Why the ‘Peanuts’ Characters Still Thrive 25 Years After the Last Original Comic Strip Was Published

He is an outcast, a loser. He is grim, often demoralized and sometimes downright sad. He mourns every lost game and openly suffers unrequited love for a girl apparently unaware of his existence. Since Charlie Brown debuted in “Peanuts” in October 1950, he has been a rare comic child—neither amusingly mischievous nor a foil for grouchy grandparents. He’s not so different from real children who are forced to give up dreams of being geniuses, star athletes or great artists, and just like Charlie Brown, most must accept instead that they are quite ordinary.

Even his dog, the charismatic and beloved Snoopy, outdoes him. “Snoopy’s the kind of thing we’d all like to be and admire, but Charlie Brown is who I was as a kid who struggled with self-esteem,” says National Museum of American History entertainment and sports curator Eric Jentsch. “Most of us don’t come in first. … Charlie Brown is what made [“Peanuts”] revolutionary in my view because he was speaking to kids about the kids’ experience in a way they really experienced.”

In addition to Charlie Brown and Snoopy, the other main “Peanuts” are Linus, the sensitive boy who hugs his security blanket to get through the vicissitudes of daily life, and his older sister, Lucy, the often mean advice-giver who has more self-assurance than many of her buddies. Other members of the gang include Charlie’s younger sister, the bothersome Sally; kind Franklin and musical Schroeder; sporty Peppermint Patty and respectful Marcie; dusty Pigpen and the loyal bird Woodstock.

Though it has been 25 years since a new daily “Peanuts” comic strip was drawn, it remains a force in popular culture, and the museum holds a great variety of artifacts showing the work of its creator, Charles M. Schulz, and revealing how the strip and its characters have won a prominent place in entertainment history. Schulz announced his retirement in December 1999 after being diagnosed with colorectal cancer. His last newly drawn daily, Monday through Saturday, strip appeared on January 3, 2000, and, in a shocking coincidence, his final full-color Sunday strip ran on February 13 of that year, just one day after he died.

Among the National Museum of American History’s trove of “Peanuts”-related paraphernalia are a pen, pencil, brush and artist’s board used by Schulz. An original hand-drawn comic strip, a camera-ready strip and cels from animated TV productions reflect Schulz’s creative work, and the museum also holds everyday items bearing the likenesses of “Peanuts” characters, such as mugs, lunchboxes, musical banks, thermoses, yo-yos and a 1973 Mother’s Day plate.

While “Peanuts” ended, in a sense, in 2000, it has since found new audiences through continued syndication in thousands of newspapers and productions in other media. Today, Peanuts Worldwide, which owns the “Peanuts” characters, has millions of followers across its social platforms, where “Peanuts” comic strips, graphics and clips are regularly shared. At the same time, the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, welcomes guests to explore the artist’s life and work.

Charlie Brown, who Schulz said was modeled on himself, “was dealing with an existential crisis,” says Jentsch. He believes that Charlie Brown’s confrontation with his failures and the way he dealt with them “really resonated with not only kids, but obviously adults, because it’s a universal condition.”

And the effects of “Peanuts” can be seen throughout later comic strip storytelling: “Every awkward pause, tragic punchline, stretched-out uncomfortable post-punchline moment, philosophical meandering, every strip with an inanimate object expressing its thoughts—all of these have their roots in ‘Peanuts,’” award-winning cartoonist Ivan Brunetti writes.

Despite their less-than-idyllic childhoods, the “Peanuts” kids became internationally known cultural icons. Apollo 10 astronaut Eugene A. Cernan held a sketch of Snoopy during a global telecast. NASA says it’s estimated that around one billion people saw some part of the broadcasts. That May 1969 mission, which was the last before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the lunar surface, featured a lunar module known as Snoopy and a command module that bore the name of Charlie Brown.

In 1971, Snoopy got a role in the Holiday on Ice show. TV holiday specials, which debuted in the mid-1960s with the still-popular A Charlie Brown Christmas, feature the “Peanuts” crew. MetLife, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies, used Snoopy in advertisements for more than 30 years. Camp Snoopy became a popular site at Knott’s Berry Farm, a Southern California theme park. You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, first an Off Broadway musical and later a Broadway production, became one of the most frequently performed theatrical musicals in the nation’s stage history. The Peanuts Movie, released in 2015, grossed more than $246 million worldwide. In 2024, Forbes rated Schulz as No. 8 on its list of deceased celebrities with the largest incomes. Among those ranked above him were Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Freddie Mercury, Dr. Seuss and Bob Marley. Schulz’s posthumous income was estimated to be $30 million.

