Peanuts

Peanuts was a syndicated daily comic strip written and drawn by American cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, which ran from October 2, 1950 to February 13, 2000. The strip was one of the most popular in the history of the medium. At its peak, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of 355 million in 75 countries, and was translated into 40 languages. It helped to cement the four-panel gag strip as the standard in the United States. Reprints of the strip are still syndicated and run in many newspapers.

Cast

Peanuts did not have a lead character from the onset. Its initial cast was small, featuring only Charlie Brown, Shermy, Patty (not the later character Peppermint Patty), and a beagle, Snoopy. The strip soon began to focus on Charlie Brown, though. Charlie Brown's main characteristic is his self-defeating stubbornness: he can never win a ballgame, but continues playing baseball; he can never fly a kite successfully, but continues trying to fly his kite. Others see this as the character's admirable determined persistence to try his best against all odds. Though his inferiority complex was evident from the start, in the earliest strips he also got in his own licks when socially sparring with Patty and Shermy. Some early strips also involved romantic attractions between Charlie Brown and Patty or Violet, the next major character added to the strip.

Related Topics:
Charlie Brown - Shermy - Patty - Beagle - Snoopy - Baseball - Kite - Inferiority complex - Romantic - Violet

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As the years went by, Shermy and Patty appeared less often, while new major characters were introduced. Schroeder, Lucy van Pelt, and her brother Linus debuted as very young children--Schroeder and Linus both in diapers and pre-verbal. Snoopy, who began as a more or less typical dog, soon started to verbalize his thoughts via speech balloons; eventually he adopted other human characteristics such as walking on his hind legs, reading books, using a typewriter, and participating in sports.

Related Topics:
Schroeder - Lucy van Pelt - Linus - Speech balloons - Typewriter - Sports

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The Peanuts characters generally do not age, or age very slowly, except in the case of infant characters who catch up to the rest of the cast, then stop. Linus, for example, is born in the first couple of years of the strip's run. He ages from infancy to right around Charlie Brown's age over the course of the first ten years, during which we see him learn to walk and talk with the help of Lucy and Charlie Brown. Linus then stops aging when he is about a year or so younger than Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown himself was four when the strip began, and gradually aged over the next two decades until he settled in as an eight year old (after which he is consistently referred to as eight when any age is given, so we can safely assume that was his "stopping point"). The Peanuts gang as a whole can be roughly broken up into three generations:

Related Topics:
Walk - Talk

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• Charlie Brown and his peers (Lucy, Shermy, Violet, Schroeder, and others), who are all in 2nd grade.
• the younger siblings Linus and Sally, along with Frieda, Eudora, and a few minor characters. They are 1-2 years behind the older generation, about kindergarden grade.
• Rerun, Linus and Lucy's youngest brother. Another character who joined the strip as an infant, he eventually reached preschool age.

In the 1960s, the strip began to focus more on Snoopy. Many of the strips from this point revolve around Snoopy's active fantasy life, in which he imagined himself to be (most famously) a World War I flying ace or a bestselling suspense novelist, to the bemusement and consternation of the children who wonder what he is doing but also occasionally participate. Snoopy eventually took on more than 150 distinct personas over the course of the strip, from "Joe Cool" to Mickey Mouse.

Related Topics:
1960s - World War I - Novelist - Mickey Mouse

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Schulz continued to introduce new characters into the strip, particularly including a frecklefaced, redheaded girl named Patricia Reichardt, better known as Peppermint Patty. Patty is an assertive, athletic, but rather obtuse girl who shakes up Charlie Brown's world by calling him "Chuck", flirting with him, and giving him compliments he's not so sure he deserves. She also brings in a new group of friends, including the strip's first black character, Franklin, and Peppermint Patty's bookish sidekick Marcie, who calls Patty "Sir" and Charlie Brown "Charles". (Most other characters call him "Charlie Brown" at all times, except for Eudora, who also calls him "Charles"; Charlie Brown's sister Sally, who usually calls him "big brother"; and a minor character named Peggy Jean in the early 1990s, who called him "Brownie Charles".) Some have speculated that Peppermint Patty and Marcie are portrayals of lesbians, but this may well be idle fantasy, especially considering both girls' admitted affection for Charlie Brown. Marcie resembles, and acts like, a younger version of Doonesbury's Honey Huan. However, from occasional references within the strip, it's clear she was modeled on Billie Jean King.

Related Topics:
Peppermint Patty - Franklin - Marcie - 1990s - Lesbians - Doonesbury - Billie Jean King

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Other notable characters include Charlie Brown's younger sister Sally, who was fixated on Linus; Snoopy's friend Woodstock the bird as well as a few other birds such as Conrad, Oliver, Bill and Harriet, all who spoke entirely in vertical lines; Pig-Pen, the perpetually dirty boy who could raise a cloud of dust on a clean sidewalk, or in a snowstorm; and Spike, Snoopy's desert-dwelling brother from Needles, California, who was apparently named for Schulz's own childhood dog.

Related Topics:
Woodstock - Pig-Pen - Spike - Needles, California

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After some early anomalies, adult figures never again appeared in the strip. "Peanuts" had several other recurring characters who were similarly absent from view. Some, such as the Great Pumpkin or the Red Baron, may or may not have been figments of the cast's imaginations. Others, such as the Little Red-Haired Girl (Charlie Brown's perennial dream girl), Joe Shlabotnik (Charlie Brown's baseball hero), World War II (the vicious cat who lives next door to Snoopy), and Charlie Brown's unnamed pen pal, were real. Schulz added some additional fantastic elements, sometimes imbuing inanimate objects with sparks of life. Charlie Brown's nemesis, the Kite-Eating Tree, is one example. Sally Brown's school building, that expressed thoughts and feelings about the students (and the general business of being a brick building), is another. Linus' famous "security blanket" also displayed occasional signs of anthropomorphism.

Related Topics:
Great Pumpkin - Red Baron - Little Red-Haired Girl - Joe Shlabotnik - Pen pal - Kite-Eating Tree

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At one point, a character named Charlotte Braun entered the cast. She was louder and more rude than Lucy, and quickly proved to be unpopular. She did not appear in more than ten strips. On an interesting sidenote, Schulz had received a letter requesting the removal of the character, and his reply contained a drawing of Braun with an ax in her head.

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