If you planned to take the kids to the Cartoon Art Museum during a Fisherman's Wharf visit, it's no longer there. The museum announced on July 31 that it would not renew its lease at 781 Beach St. and closed the gallery on Sunday, Aug. 2. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the closure leaves the 42-year-old institution without a public gallery while it decides what comes next.

Why it closed

"After navigating the pandemic and the difficult recovery that followed, it is time to close this chapter," Executive Director Summerlea Kashar said in the museum's announcement. "We are not disappearing. We will take this time to recharge, reset and consider what comes next." The board and staff wrote that they would be "packing up, taking time to regroup and determining what the next chapter of the Cartoon Art Museum should be," and promised updates. The Chronicle reported that the museum did not announce a new location or a reopening timeline.

The museum says the Beach Street gallery welcomed more than 80,000 visitors, along with thousands of children on school tours and hundreds of students in its cartooning classes.

A museum that has moved before

Malcolm Whyte, publisher of Troubador Press, and other comic art fans founded the museum in 1984. According to Wikipedia, it had no fixed home at first. In 1987, with an endowment from Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, it opened on the second floor of the Call-Bulletin Building in SoMa. In 2001 it moved to 655 Mission St. It left that space in 2015 after its lease ended and the rent was set to more than double, the Chronicle reported. In 2016 it found the 8,000-square-foot brick building on Beach Street, about a block from Ghirardelli Square. It reopened there in October 2017 with a retrospective of San Francisco cartoonist Raina Telgemeier and a tribute to Mike Mignola's Hellboy.

The museum says its collection holds about 9,000 original pieces. It spans comic books, comic strips, editorial and magazine cartoons, and animation art from studios including Warner Bros., Disney and Hanna-Barbera. The Chronicle noted Beach Street exhibitions on John Lewis' "March," Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes," Edward Gorey and New Yorker cartoonists. The museum has also given the Sparky Award, named for Schulz's nickname, to creators including Chuck Jones, Stan Lee and Gary Larson.

The museum signed off its announcement with a nod to Looney Tunes: "That's not all for now, folks."

For cartoon art in the meantime: the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa.