Posted By Dan Greenfield on Nov 26, 2025 | 7 comments

A BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE to the late, great Charles M. Schulz…

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The late, great Charles Schulz was born 103 years ago, on November 26, 1922. This year, we’ve got a double-celebration for you: the salute by Paul Kupperberg, below, and one by Peter Bosch that you can find here. Right on. — Dan

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By PAUL KUPPERBERG

It was impossible to grow up in the second half of the 20th century without being continually pelted with Peanuts.

Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz (November 26, 1922 – February 12, 2000) debuted October 2, 1950, in seven newspapers. By 1970, it was appearing in something like 1,400 papers worldwide. In the decades between, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, and the rest of the Peanuts gang grew into a licensing and merchandising powerhouse, appearing on everything from lunchboxes to greeting cards.

The first strip

Collections of the strip became best-selling books and the 1965 animated special A Charlie Brown Christmas was an instant classic, followed by a string of successful TV specials (like A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving), and the 1967 Broadway musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which contributed songs (“You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown” and “Happiness”) to the American songbook. They even went to the moon, when the crew of Apollo 10 chose “Charlie Brown” and “Snoopy” as the names for the mission’s command and lunar modules.

Peanuts wasn’t just a comic strip. It was a cultural phenomenon; by the time it ended its 50-year run on February 13, 2000, it was in 2,600 papers around the world, and even now, a quarter century after Schulz’s death, reprints of the strip continue uninterrupted in nearly 2,000 papers.

What made Peanuts stand out from the crowd of 1950 humor strips was obvious from Day One. This wasn’t a gag-a-day humor strip that relied on slapstick and verbal gymnastics for laughs. Most days, Peanuts didn’t seem to be going for big laughs at all, its gentle humor instead picking at childhood anxieties and human nature, all voiced by “children” who spoke and acted like adults. Its humor came from the characters and their surprisingly mature reflections on failure, loneliness, and hope, a weirdly melancholic blend of humor and philosophy that touched as much as made us laugh.

Charles Schulz famously never used assistants or ghosts, producing every line and letter on the 15,931 daily and 2,506 Sunday strips produced during the 50 year run of Peanuts. And no one else ever did draw the newspaper strip, although he had assistants who helped on Peanuts-related projects and merchandise, including Jim Sasseville and Dale Hale, who served as the creators on the Dell Comics Peanuts comic books, adapting Schulz’s characters and tone for the longer comic book format.

1958

However, in the early 1970s, during tense contract negotiations between Schulz and his syndicate, United Feature, the syndicate secretly hired veteran comic book artist and cartoonist Al Plastino to create a batch of Peanuts strips as a contingency plan in case Schulz walked away. Plastino, best known for his work on Superman, was told to imitate Schulz’s style and produced several weeks’ worth of substitute strips. The contract dispute was resolved so the replacement strips were never published, and Schulz continued the strip without interruption. But he wasn’t told about the replacement strips at the time, and by all reports when he did find out about it years later, he was unhappy that UFS had gone behind his back.

Plastino’s Peanuts

The few Plastino samples that have escaped into the wild only reinforce the idea that Peanuts was the unique product of Charles Schulz’s hand and mind. The art was close enough that maybe only the more discerning reader might notice the difference, but the real tell was in the writing. The familiar Peanuts tropes were there, but something was missing that no ghost or replacement artist could ever hope to duplicate: the heart of Charles M. Schulz.

Here then, My 13 Favorite Peanuts Thanksgiving and Christmas Strips:

Nov. 27, 1952

Nov. 26, 1970

Nov. 23, 1976

Nov. 25, 1981

Nov. 22, 1983

Nov. 26, 1992

Nov. 23, 1999

Dec. 17, 1961

Dec. 21, 1980

Dec. 23, 1989

Dec. 25, 1989

Dec. 15, 1991

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MORE

— 13 GREAT Comic Strips That Paid Tribute to PEANUTS. Click here.

— PEANUTS AT 75: A Salute to the Greatest Comic Strip of Them All. Click here.

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PAUL KUPPERBERG was a Silver Age fan who grew up to become a Bronze Age comic book creator, writer of Superman, the Doom Patrol, and Green Lantern, creator of Arion Lord of Atlantis, Checkmate, and Takion, and slayer of Aquababy, Archie, and Vigilante. He is the Harvey and Eisner Award nominated writer of Archie Comics’ Life with Archie, and his YA novel Kevin was nominated for a GLAAD media award and won a Scribe Award from the IAMTW. Check out his new memoir, Panel by Panel: My Comic Book Life. 

Website: https://www.paulkupperberg.net/

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