If you were reading through the 1965-1966 volume of The Complete Peanuts, this closing panel to the December 6, 1965, you may have paused a bit when you hit the final panel.

Now the first reason for a pause, particularly for younger readers, would be the phrase “an ad for men’s shirts!” After all, the C.F. Hathaway Company went out of business in 2002, and many younger folks would never have seen the ad campaign that started in the early 1950s and launched Hathaway into the big leagues of shirts.

But the second thing would be noticing that Sally is wearing her eyepatch over her left eye, as is her mirror image. This could mean one of three things:

1. Mirrors work differently in the Peanutsverse.
2. This is actually a portal to an alternate dimension, and one of them is Evil Sally.
3. Schulz made an error.

The correct answer is (as is so often true in life) the most boring one, #3. We can tell because the eyepatch strips were eventually collected for a booklet published by everyone’s favorite publisher of cartoon booklets, the US government.

And, as Tim Chow (who was with me on the team to find rare Peanuts materials for Complete Peanuts 26) pointed out to me, inside that booklet, the image is corrected.

(By the way, that shot is not from the original edition of Security is an Eye Patch, but from the reprint that was included as part of my book The Peanuts Collection… which has been out of print for a while, alas.)

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