Peanuts by Charles Schulz for November 09, 1975

So, is the character in the 2nd panel indeed Shermy, and is this then Shermy’s final appearance in the strip? It is generally agreed that this is only a boy who looks like Shermy, but in my opinion it is Shermy himself. OK, he isn’t wearing the clothes he usually wears, but then neither are Lucy and Linus wearing the clothes which they pretty much always wear at this period in the strip; Schulz would occasionally draw his characters in different clothes, especially in strips in which they were lining up to see a movie. It is also remarked that Shermy should be considerably taller than Lucy, but Schulz was not consistent in depicting the relative heights of his characters after the 60s; even in this strip, Lucy, Linus and Sally are of more or less the same height. When Schulz very occasionally drew Patty and Violet in, say, a bus queue in the late 80s, early 90s, they were no longer noticeably taller than any of the other kids, as they would have been in the 50s and 60s. Thirdly, the hair is remarked to be different. It isn’t THAT much different – Schulz had admitted in an interview that he found it difficult to portray Shermy’s hair, and it isn’t always portrayed consistently in the strip (when Frieda made some of her last ever appearances in the mid-70s, her hair was drawn differently than in previous years as well). Don’t forget that Shermy’s appearance before this was in 1969, so more than 6 years have gone by, and also that Schulz drew his characters a little differently in the mid-70s than he did in the late 60s. Finally, although by this period in the strip Schulz would draw random kids here and there, he only drew familiar characters in queues to the movie theatre (the only time he drew a random kid in a queue to the movies was in the late 80s).