One of the most popular and influential daily Comic Strips of all time, Peanuts, created by Charles M. Schulz, debuted on October 2, 1950. Schulz went on to write and draw the strip for 49 years, 3 months and 1 day.
While it's got a large cast, the stars of the strip are a boy named Charlie Brownnote and his pet beagle Snoopy.
Peanuts had its origins as a successor to Li'l Folks, a weekly feature that Schulz had drawn for his hometown newspaper in the late '40s. It ended its long newspaper run in 2000, with the final weekday strip appearing on January 3 and the final Sunday strip on February 13 of that year... which, as it turned out, was one day after Charles Schulz died in his sleep at the age of 77. Since then, the comic has kept a place in many newspapers by way of reruns.
The strip's popularity eventually launched the franchise of the same name, which includes a series of animated TV specials — beginning with the classic Christmas Special A Charlie Brown Christmas, which was an annual mainstay on American network television for more than half-a-century — as well as several feature films, a Saturday-Morning Cartoon series, and even a couple of live-action musical adaptations. As of 2022 the specials are exclusively available on Apple TV+, which is also producing original series and new specials for online viewing.
In 2011, Boom! Studios began producing a series of Peanuts comic books (as part of the KaBOOM! Comics line), featuring new content as well as old strips. Peanuts comic stories had been previously commissioned for Dell Comics in the late '50s and early '60s.
The complete Peanuts comic strip archive can be viewed at GoComics.com
. See also the official Peanuts web site, as well as the unoffical Peanuts-search tool , which allows for looking up comic strips online more directly with keywordsnote . Fantagraphics Books began publishing a multi-volume series collecting the strip's complete run in dead-tree format in 2004; the series, which encompasses 26 volumes, was finished in 2016.
