First published in 1947 under the name Li’l Folks, the strip, renamed Peanuts in 1950, featured a cast of children led by Charlie Brown, Schulz’s alter ego in the strip. On the surface, Peanuts did not differ radically from other newspaper comics of its era: the four-panel daily strips featured a simple, almost spare, artistic style and routinely concluded with a joke of some kind, often at Charlie Brown’s expense. The strength of Peanuts lay in the depth of its characters and in Schulz’s ability to connect with his readers through them.
The introspective everyman Charlie Brown stoically dealt with life’s misfortunes—from a kite-eating tree to a football that was always pulled away a moment before he attempted to kick it—with a sigh, a “Good grief!” or, most emphatically, with a “Drat!” Lucy van Pelt, his frequent tormentor and the big sister to his blanket-toting friend Linus, offered psychiatric advice and presented a steely exterior, but she could not resist observing that “happiness is a warm puppy.” Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s beagle, made pithy observations and spent his time engaging in imagined aerial battles with a German World War I flying ace, the Red Baron, and fantasizing himself as jazz saxophonist Joe Cool. The strip’s other characters included Schroeder, the Beethoven-obsessed object of Lucy’s desire; Peppermint Patty, a freckled and frequently bewildered tomboy who referred to Charlie Brown as “Chuck”; Marcie, Peppermint Patty’s wisecracking sidekick; and Woodstock, a yellow bird who, in spite of his inexpert flying skills, accompanied Snoopy on his many adventures.
At the time of Schulz’s death in 2000, mere hours before his final Sunday strip was published, Peanuts was running in more than 2,500 newspapers in 75 countries, with a readership that topped 350 million. In the early 21st century, sales of Peanuts merchandise amounted to a billion-dollar-a-year empire, with products ranging from stuffed animals to clothing to a popular line of greeting cards. Snoopy was perhaps the most visible Peanuts character, appearing as the corporate mascot for American insurance company MetLife and making an appearances as a massive balloon in New York City’s annual Thanksgiving Day parade, and his rivalry with the Red Baron was the subject of a pair of popular novelty songs by the Royal Guardsmen in the mid-1960s. Over the comic strip’s 50-year run, Schulz refused to allow anyone else to draw or write Peanuts, and the collected body of work, amounting to more than 18,000 strips, was thought to be the longest story ever told by a single person.