Peanuts

Peanuts was a syndicated daily comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, which ran from October 2, 1950, to February 13, 2000 — the day after Schulz's death. The strip was one of the most popular and influential in the history of the medium. more...

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At its peak, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of 355 million in 75 countries, and was translated into 21 languages. It helped to cement the four-panel gag strip as the standard in the United States. Reprints of the strip are still syndicated and run in many newspapers.

In addition, Peanuts achieved considerable success for its television specials, several of which, including A Charlie Brown Christmas and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown won or were nominated for Emmys. The holiday specials remain quite popular to this day, and are currently broadcast on ABC in the United States during the appropriate season.

History

Peanuts had its origin in Li'l Folks, a weekly panel comic that appeared in Schulz's hometown paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, from 1947 to 1950. He first used the name Charlie Brown for a character there, although he applied the name in four gags to three different boys and one buried in sand. The series also had a dog that looked much like Snoopy. In 1948, Schulz sold a cartoon to the Saturday Evening Post; seventeen single-panel cartoons by Schulz would be published there.

In 1948, Schulz tried to have Li'l Folks syndicated through the Newspaper Enterprise Association. Schulz would have been an independent contractor for the syndicate, unheard of in the 1940s, but the deal fell through. Li'l Folks was dropped in 1949. The next year, Schulz approached the United Features Syndicate with his best strips from Li'l Folks.

When his work was picked up by United Features Syndicate, they decided to go for the new comic strip he had been working on. This strip was somewhat similar to the panel comic, but it had a cast of characters, rather than different nameless little folk for each page. Maybe the name would have been the same, though, had it been less close to the names of two other comics of the time: Al Capp's Li'l Abner and a now-forgotten strip titled Little Folks. To avoid confusion the syndicate settled on the name "Peanuts", a title Schulz himself disliked. In a 1987 interview, Schulz said of the title Peanuts: "It's totally ridiculous, has no meaning, is simply confusing, and has no dignity — and I think my humor has dignity". The periodic collections of the strips in paperback book form typically had either "Charlie Brown" or "Snoopy" in the title, not "Peanuts", due to Schultz's previously mentioned dislike of his strip's title. The Sunday panels eventually typically read, "Peanuts, featuring Good Ol' Charlie Brown".

Read more at Wikipedia.org