You can track the evolution of the American comic strip through its typical depiction of childhood. Early 20th century strips like Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy (1933) show kids’ lives as relatively prosaic, particularly given the culture and publication standards of the time. While their child protagonists might have faced some incidental frustrations, the comics page was mostly about gentle humor. Yes, Sluggo is a homeless orphan, but no, that isn’t a source of angst or conflict.
Charles Schulz’s Peanuts has become a sort of cultural shorthand for safe, family-friendly entertainment, but for its first decade, it was a genuinely daring comic. Schulz’s kids were frustrated, unlucky, and often pointlessly cruel to one another, in a more realistic approach to kids’ behavior than most comic strips risked showing at the time. Even if you don’t have any particular use for Peanuts itself, you can see it as a necessary stepping stone towards the edgier mainstream comics of the 1980s and ’90s, like The Boondocks or even Calvin and Hobbes.
Even at his most potentially controversial, Schulz was never interested in “very special episodes.” No one in the Peanuts gang usually had to deal with anything more serious than academic underachievement. That’s part of why some other comics’ big swerves, like the death of Andy Lippincott in Doonesbury or the raccoon cub storyline in Calvin and Hobbes, hit as hard as they did at the time. You didn’t often see the funny pages get anywhere near topics like death or mortality.
As far as Peanuts is concerned, there are two real exceptions. One is part of a weird series of comics that involve Snoopy’s brothers, while the other is a month-long storyline from 1979.
I don’t feel good, Mr. Brown
In the daily Peanuts strip for July 2, 1979, Charlie Brown started to feel woozy during a baseball game and decided to just go home. This was the start of a surprisingly long plot arc, particularly for Peanuts, in which ol’ Chuck landed in the hospital.
No one ever says what’s wrong with Charlie Brown. He feels “woozy,” then goes to the hospital for treatment, at which point he’s admitted. Charlie Brown winds up staying in the hospital until July 29, at which point he’s released and fully recovered. This leads into one of the high points of Peanuts’ running football gags at the start of August 1979.
More importantly, Charlie Brown’s illness has a strong ripple effect throughout the Peanuts gang. Sally immediately tries to steal his bedroom, Snoopy is only vaguely aware Charlie Brown’s gone at all, and both Peppermint Patty and Marcie make a point of supporting him as best they can.
The character who’s the most affected, however, is also the one that you might least expect. Lucy, who spends most of her panel time with Charlie Brown tearing him down, is worried for him to the point where she can’t eat, sleep, or even harass Schroeder. She actually goes so far as to cry over Charlie Brown (and then wipe her tears off on Schroeder’s piano).
Lucy’s emotions on the subject hit their apex in the Peanuts strip for July 26, 1979. When Linus tells her that Charlie Brown doesn’t appear to be getting any better, Lucy loses it.
“He’s not any better? That’s crazy! He’s got to get better!” Lucy yells at Linus. “What’s wrong with a world where someone like Charlie Brown can get sick, and then not get any better?! I need somebody to hit!”
That leads into Lucy’s promise, in the next two days’ strips, to actually abandon the football gag for once. It’s an uncommon amount of empathy for Lucy and it gets abandoned almost as soon as it arrives, but it’s also one of the most emotional moments in the daily strip. The July 26 comic doesn’t even have a punchline as such. Instead, it’s an understandable outburst that can resonate with anyone who’s ever been in a situation where they can’t do anything but wait.
Given how much of Charles Schulz’s real life made it into Peanuts, it’s enough to raise the question of whether Schulz himself had a relative in the hospital at some point in 1979. This particular Peanuts arc ends up as a strange outlier in the comic’s history, as well as an oddly resonant brush with mortality.