As was explained to us when Derrick Bang and I were putting together the book collection of Schulz’s It’s Only A Game cartoons, the strip was designed to run in either of two formats: the full Sunday strip format as seen in the current color collection of the strip, or as three individual panels, to be run on different days of the week. That latter always seemed unlikely to me; what paper needs a cartoon every other day?

However, there was a third way of running the strip that actually was used… and once I saw it used, it was instantly clear that this had been an intended use. Here is an example from the Rocky Mountain News, as compared to the strip as reprinted in the book:

The paper ran just the first two of the three single panel gag in the Sunday funnies; the remaining panel, the bridge one, presumably ran on the same page as the bridge column. And you can tell that the strip was meant to be used this way because the full title is over those first two panels; the space over the bridge panel was always reserved for the disposable mini-gag.

I just added half a dozen of these two panel versions to the AAUGH.com Reference Library, as well as a clipping of a favorite Peanuts Sunday, the one where Linus vengefully builds a snow dinosaur, January 26, 1958.

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