27 Years Later, Linus' Final 'Peanuts' Quote Is a Brilliant Comic Strip Callback
Linus was an anarchist icon, one last time
Charles Schulz's Peanuts, for whatever reason, has one of the more dedicated fan communities on the internet. The Peanuts Fandom wiki is an invaluable resource for anything you might want to know about the strip, from obscure characters to running jokes to the gang’s unofficial cameo appearances in later media like Family Guy. While Peanuts itself has been the subject of broad academic discussion since the end of its original run, its wiki has that dense block of exhaustive well-organized trivia that you only really get from dedicated fans. (They probably ought to get the Peanuts wiki off of Fandom at some point.)
Somewhat more depressingly, the wiki features a rundown of the daily Peanuts strip that includes all of its various unofficial finales. As you flip through the last couple of months' worth of published Peanuts strips, you encounter footnotes about everything in the strip that’s now over.
By the end of January 2000, almost every character, interaction, catchphrase, and recurring scenario in Peanuts has appeared for the last time: the football gag (Oct. 24, 1999), the Great Pumpkin (Halloween 1999), Snoopy's weird cousin Spike (Dec. 21, 1999), Lucy Van Pelt (Dec. 13, 1999), etc. In most of those cases, Schulz hadn't been aware he was drawing a sendoff. He'd just been going about his usual business until he was suddenly forced into medical retirement.
As a result, Peanuts has no official final chapter besides Schulz's farewell note on Feb. 13, 2000. There are a couple of strips that feel like they've got some degree of subtext regarding Schulz's failing health, like Nov. 1, 1999 ("You're the last one . . . did you turn out the light?”) or Peppermint Patty's last appearance, but that's primarily an exercise left for the reader.
Peanuts for the people
Linus Van Pelt technically bowed out on New Year's Day 2000, in a wordless strip about a snowball fight that was also Peanuts' last weekday comic. (Both this and the previous day's comic feature rare examples of computer lettering in Peanuts, due to Schulz's failing health.) After Jan. 1, 2000, Peanuts went Sundays-only until the end of its run.
Linus' last speaking role came a few weeks earlier, on Dec. 14, 1999, in a simple strip about a snowman with poor posture. On Dec. 15, Linus "improved" his snowman by giving him a snow violin, in a rare example of a music joke in Peanuts that didn't involve Schroeder.
Before that, Linus' trademark security blanket showed up for the last time on Nov. 13, 1999, as the final entry in a decades-long struggle. It faded into the background over the years, but there are quite a few strips across Peanuts' run where other characters, primarily Sally, Lucy, and Snoopy, would try to get Linus' blanket away from him.
The Nov. 13, 1999, strip is a simple version of that struggle, where Snoopy tries to grab the blanket from Linus, and they end up in a scuffle. Just one month previously, on Oct. 17, Snoopy managed to successfully snatch the blanket without a scratch.
For my money, however, all the best Linus strips are the ones where he plays child philosopher. My favorite Peanuts comic is from April 26, 1961, where he states his political position as being on "the lunatic fringe."
With that in mind, the best of Linus' last appearances in Peanuts is from Oct. 18, 1999, where a number of the kids are stuck outside on a rainy morning before school.
Sally asks, "Does standing in the rain waiting for the school bus show our desire for education?"
"No," Linus replies. "It shows how our lives are controlled by those in power."
That isn't even this strip's punchline, but it's the kind of dialogue that resulted in Linus becoming a fan favorite back in the '50s.
By this point in Peanuts' evolution, both Linus and Lucy had taken a bit of a backseat to their little brother Rerun. While Charlie Brown and Snoopy still got their shares of panel time, Rerun was absolutely the star of the Van Pelt lineup in the '90s. The Oct. 18 strip marks one last piece of philosophy from Linus, which makes it an arguably better sendoff for him than Linus’ actual finale.