Cartoonists in 75 syndicated strips have included homages, Easter Eggs, and tributes in their strips on Saturday, November 26th, to honor Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts on his 100th birthday.

The list of participating strips ranges from B.C, Dennis the Menace, Mutts and Rhymes With Orange to Zippy the Pinhead and Zits. Each artist was encouraged to come up with their own way to honor Schulz, who was known as “Sparky.”

“It’s a tribute to probably the world’s greatest cartoonist,” cartoonist Patrick McDonnell, who creates the daily strip Mutts for 700 newspapers, told KTSP in St. Paul, Minnesota. “After ‘Peanuts,’ the cartoon world changed. I think most working cartoonists today would say he was the inspiration for them to become cartoonists.” Schulz was born and raised in the Twin Cities area.

McDonnell’s tribute  repaid a kindness Schulz gave him. In a Peanuts strip from 1999, Schulz drew his cartoon boys and girls visiting a museum and Rerun off on the side looking up with respect at a painting of the dog Earl from Mutts. Readers of Mutts will see Earl at a museum looking up fondly – his little tail wagging – at a framed image of Snoopy. “Mines pretty personal,” McDonnell told ABC 7 News in New York.

McDonnell, who is a member of the board of directors of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, California, dreamed up the tribute and he and JumpStart cartoonist Robb Armstrong contacted the various cartoon syndicates with their plan.

“It’s going to be wall-to-wall tributes to Charles Schulz,” Benjamin L. Clark, curator at the Museum told KSTP. “Charles Schulz dug deep into his soul and poured it out onto the page [which was really] remarkable and different, especially when he debuted in 1950,” Clark said, adding, “It resonated with readers around the world, including people who would grow up to become cartoonists.”

Peanuts made its first appearance on October 2nd, 1950, in seven newspapers. The weekly Sunday page debuted on January 6, 1952. After a slow start, Peanuts eventually became one of the most popular comic strips of all time, as well as one of the most influential. By 2000, Peanuts was running in more than 2,500 newspapers in 75 countries. Schulz died in 2000, the night before his last strip was published.

While United Features retained ownership of the strip, Schulz requested the syndicator allow no other artist to draw Peanuts, and reruns of the strip have been in syndication daily since his death, meaning that the beloved strip has never faded from the public eye since its debut.

The characters, Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Sally, Sherman, Peppermint Patty and Marcy, Snoopy and Woodstock et al, have appeared in numerous classic television specials, many geared towards holidays, like A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Apple TV+ produced a new series called The Snoopy Show beginning in 2021.