For more than the first three decades of Peanuts, the daily strip was always four panels… well, no, that’s not quite 100% true, as I think of the August 31, 1954 daily strip of Patty jumping rope, but even that had panel breaks at the quarter, half, and three-quarter marks of the width of the strip. This was necessary to fulfill the original promise made to newspapers that Peanuts would be a strip that could be run as a square or as a vertical stack. (Alas, I cannot quickly find a vertical stacking of that jump rope strip, whether it’s four tiers of two panels or just one huge tower of eight.) And that forced break gave the strip a certain rhythm, which can be empowering but also a limitation. Still, you rarely saw Schulz really fake it out. Few are the strips you read where you think “this would’ve worked better with one fewer panel”. As someone who is spending some time with another four-equal-panel daily strip (which one? I’ll tell you in a few months), I can tell you that that is not always the case in comic strips, that some simply add jabber to fill out another panel in a way that actually detracts from the strip as a whole.
When Schulz decided he could move the strip away from being reformatted, he didn’t give up on rhythm. His first move away from the old format was on Leap Day, 1988, and the strip was three panels of equal size… which was also true of most strips from that point. Schulz felt free to vary from it when he felt for it. He had just one non-three-panel daily in his first month of freedom, a four-panel strip… but importantly not four equal-sized panels. Once freed, he was freed, whether he was resizing panels to fit the visuals or whether he had controlling the send of time in mind (for more on panel size and time, read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.) The first single panel strip would come on April 2, two panels on April 16. The two-panel strips did tend to be two equal-sized panels; often he’s keeping the camera shot for the two panels. The one panel strips were always one equal-sized panel!
Unrelated: Both of the board books they were carrying at Costco last week had covers that would also work for a book called I Caught a Fish This Big, Snoopy!
