Schulz

You know the old saying: Trust the art, not the artist. I think that’s true. I think somebody can do real good work and be a fool in a variety of ways. I think my music is probably better than I am. I mean, like, your music is your ideals a lot of times, and you don’t live up to those ideals all the time. You try, but you fall short and you disappoint yourself. With my idols, I just like their music. - Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen

THIS ARTICLE HERE points out several things I learned from David Michaelis' wonderful (but depressing) book about Charles M. Schulz, including the fact that he very much incorporated his daily life into the strip:

One year later, however, reality infected the comic strip in a wholly different way. Easily the sharpest pin to the balloon of my blissfully naïve appreciation of Peanuts was the discovery, thanks to David Michaelis’ nicely exhaustive biography of Schulz, that Schulz’s use of his characters as mouthpieces was occasionally far from innocent.

In 1970, with his marriage to his first wife Joyce in slow collapse, Schulz, then 47, fell in love with a 25-year-old named Tracey Claudius. He hid his newfound love and his affair in plain sight, putting his words of giddy love in Snoopy’s mouth, depicting America’s favorite dog in an ongoing series of strips rhapsodizing on his doghouse about a girl beagle he had met at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. After his wife Joyce learned about the affair through her discovery of the long distance calls Schulz had been making to Claudius, he wrote a cartoon in which Charlie Brown chastises Snoopy for being obnoxious just because he can’t run off to see “that girl beagle,” and then, as Snoopy picks up the phone, yells “AND STOP MAKING THOSE LONG-DISTANCE PHONE CALLS!”

And he very pettily never let go of being bullied as a child, even decades after becoming one of the planet's most successful and beloved figures:

America’s favorite cartoonist had enjoyed unimaginable worldly success, had loved his family and family life, and—while occasionally dismissing his life’s work as just cartoons—found justifiable pride in the 17,897 brilliant comic strips he’d created entirely by his own hand. Regardless, Schulz made no secret of the grudges he still nursed toward various elusive childhood enemies. Just two months before his death, Schulz told his friend and fellow cartoonist Lynn Johnston, who was visiting him in the hospital, about his still very real and bitterly felt desire—sixty years on—to finally get even with certain bullies from high school. Johnston said it was clear that “Nothing in all his 77 years had been resolved.” 

Once I become rich and famous I'm just flat-out killing everybody.