introducing Peanuts characters

In the early days of Peanuts, it may have been a little hard to get to know the characters, because Schulz didn’t often include their names in the strip. Shermy, for example, was the very first Peanuts character to speak in the strip, the only character to talk in the first strip from October 2, 1950…. but his name didn’t get mentioned until after Christmas.

This was a shortcoming that Schulz seemed to have recognized by the time that Peanuts started having a Sunday page. The very first Sunday – June 6, 1952 – features the first five of the strip’s ongoing characters: Charlie Brown, Shermy, Patty, Snoopy, and Violet. Of these, only Violet goes unnamed in the strip.

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A thing that might have been

In 1958, the vocal jazz/pop band The Hi-Lo’s were riding high. Having released their first album in 1954, they were already working on their eighth… and they wanted to name it after a Peanuts book. As the Washington D.C. newspaper The Sunday Star reported, they were floating the idea of …

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Charles’s Angel

In 1961, Charles Schulz designed a promotional character for the United Fund (i.e., the group that is now called United Way.) He gets named “Little Angel”… or, depending on the press release, “Little Good Guy”. The character appears in promotions for a few years. The reworks of him, which are …

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Up and down, up and down

AAUGH Blog reader D.D., who heads the fine blog The Daily Cartoonist (go check it out), put in the time to find an example of the one eight-panel Peanuts daily in vertically-stacked format, as I mentioned wanting to find in a previous post. Go take a gander at its verticalness! …