I Peanuts are the most famous comic strip in the world, published daily between 1950 and 2000, when its author Charles Schulz died at the age of 77. Even today, the replicas of the strips are distributed and published every day in the newspapers of dozens of countries around the world: in Italy, by the Post. The popularity and influence of the strip – and of its most famous characters, especially Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus – has spread over time to all media and daily life around the world, through their characters, their jokes, the rootedness of their habits, and an extraordinary amount of highly effective aphorisms and quotations. The frustrations, insecurities, illusions, anxieties of the children characters have always mirrored those of the adult readers, adding to them childish tenderness that has always fascinated children readers: over time building a success among very different generations. The name Peanuts was chosen by the distributor of the strip citing that of an audience of children on a TV show of the time, and it has always been said that Schulz did not like it. But as Lucy Van Pelt says, “the older you get, the less confident you are about a lot of things.”
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