Four Color #878
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeFour Color #878 is the first dedicated Peanuts comic book published by Dell — the issue that gave Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the rest of the gang their own solo book format for the first time, after years of appearing only as backup features in anthology titles. Published in February 1958, it served as a deliberate test of whether the Peanuts characters could sustain a standalone comic, and its success directly triggered two follow-up Four Color issues (#969 and #1015) and, eventually, a full ongoing Dell series. For collectors and historians alike, it marks the pivot from Peanuts as a newspaper-strip curiosity in the backs of other books to Peanuts as a comics franchise in its own right — a transition that mapped onto the strip's own explosive rise to cultural prominence in the late 1950s.
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When Dell (Western Publishing) took over the anthology titles that had been hosting Peanuts backup features — Fritzi Ritz, Tip Top, and Nancy — in late 1957, the publisher switched from newspaper-strip reprints to all-new original stories. Charles Schulz, consumed by the demands of his skyrocketing daily strip and his short-lived sports feature 'It's Only a Game,' handed the interior comic-book work to his friend and former Art Instruction Schools colleague Jim Sasseville, who wrote and drew all seven stories inside Four Color #878; Schulz himself contributed only the signed cover. Dell issued the book as a one-shot 'experiment' within the long-running Four Color anthology numbering, and its commercial reception was strong enough to warrant a second all-Peanuts issue the following year.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published February 1958 by Dell Publishing Co. as issue #878 of the Four Color anthology series — effectively functioning as 'Peanuts #1' in Dell's own internal reckoning.
- First Peanuts comic book to give the characters a full, dedicated issue rather than backup-feature status in a shared anthology.
- Cover penciled and inked by Charles M. Schulz (signed); all interior story art and scripts by Jim Sasseville — Schulz's former Art Instruction Schools colleague and first ghost artist.
- Contains seven original (not reprint) Peanuts stories of varying length, including titled stories 'The Trip,' 'The Magic Blanket,' 'The Hero,' 'Fool Luck,' 'Westward Ho,' 'Bed of Leaves,' and 'Lucy's Tears.'
- First of three Peanuts issues within the Dell Four Color run; followed by Four Color #969 (February 1959) and #1015 (August–October 1959).
- Exists in at least one cover-price variant (10¢ standard; 15¢ variant documented).
- Reprinted in full in Peanuts (Western/Gold Key, 1963 series) #1, and again collected in the Peanuts Dell Archive (Boom! Studios, October 2018), the first major archival edition of the Dell-era material.
- Gold Key's four-issue Peanuts series (1963–1964) reprinted this issue's content in its #1, minus the Nancy and Sluggo backup story that appeared in some printings.
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Reprints
Reprinted in Peanuts #1 (1963), Peanuts Dell Archive #[nn] (2018)
Key issues in Four Color
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