First Peanuts Comic Strip Turns 76 Years Old

Shermy and Patty are the Stuart Sutcliffe of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. Neither received an official name for a few weeks, but both served as the comic strip co-stars. As the strip evolved, Schulz refined his art and introduced more popular characters like Lucy and Linus Van Pelt. That shift slowly pushed Shermy and Patty out of the spotlight. By the 1970s, both characters had ceased to appear in the strip at all.

Despite their eventual trip to character limbo, Shermy and Patty have one distinct claim to fame. They both appear in the first-ever Peanuts strip, which ran on Oct. 2, 1950. Schulz sets the tone for Peanuts with a surprisingly mean-spirited punchline. As Charlie Brown walks by, Shermy says aloud, “Here comes ol’ Charlie Brown. Good ol’ Charlie Brown… How I hate him!”

Schulz quickly walked that level of random cruelty back over the following weeks and months of Peanuts. Even so, the first two years of the strip remain a bizarre experience. 76 years later, anyone who grew up in North America did so in a pop-cultural environment where Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang were always in rotation. Seeing one of them meant encountering all-ages fun with great music, often mixed with Biblical scholarship or applicable morals.

The Peanuts comic strip was always a little more subversive than that, especially in its first two years. Its humor often relied on the premise that little kids are jerks. The second-ever Peanuts strip features Patty decking some random kid for no particular reason. Charlie Brown, Shermy, and Patty steal from, manipulate, and occasionally hit each other. They then forget it all and become friends once again by the next strip.

Snoopy first appears in the third-ever strip, but he is barely recognizable compared to the character he would become. For the first couple of years of Peanuts, Snoopy is just a dog without imaginary personae, human-like characteristics, or thought balloons. It is not even clear who he lives with. Rather than acting explicitly as Charlie Brown’s pet, Snoopy seems to just live in the neighborhood. Sometimes he stays with Shermy and other times with Patty, but most often he is simply present without further comment.

The short trip to character limbo

Schulz established in multiple written accounts that he came to see Shermy as a boring character. Earlier strips vaguely imply that Shermy and Patty are both older than Charlie Brown since both are distinctly taller than he is, but neither possesses a distinct hook. Later characters in Peanuts came preloaded with a major trait that Schulz could write gags around, such as Linus’s precociousness or Lucy’s self-importance, but Shermy and Patty lacked anything unique.

To be fair, Charlie Brown was not unique for the first couple of years either. He did not pick up major traits like his unlucky streak or philosophical self-pity for several years. At worst, he served as the butt of a strip’s joke without taking it personally. Once other characters entered the Peanuts rotation, Charlie Brown frequently played the straight man. However, Schulz explicitly based Charlie Brown on himself, so the character was not going anywhere.

Today, Peanuts primarily exists as a television franchise, with new specials coming out roughly annually via Apple TV. Viewers watching those specials with an eye on the background will notice Patty and Shermy occasionally making cameos alongside other largely forgotten Peanuts cast members like their fellow year-one kid Violet Gray. They still exist, but they peaked early. Shermy and Patty are now trivia answers for Peanuts fans, but on the anniversary of the first-ever Peanuts, they deserve proper credit for being there at the start.

Source: Polygon