On October 2, 1950, a four-panel strip called Peanuts by Charles Schulz ran in seven American newspapers: the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Minneapolis Star, the Allentown Call-Chronicle, the Bethlehem Globe-Times, the Denver Post and the Seattle Times. The first strip has Shermy and Patty talking about Charlie Brown, and Charlie Brown walking past without a word. Schulz was 27 and United Feature Syndicate was paying him 90 dollars a month.
He had wanted to call it Good Ol' Charlie Brown. The syndicate overruled him. He never forgave that. The name came from the peanut gallery of the Howdy Doody show. Schulz had been selling single panels to the Saturday Evening Post and teaching a correspondence course in cartooning, and he had drawn a strip called Li'l Folks in his hometown paper in St Paul for two years before the syndicate picked him up.
The strip changed American comics by shrinking them. Schulz dropped detailed backgrounds, drew children with heads too big for their bodies, and put the joke in the last panel. The characters accumulated slowly: Violet in 1951, Schroeder and Lucy in 1952, Linus and Snoopy in 1952, Pigpen in 1954. Snoopy was on all fours for the first decade and stood up in the 1960s.
What made it last was that the strip was about disappointment and was funny about it. Charlie Brown never kicked the football, never won a baseball game, never spoke to the little red-haired girl. Schulz was drawing the same anxieties in 1999 that he had drawn in 1952, and he said more than once that he did not think the strip could survive him. It did not. He retired in December 1999 with pancreatic cancer and died on February 12, 2000, the night before his last strip ran.
Peanuts appeared in more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries, and Schulz drew roughly 18,000 strips himself. He used no assistants. The television specials, beginning with A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, are why most people know the characters at all, and that special was written in a few weeks on a small budget and has been broadcast every year since.