Peanuts (subtitled featuring "Good ol' Charlie Brown" until January 1, 1987) is a syndicated daily and Sunday American comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, which eventually expanded into a media franchise. The strip originally ran from October 2, 1950 to February 13, 2000, continuing in reruns afterward. Peanuts is regarded as one of the most popular and influential comic strips in history, with 17,897 strips published in all, making it "arguably the longest story ever told by one human being". At the time of Schulz's death in 2000, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of roughly 355 million across 75 countries, and had been translated into 21 languages. It helped to cement the four-panel gag strip as the standard in the United States, and together with its merchandise earned Schulz more than $1 billion. Following successful animated television and stage-theatrical adaptations over the years, five animated theatrical films have been released. It is also one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time.
Peanuts focuses on a social circle of young children, where adults exist but are rarely seen or heard. The main character, Charlie Brown, is meek, nervous, and lacks self-confidence. He cannot fly a kite, win a baseball game, or kick a football held by his irascible friend Lucy Van Pelt, who always pulls it away at the last instant. Peanuts is a literary strip with philosophical, psychological, and sociological overtones, which was innovative in the 1950s. Its humor is psychologically complex and driven by the characters' interactions and relationships.
Schulz drew every strip, through nearly 50 years, with no assistants, including the lettering and coloring process.
Title
Peanuts was originally titled Li'l Folks, a weekly panel cartoon that appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press (Schulz's hometown newspaper) from 1947 to 1950. Li'l Folks marked the first appearance of the name "Charlie Brown", also featuring a dog that looked much like the early 1950s version of Snoopy.
Schulz submitted his Li'l Folks cartoons to United Features Syndicate (UFS), who responded with interest. In response, he visited their office in New York City, but instead of bringing the panels he submitted, he presented some new comic strips he had worked on, which, after viewing, UFS said they preferred. While UFS was preparing to syndicate it under the name Li'l Folks, Tack Knight, who authored the retired 1930s comic strip Little Folks, objected to the title being used. Schulz argued in a letter to Knight that the contraction of Little to Li'l was intended to avoid this conflict, but conceded that the final decision would be for his syndicate. After it was confirmed that Little Folks was a registered trademark, a different name for Schulz's strip became necessary. The production manager of UFS noted the popularity of the children's program Howdy Doody, which featured an audience of children who were seated in the "Peanut Gallery", and were referred to as "Peanuts". This led to the decided title for the comic strip to be forced upon Schulz.
Schulz hated the title Peanuts, which remained a source of irritation to him throughout his life. He accused the production manager at UFS of not having seen the comic strip before giving it a title, saying that the title would only make sense if there were a character named "Peanuts". On the day it was syndicated, Schulz's friend visited a newsstand in uptown Minneapolis and asked if any newspapers carried Peanuts, to which the newsdealer replied, "No, and we don't have any with popcorn either", which confirmed Schulz's fears concerning the title. Whenever Schulz was asked what he did for a living, he would evade mentioning the title and say, "I draw that comic strip with Snoopy in it, Charlie Brown and his dog". Schulz later said in 1997 that he had discussed changing the title to Charlie Brown on multiple occasions in the past, but found that it would cause problems with licensees who already incorporated the existing title into their products, making it costly to change.
Characters
Charlie Brown
Charlie Brown is the main character, a young boy acting as the center of the strip's world and serving as an everyman. While seen as decent, considerate, and reflective, he is also awkward, deeply sensitive, and said to suffer from an inferiority complex. Charlie Brown is a constant failure: he can never win a ballgame, nor can he successfully fly a kite. His sense of determination, regardless of the certainty of failure, can be interpreted as either self-defeating stubbornness or admirable persistence. When he fails, however, he experiences pain and anguish through self-pity. The journalist Christopher Caldwell observed this tension between Charlie Brown's negative and positive attitudes, stating: "What makes Charlie Brown such a rich character is that he's not purely a loser. The self-loathing that causes him so much anguish is decidedly not self-effacement. Charlie Brown is optimistic enough to think he can earn a sense of self-worth." Schulz named Charlie Brown after a colleague of his while working at Art Instruction, whose full name was Charlie Francis Brown.
Readers and critics have explored whether Schulz based Charlie Brown on himself. This question often carried the suggestion that the emotionally sensitive and depressed behavior of Charlie Brown drew from Schulz's own life or childhood experiences. Commenting on the tendency of these conclusions being drawn, Schulz said in a 1968 interview, "I think of myself as Charles Schulz. But if someone wants to believe I'm really Charlie Brown, well, it makes a good story." He explained in another interview that the comic strip as a whole is a personal expression, and so it is impossible to avoid all the characters presenting aspects of his personality. Biographer David Michaelis made a similar conclusion, describing Charlie Brown as simply representing Schulz's "wishy-washiness and determination". Regardless, some profiles of Schulz confidently held that Charlie Brown was based on him.