To learn his trade, Schulz took a correspondence cartoon course when he was a high school senior. Before launching his career, he served in the Army for three years during World War II, an experience that he described as teaching him “all I needed to know about loneliness.” Years later, he said that he channeled that unwelcome solitude into Charlie Brown. “Maybe I have the cruelest strip going,” he said. The original strip was published for almost half a century. By 1958, “Peanuts” was published in 355 U.S. newspapers and 40 foreign dailies. Seventeen years later, the count was 1,480 newspapers in the United States and 175 in other nations. By 1984, it debuted in its 2,000th newspaper. Given that the newspaper industry had begun its decline, with many afternoon newspapers closing, these rising numbers are especially striking.

Schulz won top awards in the comic strip community, as well as both Emmy and Peabody awards for A Charlie Brown Christmas. Other TV specials and awards followed. “Peanuts” became regarded as the most popular comic strip ever, and M. Thomas Inge writes in the introduction to Schulz’s own memoir that the cartoonist was the nation’s “major pop philosopher, therapist and theologian” in late 20th-century America.

Big lessons abound in this small comic strip. “Peanuts” is not about Charlie Brown scoring touchdowns or Schroeder playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” at Carnegie Hall. Charlie Brown “and the rest of the kids exist in an often cruel, meaningless world filled with unwinnable baseball games, monstrous kite-eating trees, and unfair treatment by unseen adults,” writes Cliff Starkey, a longtime “Peanuts” fan and English literature scholar. The characters developed into “repositories for and expressions of Americans’ dreams, hopes, fears and worries,” in the words of historian and author Blake Scott Ball. And because these youngsters live in a world where adults are rarely heard and never seen, the children make their own rules. “The genius of it, especially when you’re reading it as a kid, was how irrelevant or intrusive adults are,” says Jentsch.

“Peanuts” primarily tells stories of everyday life, and through the characters, the strips addressed relevant real-world issues. With Lucy and Peppermint Patty, the strips gave the feminist movement a push by making little girls equal participants on the playing fields of life and sports. Schulz’s work also emphasized Peppermint Patty’s appearance-conscious pain springing from how she perceives herself as “funny-looking” and less feminine than other girls. In a 1972 strip, she says, “I stood in front of that little red-haired girl and I saw how pretty she was … Suddenly, I realized why Chuck has always loved her, and I realized that no one would ever love me that way.”

Franklin, the first Black character in “Peanuts,” was introduced in 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr. was slain. California teacher Harriet Glickman had encouraged and eventually convinced Schulz to create a Black character after King’s assassination.

Schulz’s work commented on war, too. In one strip, the kids act out the horrible roar of an atomic bomb, and Snoopy has frequent aerial battles with the Red Baron. In fact, Snoopy’s image was a common sight among U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War.

The cartoonist’s handiwork remains apparent in reruns of his original work in daily newspapers, in book compilations of his comics, and in TV specials based on his art. Schulz, who didn’t allow assistants to help in the creation of his work, did not want anyone to create new strips after his long co-existence with the characters. Continuing his legacy, his son Craig Schulz and grandson Bryan Schulz have helped write and produce new animated “Peanuts” presentations in recent years.

Some of the kids who grew up reading Schulz’s more than 17,000 strips in newspapers now have grandchildren and great-grandchildren who can read the old strips online. As his followers grow older, Charlie Brown remains a downcast boy wearing a yellow shirt with a black zigzag stripe. Jentsch believes 21st-century children have no trouble understanding these characters and their activities: “The kind of situations that they come up against are universal.”

Alice George | | READ MORE

Alice George, Ph.D. is an independent historian with a special interest in America during the 1960s. A veteran newspaper editor, she is recently the author of The Last American Hero: The Remarkable Life of John Glenn and has authored or co-authored seven other books, focusing on 20th-century American history or Philadelphia history.