1950: The first publication

“It was a dark and stormy night"… Or maybe not.

It is on November 26th 97 years ago that Sparky was born, the nickname of Charles Schultz, given to him by his uncle a few days after his birth in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The nickname comes from the horse Spark Plug cartoon Barney Google by Billy DeBeck.

Young Charles drew the family dog in many ways and one day sent to the magazine Ripley's Believe It or Not! one of his drawings, which published with the caption "A hunting dog that eats pins, tacks and razor blades is owned by C. F. Schulz, St. Paul, Minn. " and "Drawn by 'Sparky'".

In 1943, after his mother's death, he enlisted at Camp Campbell in Kentucky, and after two years he was sent to fight in Europe. After leaving the army in 1945 he was a teacher and lay preacher. He married Joyce Halverson, with whom he had five children.

His first strip was published in 1947 from St. Paul Pioneer Press, and it was called Li'l Folks. 

It was 1950 - that's for sure - and Charles Monroe Schulz, a young cartoonist from Minnesota, was selling the rights to his strip to United Feature Syndicate, a company that distributed comic series to newspapers.

There Peanuts series however it was born from the original Li'l Folks, literally Personcine, which Schulz, since 1947, published weekly in a local newspaper.

The distribution company, to make the product more attractive, imposed some changes on the young author. He changed the name of the comic to the one we all know today. But that ridiculous nickname, Peanuts, the young Schulz never liked. In addition, United Feature decided to publish it in strips, asking the cartoonist to change the format of the speech bubble.

The first Peanuts strip was then released on 2 October 1950 in some American newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. In a short time, the small provincial characters became the most famous in America and then, in the world.

MAMe