76 Years Ago, 'Peanuts' Shockingly with a Delightfully Cruel First Comic

Remembering Shermy and Patty, the lost members of Charlie Brown's gang

Shermy and Patty are the Stuart Sutcliffe of Charles Schulz's Peanuts. While neither received an official name for a few weeks, they were nonetheless the comic strip’s co-stars. As the strip evolved, Schulz refined his art and introduced more popular characters like Lucy and Linus Van Pelt, which slowly pushed Shermy and Patty out of the spotlight. By the 1970s, both characters had ceased to appear in the strip at all.

Despite their eventual trip to character limbo, Shermy and Patty both have one thing going for them: They're both in the first-ever Peanuts strip, which ran on Oct. 2, 1950. Schulz sets the tone for Peanuts with a surprisingly mean-spirited punchline. As Charlie Brown walks by, Shermy says aloud, "Here comes ol' Charlie Brown. Good ol' Charlie Brown... How I hate him!"

Schulz quickly walked that level of random cruelty back over the following weeks and months of Peanuts, but the first two years of the strip are still a bizarre experience. 76 years later, anyone who grew up in North America did so in a pop-cultural environment where Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang were always in rotation. If you saw one of them, you were in for some all-ages fun with great music, often with some Biblical scholarship or applicable morals mixed in.

The Peanuts comic strip was always a little more subversive than that, especially in its first two years. If there's one thing driving its humor, it's that little kids are often jerks. The second-ever Peanuts strip, in fact, is about Patty decking some random kid for no particular reason. Charlie Brown, Shermy, and Patty steal from, manipulate, and occasionally hit each other, only to forget it all and become friends once again by the next strip.

Snoopy first appears in the third-ever strip, but he's barely recognizable by comparison to the character he'd become. For the first couple of years of Peanuts, Snoopy's still just a dog, without his various imaginary personae, human-like characteristics, or thought balloons. It's not even clear who he lives with. Rather than being explicitly Charlie Brown's pet, Snoopy seems to just live in the neighborhood. Sometimes he's with Shermy, other times with Patty, but most often he's simply present without further comment.

The short trip to character limbo

As for Shermy in particular, Schulz established in multiple written accounts that he came to see Shermy as a boring character. In the earlier strips, it's vaguely implied that Shermy and Patty are both older than Charlie Brown, since both are distinctly taller than he is, but neither of them have a distinct hook. Later characters in Peanuts would come preloaded with a major trait that Schulz could write gags around, such as Linus’s precociousness or Lucy’s self-importance, but Shermy and Patty don’t have anything unique about them.

To be fair, Charlie Brown wasn’t unique for the first couple of years either. He doesn't pick up his major traits like his unlucky streak or philosophical self-pity for several years. At worst, he’s often the butt of a strip’s joke, but he doesn’t take it personally. Once other characters enter Peanuts' rotation, Charlie Brown's position in the strip is frequently to play straight man. However, Schulz explicitly based Charlie Brown on himself, so Charlie wasn't going anywhere.

In 2026, Peanuts primarily exists as a TV franchise, with new specials coming out roughly annually via Apple TV. If you watch those specials with an eye on the background, Patty and Shermy occasionally make a cameo, alongside other largely forgotten Peanuts cast members like their fellow year-one kid Violet Gray. They still exist, but they peaked early. Now Shermy and Patty are simply trivia answers for Peanuts fans, but on the anniversary of the first-ever Peanuts, it's worth giving them their proper due. They were there at the start.