Peanuts

Peanuts is a popular, multiple award-winning comic strip by Charles Schulz, which ran from October 2, 1950, to February 13, 2000. The strip featured a modest and unassuming boy named Charlie Brown, for whom nothing ever went right. Charlie Brown and his pet dog Snoopy, a Beagle, have become icons of American popular culture.

The strip grew to include a cast of characters including Charlie Brown’s best friend, a security blanket-carrying boy named Linus van Pelt, his fussbudget sister, Lucy and Rerun, their little brother, Schroeder, the piano-playing boy adored by Lucy, Sally, Charlie Brown’s younger sister (who has a crush on Linus), Pig Pen, habitually covered in a cloud of dust and grime, Peppermint Patty and her timid sidekick Marcie (who are both secretly in love with Charlie Brown), Franklin, the strip’s first African-American, and The Little Redheaded Girl, an unseen character who is Charlie Brown’s longtime unrequited love.

The non-human characters include Snoopy, his friend Woodstock, a little bird who’s inept at flying but skilled at other things including typing and shorthand, and a “stupid cat” who’s never seen.

One of Peanuts’s distinguishing features, especially in its early years, and perhaps a reason for its popularity was its social commentary, a technique often employed by writers, but pioneered in comic strips by Charles Schulz.

Charles Schulz officially retired on December 14, 1999 and requested that the Peanuts cartoon not be continued.

Peanuts is the longest lasting strip in the history of comics, with an archive of almost 18,000 strips. Copyright is owned by United Features Syndicate.

Official Peanuts site: http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/peanuts/