Peanuts is almost certainly the most influential humor strip in the history of the medium, but from time to time it has been more than an artistic influence on a creative mind; there have been strips that have pretty clearly tried to be The Next Peanuts, although they’ve had different interpretations of just what Peanuts is.

A few years back, I made some mention of “Small World” as possibly the first attempt to Xerox that Peanuts magic. Crafted by the relatively obscure Sam Brier, this is a strip that echoes the “kids showing adult-style concerns.

But how it achieves this alignment is quite different. “Small World” is a strip about a boy and a girl playing house, with a kid brother as their baby… or it’s a strip about a family that’s drawn as if the adults are kids. The strip carefully avoids offering a correct interpretation. One could, I suppose, simply see the leads as a family of midgets, but, well no. Is this adults expressing their inner child, or children expressing their inner adult? Hard to tell, and ultimately, hard to really care. This is an interesting curiosity, but not an outstanding strip. From time to time I think about reprinting the one collection that was published, but on reviewing it, I decide… nah.

But looking at it again recently, I started to wonder: was this really inspired by Peanuts, or was it simply coincidental? It’s easy to look at it now, and see Peanuts in it in not just the kid material, but some of the flat layout sensibility as well. However, this strip launched in October 1952, just a few days before Peanuts second birthday… and that makes it seem less likely. First off, Peanuts wasn’t instantly the hugely popular strip it grew to be. Sure, it grew in popularity, but with all the various lag times involved in developing a strip (whether this was Brier’s idea or the New York Herald Tribune’s idea) and getting it into distribution, that means that in a year and a half, it had to inspire a copycat even before it got popular. And the elements that we see in “Small World” were not as pronounced in Peanuts at the beginning, either. Had this come out in ’54, I would’ve said “yes, this has to be Peanuts-influenced.” But considering the date, it’s just not as likely as I thought.

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