Shortly after I posted the video about the comic strip”The Wolf” which suggested ways in which it set the path for “Peanuts”, my pal and co-writer, Schulz Museum curator Benjamin L. Clark, pointed out something I had missed — while “Willie” had offered strips run in a two-tier format before Peanuts was designed to do the same thing, it was not the first strip at United Feature Syndicate to do so. “Nancy” was arranged so that it could run as a square, and sometimes did. However, Nancy did not use the box in the first panel with the title; as far as I can tell, that only start with “Willie”/”Wally”. So it still set a format that “Peanuts” would use.

Peanuts did not launch with the box in place; that showed up a out a month-and-a-half into the run. I do wonder at what point it was decided to include it, in relation to other decisions being made. After all, UFS had considered several names for the new strip, and I could see them picking “Peanuts” over some other options because it was short enough to fit readably in the corner — something that couldn’t be said of, say, Schulz’s preferred “Good Ol’ Charlie Brown”.

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