Peanuts’ Charlotte Braun resurfaces: one reader got her dropped

The story behind Charlotte Braun’s removal from Peanuts in early 1955 has been making the rounds again. Charles M. Schulz introduced her on November 30, 1954, then dropped the character after only 10 appearances, following a complaint from a reader named Elizabeth Swaim.

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Schulz appears to have created Charlotte Braun as a female counterpart to Charlie Brown. What readers got, though, was a much louder character, complete with oversized bold lettering that clashed with the strip’s softer, gentler humor. By February 1, 1955, Charlotte Braun was gone, and a lot of Peanuts fans never even knew she had existed.

When Elizabeth Swaim wrote to Charles M. Schulz asking him to remove Charlotte Braun, he sent back a reply on January 5, 1955 that’s still startling to read. He told her that she and her friends would have “the death of an innocent child on your conscience,” and he even drew Charlotte Braun with an axe in her head, a dark little “getting the axe” joke. It never appeared in the strip itself, but it’s often treated as the closest thing Peanuts has to an implied character death.

If you follow Peanuts history, this episode has a lot going on. It shows fan feedback reshaping canon as early as the 1950s, suggests that some of Charlotte Braun’s bossy DNA may have lived on in Lucy van Pelt, and helps explain why a franchise better known for kite-eating trees, baseball losses, and Snoopy still has this odd dark footnote attached to it. You can trace the broader rediscovery of the story to Elizabeth Swaim’s 2000 donation of Schulz’s letter to the Library of Congress, and Charlotte Braun still pops up in later projects, including the mobile game Snoopy’s Town Tale.