Peanuts
Peanuts is a syndicated daily and Sunday comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, which ran from October 2, 1950, to February 13, 2000 (the day after Schulz’s death). The strip is considered to be one of the most popular and influential in the history of the medium, with 17,897 strips published in all, making it “arguably the longest story ever told by one human being,” according to Professor Robert Thompson of Syracuse University. At its peak, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of 355 million in 75 countries, and was 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. Reprints of the strip are still syndicated and run in many newspapers.
In addition, Peanuts achieved considerable success for its television specials, several of which, including A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown won or were nominated for Emmy Awards. The holiday specials remain quite popular and are currently broadcast on ABC in the United States during the appropriate season.
Peanuts had its origin in Li’l Folks, a weekly panel comic that appeared in Schulz’s hometown paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, from 1947 to 1950. He first used the name Charlie Brown for a character there, although he applied the name in four gags to three different boys and one buried in sand. The series also had a dog that looked much like Snoopy. In 1948, Schulz sold a cartoon to the Saturday Evening Post; seventeen single-panel cartoons by Schulz would be published there. The first of these was of a boy who resembled Charlie Brown sitting with his feet on an ottoman.
In 1948, Schulz tried to have Li’l Folks syndicated through the Newspaper Enterprise Association. Schulz would have been an independent contractor for the syndicate, unheard of in the 1940s, but the deal fell through.[citation needed] Li’l Folks was dropped in 1949. The next year, Schulz approached the United Features Syndicate with his best work from Li’l Folks.
When his work was picked up by United Features Syndicate, they decided to run the new comic strip he had been working on.[citation needed] This strip was similar in spirit to the panel comic, but it had a set cast of characters, rather than different nameless little folk for each page. The name Li’l Folks was too close to the names of two other comics of the time: Al Capp’s Li’l Abner and a strip titled Little Folks. To avoid confusion, the syndicate settled on the name Peanuts, a title Schulz always disliked. In a 1987 interview, Schulz said of the title Peanuts: “It’s totally ridiculous, has no meaning, is simply confusing, and has no dignity — and I think my humor has dignity.” The periodic collections of the strips in paperback book form typically had either “Charlie Brown” or “Snoopy” in the title, not “Peanuts”, because of Schulz’s distaste for his strip’s title. The Sunday panels eventually typically read, Peanuts, featuring Good Ol’ Charlie Brown.
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