Tales From Today

On this day, October 2, 1950, the most beloved comic strip in history made its debut — with a joke about hating its main character. The strip was four panels long. Two kids, Shermy and Patty, sit on a curb. A round-headed boy walks past without a glance. Shermy watches him go and says, "Well! Here comes ol' Charlie Brown!" Then, warming to his subject: "Good ol' Charlie Brown... yes, sir!" And in the final panel, the kicker: "Good ol' Charlie Brown... How I hate him!" That was it. That was Peanuts, day one — appearing in exactly seven newspapers: the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Denver Post, the Seattle Times, the Allentown Call-Chronicle, and the Bethlehem Globe-Times. Consider how much of the next fifty years is packed into those four panels. The strip's defining gag — everybody dumping on Charlie Brown — didn't evolve over time. It arrived fully formed on day one, in the very first strip, in the very last panel. The world's most famous loser was born losing. Almost nothing else about that first strip survived. Snoopy, the strip's eventual breakout star, wasn't in it. Neither were Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, Pig-Pen, or Sally — Schroeder wouldn't arrive until May 1951, Lucy in March 1952, Linus that September, Pig-Pen in 1954, Sally not until 1959. Charlie Brown himself looked different, rounder and younger. And his creator wasn't even allowed to call the strip what he wanted. Charles M. Schulz had been drawing a weekly panel called Li'l Folks for the St. Paul Pioneer Press since 1947. When United Feature Syndicate agreed to take it national, they told him the name had to go — it sat too close to Al Capp's Li'l Abner and another strip called Little Folks. The syndicate borrowed a name from the peanut gallery on the Howdy Doody TV show and called it Peanuts. Schulz disliked the name for the rest of his life. He was stuck with it for fifty years. What he refused to give up was control. Schulz drew every single Peanuts strip himself — nearly 18,000 of them — for almost half a century. No assistant inked the backgrounds. No hired gag writers fed him jokes. In an industry where popular strips were routinely farmed out to studios, Peanuts stayed the work of one man's hand, from the first curb to the last Sunday. And what a run it became. From seven newspapers, Peanuts grew to more than 2,500 papers in 75 countries, read by over 350 million people — the most widely syndicated comic strip in history. It spun off beloved television specials, a Broadway musical, and a mountain of merchandise that made Snoopy one of the most licensed characters on Earth. Through all of it, the engine never changed. Charlie Brown never won the big game, never kicked the football, never got the little red-haired girl. The strip that opened with "How I hate him!" spent fifty years proving the point — and readers loved him for it, precisely because he kept showing up anyway. The last original Peanuts strip ran on Sunday, February 13, 2000. Schulz had died in his sleep the night before, of complications from colon cancer. The papers carried his final drawing the morning after he was gone. Seventy-six years after that October morning, the joke still lands. A boy walks past. Somebody loves him. Somebody hates him. Good ol' Charlie Brown.