Day: December 20, 2005

Peanuts Ghost Artist Passes Away

andertoons

I thought this was interesting, if oddly late (the obit posted last evening)…

Artist and cartoonist Jim Sasseville, who attended art school with Charles Schulz in Minneapolis and worked with him in California for several years, died from Parkinson’s disease at his home in Los Altos, Calif., on Nov. 30. He was 78.

The commercial artist was known for “his wit in his art,” said his niece, Melanie Lesh, of Juneau, Alaska.

Sasseville, a native of Minneapolis, was an instructor at Art Instruction Schools of Minneapolis. There he met Charles Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts.”

In 1958, Sasseville moved to California to ghost-draw Peanuts comic books for Schulz. Sasseville also did the art work for a comic strip that the duo produced for a couple of years in the late 1950s called “It’s Only a Game.” The strip had a sports theme and characters “who appeared similar to Peanuts,” Lesh said. A book Schulz and Sasseville wrote about the little-known comic strip was published in 2004.

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