In its early years, the comic strip Peanuts featured a character called Charlotte Braun who appeared just 10 times between November 1954 and February 1955 before being written out entirely. Creator Charles M. Schulz was still experimenting with the strip's cast at the time, and Charlotte's removal illustrates how the now-iconic Peanuts ensemble only took shape through trial and error rather than being conceived fully formed from the start.

Charlotte, whose name mirrored Charlie Brown's, was introduced as a loud, brash counterpoint to his timid, anxious persona, but her strips largely repeated the same joke about her volume without developing further depth. Schulz dropped her after a reader wrote to complain, and he responded by drawing Charlotte with an axe in her head, telling the reader her "death" would be on her conscience—a letter now held by the Library of Congress. Her boisterous, self-assured traits were soon absorbed more effectively by Lucy, who evolved into one of the strip's defining characters, making Charlotte's role redundant.