The Charlie Brown You May Not Know: Charlie Brown & Hobbes?

Good 'ol Charlie Brown. The lovable loser. The not terribly bright, not also not stupid sad sack who never gets the better of anybody, but is instead always the butt of the joke. You know this Charlie Brown, don't you? But did you know there is a Charlie Brown who is much closer to Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes than he is to George Constanza or Cliff Claven? In fact, if you are a big fan of Calvin's strange and surreal snowmen, you might be shocked to discover that Charlie Brown was creating much the same kind of snowmen a full three decades before Hobbes' imaginative partner gave the world a snowman standing in a hole. In fact, there are many similarities between the early Charlie Brown and Calvin. And get this: Lucy, Patty and Violet even look at Charlie Brown in terms of a potential match for marriage.

Charlie Brown's ideological persona was really not established until the 1960s. Till then creator Charles Schulz was really working out what he wanted to do with the strip. You can find these early strips in the thick collections that combine two years worth of comic gold in each volume. Those from early to late 1950s present a Peanuts universe substantially different from the one you know from the animated specials and the comic strips from the 1960s on. In addition to a radically different Charlie Brown, Linus is a baby unable to speak, the adults actually talk and interact (though remaining unseen), and Snoopy both looks and acts more like a dog. He doesn't even have a doghouse upon which to slumber and dream of flying his Sopwith Camel as he battles the Red Baron. To those who have had occasion to visit Peanuts under the conditions, the early strips can be unnerving.