There are some elements of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic that have hardly aged at all, such as the characters’ relationships or its focus on team sports. Most kids in America, before or since, have had the experience of being on a team where one kid is taking the game way too seriously while another seems barely aware of what’s going on.
Other parts of Peanuts, on the other hand, are portraits of a bygone era. If you’re younger than about 45, you probably never had an old-school “pen pal.” These were kids in other states or countries who you’d send handwritten letters, either as a learning or social exercise. Depending on how you look at it, the advent of the home internet either destroyed the practice on the spot or ensured that “pen pals” now make up a solid 50% of a modern kid’s social circle.
Charlie Brown, conversely, had a “pencil pal,” because he lives in a universe that hates him and every pen he touches explodes. The first “pencil pal” comic strip ran on Aug. 25, 1958, with Charlie Brown confessing that as far as he was concerned, his pencil pal was his only real friend. (Kind of harsh for Linus, but understandable.)
What if we met in real life?
Both Charlie Brown and his sister Sally would periodically write to various pen-pals over the course of the next 36 years, with Charlie Brown occasionally trying to do so in ink. Readers almost never saw either Charlie Brown or Sally get a letter in return, although Schulz established in the first week of the bit that Charlie Brown’s anonymous “pencil-pal” was from somewhere outside the United States.
36 years later, on Sept. 27, 1994, Schulz abruptly revealed the pencil-pal’s identity. She was a girl from Scotland named Morag with an odd habit of writing her accent out phonetically. Charlie Brown immediately fell in love with her, sight unseen, but got his heart broken at the revelation that he was only one of Morag’s 30 pen-pals.
The pen pal bit continued to run in the daily Peanuts strip every once in a while until August 1998, and Morag was never mentioned again. Morag’s story was tentatively planned to continue in an animated special, called Will Ye No Come Back Again, Charlie Brown? which was never made. It’s one of several unproduced Peanuts specials that were first revealed in 2012’s The Art and Making of Peanuts, which is available on Archive.org.
Schulz and Bill Melendez’s unused script was eventually adapted into an original graphic novel, Scotland Bound, Charlie Brown, published by Boom! Studios in 2021. In the OGN, by Jason Cooper and Robert Pope, the gang scrape together some money so Charlie Brown can finally meet Morag in person.
Of course, they haven’t even gotten off the plane before Charlie Brown discovers Morag will be in Mexico while they’re in Scotland. Despondent, Charlie Brown goes on a tour of the country anyway, and befriends a Scottish girl named Nell in the process. Nell becomes his new pen-pal when he gets home, which puts a rare tally in the win column for ol’ Chuck.
With the end of Peanuts’ original run in 2000, you’d think that would be it for the pen-pal storyline. However, Apple TV quietly dusted off the Peanuts license in 2021 and has released at least one brand-new animated special every year since then, produced by Peanuts Worldwide, Schulz Studio, and WildBrain Studios. The most recent special at time of writing, There’s No Place Like Home, aired on Apple TV on July 31.
One of the next Peanuts specials, planned for release in 2027, will revisit the pen-pal storyline. In Snoopy Unleashed, Charlie Brown receives a surprise visit from his (new?) pencil-pal, who turns out to be a wheelchair-using Londoner of South Asian descent named Mia (Lara Mehmet). Her arrival will result in Snoopy running away to the big city, forcing Charlie Brown, Mia, and the Peanuts gang to give chase. (In the above promotional image, the girl in the wheelchair in the top right is most likely fans’ first look at Mia.)
Since Morag carefully dodged ever being shown on-panel, Mia’s debut in Snoopy Unleashed marks the first time that one of Charlie Brown’s correspondents will ever make an official appearance in Peanuts. It’s another example of how the current slate of animated specials have made an effort to expand on Schulz’s work, alongside Franklin getting a center-stage role in 2024’s Welcome Home, Franklin.