Ли'л Фокс: Ранние работы Чарльза М. Шульца

Comic strip

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.