Early Snoopy Fetches $192,000
A 1950 Peanuts comic strip featuring Snoopy, the world’s most famous beagle, sets a record price at Heritage Auctions.
DALLAS – Charles Schulz began his Peanuts syndicated comic strip on October 2, 1950. During its nearly 18,000-strip, 50-year run, no character captured our imagination like Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s loyal and imaginative beagle.
At its peak, Peanuts was syndicated in 75 countries, translated into 21 languages and had a total readership of 355 million. Snoopy became one of the most recognizable and iconic comic strip characters of all time. A World War I flying ace, novelist and Mr. Joe Cool, Snoopy was so popular he had his own character balloon in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1968.
Even so, when an earliest-days Peanuts comic strip featuring Snoopy and dated November 17, 1950, sold for $192,000 recently at Heritage Auctions – a record price for a Peanuts daily comic strip – it was impressive. The strip is the 40th Peanuts daily to appear and features Snoopy along with another Peanuts character named Shermy.
Coming just weeks after the debut of strip, this November 17 entry also points to some forgotten Peanuts history: Shermy was one of the primary Peanuts characters at the outset of the strip, and it was even implied that Snoopy was Shermy’s dog early. But Shermy faded into obscurity in the strip after the early 1950s.
While there are 17,897 published Peanuts strips, original Peanuts art this early doesn't come up for sale too often, which makes this charming bit of Snoopy history something special.
