Characters have come and gone from the comics page over the years, but usually in pretty benign ways.
Here’s one who may have met a horrific end at the hands of the cartoonist!
Charles Schulz drew “Peanuts” for half a century.
For all those years, the core characters were pretty much the same: Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, Sally, etc.
But other characters came later, like Woodstock, Franklin and Peppermint Patty.
And not all of those additions stuck around.
In 1954, Schulz introduced a character named Charlotte Braun.
From her name on down, every bit of her was supposed to be a kind of Bizarro version of Charlie Brown.
He was quiet, introverted, worried a lot; she was right there in everybody’s faces, being very, very loud.
She would come into a scene and say something, often about how loud she was, and the other characters would sort of be jolted by the volume.
Here’s another example of how they were opposites: Charlie Brown’s character was complex, and that gave Schulz a lot of creative possibilities.
Charlotte Braun was pretty much a one-joke character.
And readers seemed to realize that: one young fan, Elizabeth Swaim, wrote to Schulz about Charlotte.
We don’t know exactly what she suggested, but Swaim kept the reply she got from the artist.
“I am taking your suggestion regarding Charlotte Braun and will eventually discard her,” Schulz replied. “If she appears anymore it will be in strips that were already completed before I got your letter or because someone writes in saying that they like her.”
But then the letter turns a little sinister.
He adds, “Remember, however, that you and your friends will have the death of an innocent child on your conscience. Are you prepared to accept such responsibility?”
And to make crystal clear what he meant by this, Schulz drew a very nervous looking Charlotte Braun at the bottom of the page with a giant axe sticking out of her hair!
Sure enough, the character did disappear from “Peanuts,” though it wasn’t until 2000 or so, when Swaim donated Schulz’s letter to the Library of Congress, that we found out about the character’s very grisly last act.
We move now from the comic strip “Peanuts” to actual peanuts.
In 2010, two men in a pub in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, were upset because there was only one bag of dry roasted peanuts left and they each wanted it.
So they started arguing, and then fighting, and then several dozen other pubgoers started fighting, too.
One witness said, with great understatement, “It was a sad end to the night, I can tell you.”
Charlotte Braun, the ‘Peanuts’ Character Who Met a Gruesome End (Mental Floss)
Drinkers ‘in mass brawl over peanuts’ (Digital Spy)
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