All of the best work is a little bit autobiographical. You can't truly make something important without giving away a little bit of yourself, and it's a sacrifice that plenty of artists make.

While the Peanuts gang never seems to age into the double digits, adult audiences still find characters like Charlie Brown relatable. Lucky individuals grew up with the Peanuts kids, whether they saw them on the comic strip or on their screen.

The creator of Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz, always maintained that his art was a labor of love. During an interview with Penthouse, Schulz explained that he frequently drew upon his real life when searching for content to write about.

"Anyone who creates a comic strip and is involved in doing it day after day works in the same manner as a novelist does," he said. "I've been doing this now for twenty-one years and if you're going to survive on a daily schedule you survive only by being able to draw on every experience and thought that you've ever had. That is if you are going to do anything with any meaning. Of course, you can grind out daily gags but I'm not interested in simply doing gags. I'm interested in doing a strip that says something and makes some comment on the important things of life."

Commentary aside, Schulz also mentioned that he didn't identify with any one character more than the rest. Like most of us, he was a mixture of various personalities, something that undoubtedly changed his work for the better.

See More

Tell us which Snoopy you feel like today and we'll tell you your Snoopsona

"I'm probably a little bit of Charlie Brown and a little of Lucy and Linus and all the characters," he said. "It would be impossible in this kind of strip to create any character and not be part of it yourself."