really is, probably, the, the driving force that, that created Schulz's work with Hallmark and that went on to so many other things. I can't think of any young kid that didn't, at one time in their life, get a Snoopy card or a Charlie Brown card. Arnold played a very important role in, in American culture.

APPRAISER: Let me give you an idea on what you have and what the value is.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: There are three factors when I'm doing an appraisal like this that I'm gonna take into consideration. First is freshness to the market, and obviously, it's never been out on the market. Second is the age of the material, and it's really vintage, perfect "Peanuts" period, late '50s into the early '60s, nothing later than that. And the third factor is the characters involved. Everywhere you look, you see nothing but key characters. Snoopy, Charlie.

GUEST: Linus.

APPRAISER: Linus, Lucy. You have 14 of these daily exercise large panels.

APPRAISER: The estimates I'm gonna give you are basically conservative auction estimates, and the sky's the limit when it comes to Charles Schulz stuff. It's the hottest comic art right now on the market.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: Easily, I would estimate each of these at $6,000 to $9,000.

GUEST: Each?!

APPRAISER: Each-- each piece.

GUEST: (chortling)

APPRAISER: Now, there's 14 of them, okay?

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: Now, when we go up here onto your daily, it's fantastic. You have Charlie in all four panels. Again, conservative estimate, $8,000 to $10,000 for that daily. When you jump up here to the pencil roughs, you have a nice little grouping here. Not as attractive to collectors, but still historically very important. And a conservative estimate on that would be $4,000 to $6,000 as a group. When you come over here to "It's Only a Game," since it's not a "Peanuts"-related strip, I don't know if it's going to be as interesting to the "Peanuts" collector, but still, you got to estimate these at $4,000 to $6,000 each. Now, Sunday pages are really desirable, and these are terrific. On the conservative side, I'm gonna estimate these anywhere from $12,000 to $18,000 each.

GUEST: (laughs) My God!

APPRAISER: I think if you add it all up, I wouldn't be surprised to see you come out anywhere from $150,000 to $200,000 on a piece-by-piece basis.

GUEST: You're kidding. You're kidding.

APPRAISER: Absolutely not-- and if you're gonna insure it, you'd probably want to insure it for a little bit more than the high estimate.

GUEST: I, I was going to say...

APPRAISER: Yeah?

GUEST: I, I had these on a shelf in my closet, and I think...

APPRAISER: Not a good place for them anymore.

GUEST: (laughs) Not a good place for them anymore.

APPRAISER: No, absolutely not.

GUEST: Wow.

APPRAISER: I think he was shocked by the total value by the time we were finished cataloguing and adding everything up. So that was the exciting part, that it was a fresh find, he didn't know what it was worth. And the story was phenomenal. The odds are that you're not going to hear from the guest afterwards. But he did reach out to me and asked if I would do an appraisal for him for insurance purposes, a written appraisal. I was happy to do that, I reached out, I gave him the appraisal, and I let him know that if he ever decides he wanted to part with the collection, I would be happy to help him. Which never happened-- I never heard from him. Somebody eventually let me know, he sold the majority of the collection to the Charles M. Schulz Museum here in Santa Rosa, California. I have no idea what the terms of the sale were or what it was, but that's where it's now residing. They're gonna make sure they stay safe, taken care of, archived, and that's part of Schulz history. So I think he would, he did the right thing. Collecting in general is usually generational. So people who are in their 40s, 50s, even 60s, who are earning a living and have expendable income, they want to buy back their childhood. That to me has always been the name of the game. "Peanuts," it's an iconic, collectible artwork, so people are always going to be drawn to that and they're going to keep buying it. There's a lot of it, it's not rare, but the market level is staying where it is right now.