In fact, it looks like Snoopy overtakes Charlie Brown in about 1967.Ĭharlie Brown’s prominence is very high at the start of the comic strip and plunges as new characters are introduced. The lines across the plot are rolling averages, which make the lines less jiggly and the trends easier to see.īoxer’s pronouncement was correct: Snoopy’s prominence (the high white line) surpasses Charlie Brown’s prominence (the high yellow line) by the 1970s. If Snoopy appears in only one of those panels, he is probably not as important. For example, if a strip has four panels and Sally appears in all of them, then she is probably important to the strip’s story. “Prominence” refers to the proportion of a strip’s panels in which a character appears or is mentioned. I wanted to measure it! Character Prominenceīelow is a plot of the prominence of the major Peanuts characters over the course of the comic strip from its start in 1950 to its end in 2000. Read through, enjoy them all, and answer the questions for yourself.īut as a trained scientist, I wanted to do more than just read and enjoy all of Peanuts. GoComics has published every Peanuts strip online from the very first to the very last. Thankfully, these questions are relatively easy to answer in our internet-based age. How else did Peanuts change over time? Which characters were most important? How strong were those relationships? “By 1975, Snoopy had replaced Charlie Brown as the center of the strip,” Boxer pronounced. This article by Sarah Boxer in The Atlantic discussed how Charles Schulz shifted the comic strip’s focus from the characters’ angst and their web of relationships to Snoopy’s carefree fantasy world. It wasn’t just the characters’ appearances that changed. Did you know that the characters used to look like this? But Peanuts had already been around for a long time by then my parents grew up with it, too! For me, the characters always had their distinctive quirks: Snoopy at his typewriter Lucy’s “football gag” with Charlie Brown Marcie calling Peppermint Patty, “Sir.” I never appreciated how much Peanuts had changed over its 50 years in newspapers. Like so many of us, I have fond memories of growing up with Peanuts - Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, Sally, and the rest of the gang. “Ohhhh, you didn’t tell me you were gonna kill it!”
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