Charles Monroe Schulz moved to Sonoma County in 1958 and lived in Santa Rosa for the rest of his life, drawing Peanuts from a studio just across the street from what would become the museum. He drew the strip every day for nearly fifty years, from its debut on October 2, 1950, to its final installment on February 13, 2000, the day after he died. He produced roughly 17,897 strips in total, all by hand, without assistants. Santa Rosa was not just where Schulz happened to live. It was where he built a personal world: the Redwood Empire Ice Arena next door, which he opened in 1969 because he loved hockey, and the studio where he worked alone each morning, eating a lunch of the same ham sandwich and drinking the same glass of milk. The museum sits in this neighborhood because the neighborhood was already his.

Two works by Japanese artist Yoshiteru Otani anchor the museum's Great Hall. One is the ceramic mural, assembled from 3,588 individual Peanuts strips that together form the image of Lucy and the football. The other is a 3.5-ton wood sculpture tracing the evolution of Snoopy from his early, somewhat feral four-legged form in the 1950s to the upright, expressive, fantasy-prone beagle the world came to know. Together, these pieces capture the museum's central idea: that a comic strip drawn in simple black lines on small sheets of paper could accumulate, over decades, into something with real mass and meaning. The Great Hall functions as a kind of cathedral for the daily comic strip, a form that most people consumed in thirty seconds over breakfast and then forgot. Here, you cannot forget. The sheer physical scale of the work forces a reckoning with how much of it there was.

The permanent collection extends well beyond Peanuts originals, though those are here in abundance. Christo, the artist famous for wrapping buildings, bridges, and islands in fabric, contributed a piece depicting Snoopy's doghouse wrapped in his signature style. It is a witty collision of high art and comic strip iconography, and it speaks to the way Schulz's work crossed boundaries that most cartoonists never approached. An exhibition of foreign-language editions of Peanuts books demonstrates the strip's reach: Charlie Brown's anxieties and Snoopy's fantasies translated into dozens of languages, resonating in cultures that had never seen an American football or a trick-or-treating ghost made from a bedsheet with too many eyeholes. Three rotating galleries change their exhibitions annually, keeping the museum alive for repeat visitors. Schulz's personal studio has been reconstructed inside the museum, preserving the drawing table and the tools with which one quiet man populated a world.

What makes Peanuts endure, and what makes a museum dedicated to it more than a nostalgia exercise, is Schulz's unflinching commitment to failure as a subject. Charlie Brown loses baseball games. He loses the football. He loses the little red-haired girl. The kite eats itself in the tree. Lucy dispenses psychiatric advice for five cents that never helps. Schulz drew from his own insecurities, his own sense of not quite belonging, and he did not soften the losses with easy redemptions. The strip's humor comes from recognition, from the shock of seeing your own defeats rendered in four panels with a punchline. The museum honors this honestly. It does not turn Schulz into a triumphant success story, though he was one of the most commercially successful artists in history. It presents the work itself, day after day of it, and lets visitors see that the work was always about how hard things are, even for a beagle with an active imagination.