FOR FANS OF CHARLIE BROWN, SNOOPY AND THE REST OF THEIR PALS, HAPPINESS IS CHARLES SCHULZ’S BELOVED COMIC STRIP AND THE BOOKS, SPECIALS AND PRODUCTS IT INSPIRED
By Rhonda Reinhart
In the spring of 1950, Charles Schulz was on a mission. His weekly panel comic Li’l Folks, about a crew of precocious kids, was a hit in Minnesota’s St. Paul Pioneer Press, but the budding cartoonist was dreaming much bigger than the Twin Cities. Schulz had his eye on the national market and a comic strip syndication contract. After a soul-crushing series of nos, the 27-year-old finally got a yes, landing a deal with United Feature Syndicate. Because of a naming conflict, Li’l Folks became Peanuts, and on October 2, 1950, the first Peanuts comic strip appeared in seven newspapers across the country, from Washington, D.C., to Seattle, Washington. For Schulz’s first month of strips, the syndicate paid him 90 whole dollars.
A young Charles Schulz sketches an early version of Charlie Brown in this 1950s publicity photo.
Peanuts, of course, became a global sensation, with readers around the world opening the daily funny pages to laugh and learn with good ol’ Charlie Brown, bossy Lucy, deep thinker Linus, everyone’s favorite beagle, Snoopy, and the rest of the now-adored characters that were once just glimmers in Charles Schulz’s imagination. By the end of the strip’s five-decade run, it was syndicated in more than 2,600 newspapers worldwide.
To celebrate the gang’s 75th anniversary, we rounded up some of our favorite items from key dates in Peanuts history.
1950
Only three characters appeared in the first Peanuts comic strip: Charlie Brown, Shermy and Patty (not to be confused with Peppermint Patty, who didn’t make her first appearance until August 1966). This original art, dated November 17, 1950, was just the 40th Peanuts daily ever created and features Snoopy causing a little mishap for poor Shermy. The art sold for $192,000 in a November 2020 Heritage auction.
1952
On January 6, 1952, the first full-color Sunday Peanuts page made its debut. Before then, the comic strips were published Monday through Saturday and only in black and white. This early Sunday Peanuts original art, which realized $38,837 in a May 2013 Heritage auction, appeared in more than 40 U.S. newspapers on September 14, 1952, and featured a young Charlie Brown and Lucy Van Pelt, along with Snoopy as a pup. Read more about Lucy’s early days in “The Gentle Beginnings of Lucy Van Pelt.”
1953
The first comic book devoted entirely to the Peanuts gang, 1953’s Peanuts No. 1 was the only issue of the title published by United Feature Syndicate. It contains early Peanuts strip reprints and features Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Patty on its brightly colored cover. This copy of Peanuts No. 1, graded CGC VF- 7.5, sold for $24,000 in a June 2023 Heritage auction.
1958
By 1958, Peanuts was appearing in 355 U.S. and 40 foreign newspapers. That was also the year Hungerford Plastics Company released the first line of Peanuts dolls. Three years later, the company introduced a second edition of the plastic dolls, including Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, baby Sally, Pigpen, Schroeder and Schroeder’s piano. This full set of 1961 dolls, each measuring 3 inches to 9 inches tall, realized $1,134 in a November 2020 Heritage auction.
1965
1965 was a big year for Peanuts. On April 9, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Schroeder and Lucy graced the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline “The World According to Peanuts.” Then, exactly eight months later, A Charlie Brown Christmas debuted on CBS. Schulz’s first animated TV feature went on to win a Peabody Award and an Emmy, and it is still a family-viewing favorite today. This production cel from A Charlie Brown Christmas, which sold for $36,000 in a June 2016 Heritage auction, features the Peanuts kids singing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” in the finale of the beloved television special. On a related note, Schulz’s Sunday-paper version of A Charlie Brown Christmas, published December 18, 1966, sold in September 2021 for $360,000, the highest price ever paid at auction for an original Peanuts artwork.
1966
Schulz’s second holiday-themed TV special, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, hit the CBS airwaves on October 27, 1966, and has been a Halloween-season classic ever since. In a 2013 lookback for TV Guide, writer Matt Roush summed it up: “No matter how often we see it, we’ll still be happy to wait in the pumpkin patch with Linus, and wait-for-it when Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown, and delight when Snoopy is on the other end of the apple when Lucy goes bobbing.” This original hand-inked, hand-painted production cel from the time-honored special realized $16,800 in a June 2020 Heritage auction.
1969
In May 1969, Snoopy and Charlie Brown became the mascots for NASA’s Apollo 10 mission, the final “dress rehearsal” for the Apollo 11 moon landing. As the Kennedy Space Center blog noted in 2019, “Because the lunar module was set to skim over the surface of the Moon, it was named Snoopy because it was going to ‘snoop’ around Apollo 11’s future landing site. Therefore, it was also fitting that the command module be named Charlie Brown.” This original 1969 Apollo 10 doll, featuring Snoopy in a spacesuit and helmet, sold for $12,500 in a July 2019 Heritage auction and came from the personal collection of astronaut Neil Armstrong.
1970
Snoopy’s pal Woodstock first appeared in a Peanuts strip on April 4, 1967, but he didn’t get a name until June 22, 1970, when Schulz found inspiration in an unlikely source. “At one point I began to draw the bird a little better,” he once said of Snoopy’s feathered friend. “I needed a name for him, and with the Woodstock festival being so prominent in the news, I said, ‘Why not?’” This Snoopy and Woodstock original art, dated August 14, 1970, realized $28,800 in a March 2023 Heritage auction.
1973
Two days before Thanksgiving in 1973, A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving made its television debut. It placed third in the Nielsen ratings that week, bested only by All in the Family and Sanford and Son. As with A Charlie Brown Christmas, Schulz won an Emmy Award for writing the popular special. This Snoopy and Woodstock production cel setup from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving sold for $6,600 in a June 2021 Heritage auction.
1983
On July 1, 1983, Camp Snoopy opened at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California. The 6-acre spread, which featured Peanuts-themed rides and counted Snoopy as its official mascot, was the first area of any amusement park designed especially for kids under 12. These canoe-shaped Camp Snoopy signs that date to 1984 sold for $1,792 in a March 2017 Heritage auction.
1991
Artist Tom Everhart met Charles Schulz in 1980 when he was involved in a project that required him to draw large-scale renderings of Schulz’s work. The resulting pieces so impressed the Peanuts creator that since 1991, Everhart has been the only artist authorized to paint the Peanuts characters. Everhart’s 76 Dog Salute, a circa 1998 painting depicting Snoopy as the World War I Flying Ace, realized $3,346 in a December 2015 Heritage auction.
2000
After announcing his retirement at the end of 1999, in an open letter in which he described his work on Peanuts as “the fulfillment of my childhood ambition,” Schulz died in his sleep on February 12, 2000, the day before the final Peanuts Sunday strip was published. This original art, dated October 18, 1999, was one of the last Peanuts strips Schulz produced. It sold for $15,535 in a November 2016 Heritage auction.
RHONDA REINHART is editor of Intelligent Collector.