Happy New Year, Charlie Brown by Charles M. Schulz

Though Pig-Pen is proud of his uncleanliness, Charlie Brown is the only other Peanuts character to unconditionally accept Pig-Pen for who he is, even defending Pig-Pen's uncleanliness in one strip (which was re-used in A Charlie Brown Christmas and Peanuts):ĭon't think of it as dust. He responds with disdain, stating that 'in one minute the rain has washed away what took me all day to accomplish'. One notable exception is an earlier strip where he gets caught in a brief but heavy rainfall, and while trying to seek shelter, the storm ends, revealing him to be clean.

Once, after bathing and dressing in clean clothes, Pig-Pen stepped outside his house and instantaneously became dirty and disheveled, whereupon he declared to Charlie Brown, 'You know what I am? I'm a dust magnet!' On another occasion, Pig-Pen decided it was important to have clean hands, but after failing to wash them, realized that he had 'reached a point of no return.' In The Peanuts Movie (2015), Patty seems to have a crush on Pig-Pen and he seems to return these feelings. On another occasion (September 6, 1954), he managed to keep one side of his body clean and presented this clean side to Patty, causing her to believe that he was completely clean. Once this was in order to impress Violet, of whom he was a bit fond. Nevertheless, on rare occasions he has briefly appeared clean, and hence unrecognizable. He is referred to in an early strip as the only person who can get dirty while walking in a snowstorm. He cannot seem to rid himself of the dust for more than the very briefest of periods - indeed, in spite of his best efforts, it appears that he cannot stay clean. He sometimes refers to the cloud that surrounds him with pride as 'the dust of ancient civilizations'. When he takes a deep breath (to sing, for example), the dust rises briefly around him. Pig-Pen is known for his perpetually filthy overalls and the cloud of dirt and dust that follows him wherever he goes. He is also mocked by other characters because of his dirtiness. In strips up through 1980, Schulz spelled the character's name 'Pig-Pen', with a hyphen since 1981, the name has been spelled 'Pigpen'. In a 2000 Gallup Poll, Pig-Pen was found to be the fifth most popular Peanuts character. While amiable, he is a young boy who is, except on rare occasions, extremely dirty and attracts a permanent cloud of dust. Pig-Pen is a fictional character in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M.

Happy New Year, Charlie Brown by Charles M. Schulz