Li'l Folks
Li'l Folks, the first comic strip by "Peanuts" creator Charles M. Schulz, was a weekly panel that appeared mainly in Schulz's hometown paper, the "St. Paul Pioneer Press", from June 22, 1947, to January 22, 1950. Schulz's first regular cartoon, "Li'l Folks" can be regarded as an embryonic version of "Peanuts", containing characters and themes which were to reappear in the later strip: a well-dressed young boy with a fondness for Beethoven, à la Schroeder; a dog with a resemblance to Snoopy; and a boy named Charlie Brown. Publication history. Schulz was 24 at the  time he began drawing "Li'l Folks", and he was living with his father in a four-bedroom apartment above his father's barber shop. He earned $10 for each submission to the paper. The first two installments of "Li'l Folks" ran June 8 and 15, 1947, in the "Minneapolis Tribune". It then moved to the "St. Paul Pioneer Press"; "Li'l Folks" ran in the women's section of the paper. In 1948, Schulz tried to have "Li'l Folks" syndicated through the Newspaper Enterprise Association (a Scripps Company). He would have been an independent contractor for the syndicate, unheard of  in the 1940s, but the deal fell through. Schulz quit two years into the strip after the editor turned down his requests for a pay increase and a move of "Li'l Folks" from the women's section to the comics pages. Later that year, Schulz approached the United Feature Syndicate (also a Scripps Company) with "Li'l Folks", and the syndicate became interested. However, by that time Schulz had also developed a comic strip (also called "Li'l Folks"), typically using four panels rather than one. The strip was similar in spirit to the panel comic, but it had a set cast  of characters, rather than different nameless little folk for each page. The syndicate preferred the strip; however, the name "Li'l Folks" was too close to the names of two other comics of the time: Al Capp's "Li'l Abner" and a strip titled "Little Folks". To avoid confusion, the syndicate chose the name "Peanuts", after the peanut gallery featured in the "Howdy Doody" TV show. "Peanuts" made its first appearance on October 2, 1950, in seven newspapers. Characters and story. "Li'l Folks" saw the first use of the name Charlie Brown on May 30, 1948, although Schulz applied the name  in four gags to three different boys, as well as one buried in sand, during 1948–1949. The strip also featured a dog named Rover that looked much like Snoopy. Like most of "Peanuts", adult characters were not shown in the strip. Collected editions. The newspaper never returned Schulz's original artwork, so he clipped each week's strip from the paper and placed it in his scrapbook, which eventually housed over 7,000 pieces of artwork. In 2004, the complete run of the strip was collected by the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center (Santa Rosa, California) in a book , "Li'l Beginnings", by Derrick Bang with a foreword by Jean Schulz. It is available from the Museum and distributed by Fantagraphics Books. The complete run of the strip was also included in the penultimate volume of "The Complete Peanuts", published in May 2016 by Fantagraphics Books.