7 'Peanuts' Halloween Comics That Are Perfect From Start to Finish
Shawn Van Horn is a Senior Author for Collider. He's watched way too many slasher movies over the decades, which makes him an aficionado on all things Halloween and Friday the 13th. Don't ask him to choose between Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees because he can't do it. He grew up in the 90s, when Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, and TGIF were his life, and still watches them religiously to this day. Larry David is his spirit animal. His love for entertainment spreads to the written word as well. He has written two novels and is neck deep in the querying trenches. He is also a short story maker upper and poet with a dozen publishing credits to his name. He lives in small town Ohio, where he likes to watch professional wrestling and movies.
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There is no newspaper comic strip more famous than Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts. Running for a whopping 50 years, the strip followed the adventures of Charlie Brown and company as they moved through life and its seasons. Among them are the meanings found in Thanksgiving and Christmas, including some famous TV specials. Then there's how Peanuts approached Halloween.
From Charlie Brown's observations to the hijinks of his dog Snoopy, the spookiest time of the year provided a lot of material for the comic. While Peanuts in Autumn is most well known for Linus's belief in the Great Pumpkin, especially in It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, many of Peanuts' best Halloween moments happened in the pages of the daily newspaper.
7 "That's the Best Treat Lucy Will Get All Night"
As established by many classic Peanuts comics, Snoopy is the world's most self-assured beagle. He is Joe Cool after all. But Charlie Brown's little dog doesn't need his sunglasses to be confident. When it comes to his crush on Lucy, he shows how he feels. There are so many comics of Snoopy giving the girl an innocent smooch, only for her to be grossed out that she was kissed by a dog.
In this strip, Lucy visits Snoopy on Halloween night and asks for a trick or treat. Not having any candy in his doghouse, Snoopy gives her a kiss instead before going back to staring at the stars as Lucy stands there in disbelief. What a dog.
6 "A Pumpkin With Ticklish Ears"
Snoopy is capable of being around Lucy without letting his feelings get in the way. He's often seen hanging around the friend of his boy owner, and in this strip he watches dutifully as Lucy carves a pumpkin into a Jack-o'-lantern. More like a regular dog here than one with human characteristics, as soon as the pumpkin is done and Lucy walks away, he immediately jumps in headfirst.
If you've ever had a dog, you know they'll do hilarious things like this for whatever reason. Now, with Snoopy's ears sticking out (he must be looking out through the eyeholes), Linus walks up and gives the ears a scratch. There's no kid in Peanuts who will believe in anything as Linus does. If he is so certain that there's a Great Pumpkin, why can't a Jack-o'-lantern have dog ears too?
5 "Marcie Has Heard About Linus and the Great Pumpkins"
Peanuts becomes so much about Linus when it's Halloween season (as proven by the best Peanuts specials). The boy is the philosopher of the group, the one whose mind is constantly wondering about the mysteries of the universe, even if he's too young to understand any of it. When October hits, he becomes solely focused on being visited by the Great Pumpkin in the local pumpkin patch.
Linus will tell anyone who will listen about the Great Pumpkin, including Marcie. She listens silently to his bizarre fantasies, takes it all in, and as only the mild-mannered Marcie can do, lets her friend know that his reputation precedes him.
4 "Snoopy Needs a Night Light Too After a Scary Movie"
Long before kids were being scared by more intense and gory modern horror movies, past generations needed only old-school monsters to be terrified. Then, it was about the lingering thoughts and an imagination out of control that brought the fear.
In this strip, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and Linus watch a Frankenstein movie together. As Charlie Brown leaves Linus's house, they're thankful to have night lights to help them through the dark night to come. The next two panels show the two friends sound asleep at peace because of their night lights. In the last panel, we see that Snoopy has one too. Where's he plugging that lamp in, though?
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Fandom Should You Join? Harry Potter · Lord of the Rings · Star Wars · Star Trek
Eight honest questions about how you actually are: what you put on when you need cheering up, how deep you go into the things you love, what you argue about, what you keep on your shelf. Answer them and we will tell you where you belong. Four of the biggest fandoms on earth are taking new members, and they could not be more different from one another.
⚡Harry Potter(Wizarding World)
💍Lord of the Rings(Middle-earth)
⚔️Star Wars(A Galaxy Far Away)
🖖Star Trek(The Final Frontier)
01
What do you put on when you need cheering up? Nobody is brave about this one.
02
How deep do you go into something you love? There is no shallow end here, only different deep ends.
03
What do you and your friends actually argue about? Every fandom has one argument it has been having for years.
04
How do you feel about a room full of strangers? Every one of these comes with a very big room.
05
Where would you rather spend a week? Pick on instinct rather than on budget.
06
What do you believe about people, mostly? All four of these stories have an answer, and they disagree.
07
What is actually on your shelf? Look over at it before you answer.
08
What do you actually want from a story? Eight questions in, this is the one that picks your fandom.
Membership Confirmed Your Fandom Is…
Four of the largest communities on the planet, and four completely different reasons to belong to one. Here is yours, what it would give you, and the argument you would be having within a week.
Harry Potter
You belong to the fandom that is really about comfort. Hogwarts works on people because it is a place rather than a plot, and the pull is not the wizard war so much as the corridors, the food, the weather and the sense that somebody is expecting you.
- You are drawn to belonging, which is why this fandom sorted itself into houses within about five minutes and has never stopped.
- This is the most social of the four, and the one most likely to know which type every single person in your life would be.
- The books are built to be reread rather than analysed, and rereading is exactly what you do with things you love.
- The new HBO series is bringing the whole thing back one book at a time, which means the arguments are about to start all over again.
Lord of the Rings
You belong to the deepest fandom on this list, the one where somebody has always read further than you and is quietly delighted to say so. Middle-earth rewards patience more than any other world in popular culture.
- You like the sense that the story you are reading is only the visible part of something enormous, which is precisely how Tolkien built it.
- This fandom takes adaptation seriously to a degree that other fandoms find slightly alarming, and it has good reasons for that.
- Your favourite thing about the books is probably the bit that is not action at all, which is the walking, the songs and the long goodbyes.
- Nobody here thinks heroism belongs to the powerful, and the whole story exists to make that argument.
Star Wars
You belong to the loudest and largest tent of the four, the one where three generations are all watching the same thing and none of them agree about any of it. That disagreement is not a flaw in this fandom, it is the main activity.
- You want something you can share with absolutely everybody, from a six year old to a grandparent, and this is the only one on the list that really does that.
- Nobody argues like Star Wars fans argue, and the argument has been running since roughly 1980 with no sign of resolution.
- The pull here is sensory before it is narrative, since it is the sound design, the score and the look of a used and dented galaxy.
- You would be first in the queue, in costume, with strong opinions and a genuinely good time.
Star Trek
You belong to the thinking fandom, the one that turns up for the argument rather than the explosion. Trek has always been a series of ethical problems in space, and the people who love it love being asked what they would have done.
- You are an optimist in a way that is currently unfashionable, and this is the only major franchise still willing to say the future might be better.
- The best episodes are the ones where nobody fires anything, which is a sentence that makes perfect sense to this fandom and to nobody else.
- Starfleet Academy brought the franchise back to a classroom in 2026, which is appropriate, because Trek has always been a bit of a seminar.
- You would want the conversation afterwards more than the episode itself, and here you will always find somebody willing to have it.
3 "Snoopy Doesn't Want To Be Recognized With Linus"
One adorable constant with Linus's never-ending talk about the Great Pumpkin is that his friends still spend time with him anyway. While they might not believe, they also don't abandon the kid. It's just something to be put up with. Snoopy has no problem hanging out with the unusual Linus, or even accompanying him to a pumpkin patch to wait for the Great Pumpkin to appear. This doesn't mean he's not embarrassed, though.
Snoopy wears his sunglasses at night, not wanting to be recognized for being seen with this boy. Or is he maybe a little embarrassed that he's a bit of a believer himself?
2 "Linus Is More Trouble Than He's Worth"
Lucy and Linus have a complicated brother and sister relationship. For the brother, his head is often in the clouds, consumed with his own imagination. Lucy is more grounded, and with her short temper, she's likely to let people know when she's annoyed. Still, she loves her sibling, so when it comes time to go trick-or-treating, she'll get candy for the boy who'd rather sit in a pumpkin patch.
Lucy starts out easily tolerating the need to tell every adult whose doorstep she appears on why she needs extra candy. Repeating herself quickly wears Lucy down. She promptly goes to the pumpkin patch and dumps out the candy on Linus. She can only take so much.
1 "Where Will the Great Pumpkin Appear?"
The best Peanuts Halloween comic has to be something to do with Linus and the Great Pumpkin. The only problem is that there are so many to choose from. We'll go with this longer one, which shows just how advanced Linus's imagination is and how sure he is about what he believes in.
As he and Charlie Brown walk to the pumpkin patch, Linus wonders where the Great Pumpkin will appear. It's not just a simple curiosity. His thorough imagination has concocted an entire story about the entity appearing before random names. Where does he come up with this stuff? Charlie Brown, rather than laughing at his best friend, is overcome with his usual anxiety. He wouldn't want to be the Great Pumpkin. There's too much responsibility. Good grief.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.