Jillian Chantal

I thought I’d take a break from Paris-based Friday Facts and share something I particularly love. I grew up reading the Peanuts comic strip in the newspaper. We also had a collection of the strips in a boxed set of books. It was something my father shared with my sister and me. We still quote lines to each other all the time- like at Christmas, we might say, “I got a rock” which of course comes from the Halloween strips. One strip we quote a lot is “I’m lookiting.” It seems more and more television reporters are saying “lookit” instead of ‘look at”- what’s up with that?

Anyway, the anniversary of the first Peanuts comic strip was yesterday. It first appeared in papers in 1950 on Oct. 2. This was way before I was born but since they are still running today – many years after the awesome Mr. Schultz’s death- they are obviously still relevant. Interestingly, that first strip was only in seven newspapers. WOW! Hard to believe since at the height of its popularity, it was in over 2,600 papers and in 75 countries.  It reached over 355 million readers and was translated into 21 languages.  Now that is some impact, isn’t it?

Mr. Schultz published 17,897 strips – how massive is that number? I have to say WOW again. This number is pretty daunting, isn’t it? To draw that many comic strips and always have fresh material? Amazing.

As a history buff, some of my favorites were the ones where Snoopy was the WWI flying ace. They always made me laugh- “Curse you, Red Baron!”

Here is the Lookiting strip and the first strip, too: