Every long-running comic strip has a few characters who got phased out early on. The most famous example might be Lyman from Garfield, Jon's roommate and Odie's original owner, who simply disappeared one day around 1985. (Davis has occasionally joked that if you want to find Lyman, you should dig up Jon's basement.) You could also point to most of the early human characters in Bloom County, Nicole in Doonesbury getting sidelined in favor of Joanie Caucus, or the abortive Uncle Max arc in Calvin and Hobbes.

Peanuts is no exception. Charlie Brown and Snoopy were central from the start, but the kids around them changed as Charles Schulz evolved the comic and his cartooning style. Early on, Charlie Brown mostly hung out with his buddy Shermy and their mutual friend Patty (not Peppermint Patty), both of whom were slowly cycled out of the strip in favor of later creations like Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, and Woodstock.

Schulz continued to introduce characters over time, such as Snoopy's brother Spike or Linus and Lucy's little brother Rerun, but he'd settled on what would become the most recognizable version of the comic by the '70s. That left Shermy, Patty, and a few other former stars in character limbo. By now, they're usually reserved for crowd scenes and cameos in animated specials, the most recent of which air semi-annually on Apple TV. As part of Polygon's ongoing retrospective on the Peanuts comic strip, here are some of the best moments of Peanuts' long-time benchwarmers.

Source link