Charles Schulz on the importance of having a diverse cast of characters

Now, as your strip develops, I think you will find, too, that all comic strips have a single character around which all the others revolve. Mort Walker has done this with Beetle, Walt Kelly did it with Pogo; and usually the main character is a person with kind of a mild personality. He has some quirks and all that, but it's the character the strip revolves around that's so important. You can go back to Al Capp and Lil Abner, and the wonderful characters that revolved around Li'l Abner. And I think this is very serious -ー as the years go by, it's very important to build up a cast of characters so you can have a change of pace. I think a change of pace is really important. I think it's important, if you're doing a ridiculous strip, to throw in some serious material now and then... Fortunately, I can do a lot of the corny things with Snoopy, like when he writes, he thinks his writing is great, but it's terrible! But you couldn't get away with that if somebody else was doing the writing. So I think that is very important.