``Are you going to die?'' asks Charlie Brown when Janice, his little friend in the hospital bed, says she has leukemia. ``Good grief, Charlie Brown!'' cries Linus. ``What kind of question is that?'' A blunt one, asked in a different kind of ``Peanuts'' special that CBS is showing Friday night. Rest assured, though, that the ending is upbeat, in keeping with medical fact and the nature of Charles M. Schulz. Schulz, who has drawn the wise and whimsical characters of his ``Peanuts'' cartoon strip since 1950 and did his first TV special in 1965, hadn't thought of making his next one about a child who develops leukemia. What became Friday's ``Why, Charlie Brown, Why?'' began, he says, with an idea from Sylvia Cook, a nurse in California who works with young cancer patients at Stanford Children's Hospital. She proposed a five-minute film for them in which cancer and its treatment were explained by the ``Peanuts'' gang. He recalls that he pointed out a few problems, including that animation is expensive. That didn't stop Cook, Schulz says. ``Gradually, her idea changed, and she finally decided that it'd be more important if we could do a film that would show the people around the person who was ill just what is going on,'' he says. Wth the aid of the American Cancer Society, that's ultimately what happened. It helped that Schulz came to believe the film would make a good ``Peanuts'' special for TV and shouldn't be limited to hospital showings. The gentle lessons of Friday's show include the early symptoms of leukemia and what can be expected in treatment of the disease. A key part of the program _ the survival rate of children stricken with leukemia _ is only obliquely noted, mainly because a mass of statistics would be as out of place in a ``Peanuts'' special as a visit from The Simpsons. Little Janice, in chemotherapy treatment that she notes will cause her temporary hair loss, quotes her doctors as saying she should get well. The survival rate for children is high, according to ACS spokesman David Lehmann. He says the society estimates 2,500 children will be stricken with leukemia this year, 1,900 of them with its acute form. However, thanks to advances in treatment, 71 percent are expected to survive, he says. Schulz, who worked with the society in preparing Friday's special, downplays his role in it. ``I didn't go into making this thing because I wanted to teach the world all about this,'' he says. ``This was the idea of the cancer people. It was their project. My only job was to make it palatable, to give it some kind of story and try to tell the things they wanted told, yet make it so that people wouldn't turn it off.'' Schulz, 67, who lives in Santa Rosa, Calif., about an hour's drive north of San Francisco, estimates Friday's is his 25th TV special since ``A Charlie Brown Christmas.'' He still draws the seven-day-a-week ``Peanuts'' strip that by CBS' estimate appears in more than 2,200 newspapers worldwide. He reckons he's drawn 15,000 of the strips since he began them 40 years ago. More than a few cartoonist have groused that the constant pressure of a daily strip at times has put them up against the wall, if not under it. No such gripes are heard from Schulz. ``No, quality is the only thing that worries me,'' he says. ``I don't worry about getting them done. I'm always worrying that I'll just end up doing the same things over and over. ``Just to try to keep the thing alive, and be trying new things, that's the hard part. Just getting it done is nothing. I think cartoonists who say it's hard to keep up the schedule are just lazy, that's all.''
