Peanuts’ Pencil Pal Makes Her Official Debut 68 Years After First Appearance

Some parts of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip have barely aged, including its character relationships and its focus on team sports. Many children have known the experience of playing on a team with one kid taking the game far too seriously while another seems barely aware of what is happening.

Other parts of Peanuts capture a bygone era. If you’re younger than about 45, you may never have had an old-fashioned pen pal: a child in another state or country who exchanged handwritten letters with you as a social or learning exercise. The arrival of home internet may have ended the practice, or made pen pals account for half of a modern child’s social circle.

Charlie Brown had a “pencil pal” instead, because every pen he touched exploded. The first “pencil pal” strip ran on Aug. 25, 1958. Charlie Brown confessed that, as far as he was concerned, his pencil pal was his only real friend. That was a harsh judgment of Linus, but understandable.

What if they met in real life?

Over the next 36 years, Charlie Brown and his sister Sally periodically wrote to pen pals. Charlie Brown occasionally tried writing in ink. Readers almost never saw either of them receive a reply, though Schulz established in the first week of the storyline that Charlie Brown’s anonymous pencil pal lived outside the United States.

On Sept. 27, 1994, Schulz revealed the pencil pal’s identity. She was Morag, a girl from Scotland who wrote her accent out phonetically. Charlie Brown fell in love with her without ever seeing her, then had his heart broken when he learned he was one of Morag’s 30 pen pals.

The pen-pal storyline appeared occasionally in the daily Peanuts strip until August 1998, but Morag was never mentioned again. Schulz and Bill Melendez tentatively planned to continue her story in an animated special called Will Ye No Come Back Again, Charlie Brown?, which was never made. The special was among several unproduced Peanuts projects first revealed in the 2012 book The Art and Making of Peanuts, available on Archive.org.

Schulz and Melendez’s unused script was eventually adapted into the original graphic novel Scotland Bound, Charlie Brown, published by Boom! Studios in 2021. In the book, written by Jason Cooper and Robert Pope, the gang gather money so Charlie Brown can finally meet Morag in person.

Before they even leave the plane, Charlie Brown learns that Morag will be in Mexico while he is in Scotland. He tours the country anyway and befriends a Scottish girl named Nell. When he returns home, Nell becomes his new pen pal, giving Charlie Brown a rare win.

Peanuts ended its original run in 2000, but Apple TV revived the license in 2021. Since then, at least one new animated special has been released each year, produced by Peanuts Worldwide, Schulz Studio, and WildBrain Studios. The most recent special at the time of writing, There’s No Place Like Home, aired on Apple TV on July 31.

A Peanuts special planned for release in 2027 will return to the pen-pal storyline. In Snoopy Unleashed, Charlie Brown receives a surprise visit from his new pencil pal, Mia (Lara Mehmet), a wheelchair-using Londoner of South Asian descent. Her arrival leads Snoopy to run away to the big city, so Charlie Brown, Mia, and the gang set off in pursuit. The girl in the wheelchair at the top right of the promotional image is likely the first look at Mia. The Associated Press reported on the special.

Morag was never shown in a Peanuts strip, so Mia’s appearance in Snoopy Unleashed will mark the first official appearance of one of Charlie Brown’s correspondents. The new animated specials have also expanded on Schulz’s work by giving Franklin a central role in 2024’s Welcome Home, Franklin.

Source: Polygon