Snoopy
Snoopy is Charlie Brown's pet dog, who later in the development of the strip would be described as a beagle. While generally behaving like a real dog and having a non-speaking role, he connects to readers through having human thoughts. Despite acting like a real dog some of the time, Snoopy possesses many different anthropomorphic traits. He frequently walks on his hind legs and is able to use tools, including his typewriter. He introduces fantasy elements to the strip by extending his identity through various alter egos. Many of these alter egos, such as a "world-famous" attorney, surgeon, or secret agent, were seen only once or twice, although others (such as the World War I flying ace, or the sunglasses-wearing "Joe Cool") were featured many times over a period of years. His character is a mixture of innocence and egotism; he possesses childlike joy, while on occasion being somewhat selfish. He has an arrogant commitment to his independence but is often shown to be dependent on humans. Schulz was careful in balancing Snoopy's life between that of a real dog and that of a fantastical character. While the exterior of Snoopy's doghouse is of small dimensions, the interior is described in the strip as having such things as a recreation room, a library, a pool table, and being adorned with paintings of Andrew Wyeth and Van Gogh. However, it was never shown, as it would have demanded an inappropriate kind of suspension of disbelief from readers.
Linus and Lucy
Linus and Lucy are siblings; Linus is the younger brother, and Lucy is the older sister.
Lucy is bossy, selfish, and opinionated, and she often delivers commentary in an honest, albeit offensive and sarcastic way. Schulz described Lucy as full of misdirected confidence, but having the virtue of being capable of cutting right down to the truth. He said that Lucy is mean because it is funny, particularly because she is a girl: he posited that a boy being mean to girls would not be funny at all, describing a pattern in comic strip writing where it is comical when supposedly weak characters dominate supposedly strong characters. Lucy, at times, acts as a psychiatrist and charges five cents for psychiatric advice to other characters (usually Charlie Brown) from her "psychiatric booth", a booth parodying the setup of a lemonade stand. Lucy's role as a psychiatrist has attracted attention from real-life individuals in the field of psychology; the psychiatrist Athar Yawar playfully identified various moments in the strip where her activities could be characterized as pursuing medical and scientific interests, commenting that "Lucy is very much the modern doctor".
Linus is Charlie Brown's most loyal and uplifting friend and introduces intellectual, spiritual, and reflective elements to the strip. He offers opinions on topics such as literature, art, science, politics, and theology. He possesses a sense of morality and ethical judgment that enables him to navigate topics such as faith, intolerance, and depression. Linus acts as a philosopher and an open ear to Charlie Brown's dilemmas and worries. Schulz enjoyed the adaptability of his character, remarking he can be "very smart" as well as "dumb". He has a tendency to express lofty or pompous ideas that are quickly rebuked. He finds psychological security from thumb sucking and holding a blanket for comfort. The idea of his "security blanket" originated from Schulz's own observation of his first three children, who carried around blankets. Schulz described Linus's blanket as "probably the single best thing that I ever thought of". He was proud of its versatility for visual humor in the strip, and of how the phrase "security blanket" entered the dictionary.
Peppermint Patty and Marcie
Peppermint Patty and Marcie are two girls who are friends. They attend a different school than Charlie Brown, on the other side of town, and so represent a slightly different social circle from the other characters.
Peppermint Patty is a tomboy who is forthright and loyal and has what Schulz described as a "devastating singleness of purpose". She frequently misunderstands things, to the extent that her confusion serves as the premise of many individual strips and stories; in one story she prepares for a "skating" competition, only to learn with disastrous results that it is for roller skating and not ice skating. She struggles at school and with her homework, and often falls asleep in school. The wife of Charles Schulz, Jean Schulz, suggested that this is the consequence of how Peppermint Patty's single father works late; she stays awake at night waiting for him. In general, Charles Schulz imagined that some of her problems were from having an absent mother.
Marcie is bookish and a good student. Schulz described her as relatively perceptive compared to other characters, stating that "she sees the truth in things" (although she perpetually addresses Peppermint Patty as "sir"). The writer Laura Bradley identified her role as "the unassuming one with sage-like insights".
Supporting characters
In addition to the core cast, other characters appeared regularly for a majority of the strip's duration: Sally Brown is the younger sister of Charlie Brown. She has a habit of fracturing the English language to comical effect. She reacts negatively to school and homework due to dealing with dogmatic memorization and obeying ambiguous instructions. She otherwise confidently delivers speeches in oral exams, using wordplay and puns while framing her topics with theatrics and suspense.