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. As Schulz's first regular cartoon, Li'l Folks can be regarded as an embryonic version of Peanuts, centered around children saying things beyond their years. Unlike Peanuts, Li'l Folks did not feature any recurring characters, though several themes were carried over to the later strip, including: Beethoven's music (which was applied to Peanuts character Schroeder); dogs resembling Snoopy that appeared in most strips; and the name Charlie Brown.
thumb|"Rover", the earliest prototypical version of Snoopy, from Li'l Folks from a strip from an unknown date.
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. Peanuts made its first appearance on October 2, 1950, in seven newspapers.
All of the original Li'l Folks comic strips have fallen into the public domain due to a lack of a copyright renewal.
Characters and story
thumb|First appearance of a "Charlie Brown" from a May 30, 1948 strip of Li'l Folks.
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. One 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.