Li'l Folks, the first comic by Charles M. Schulz, was a weekly panel that appeared mainly in Schulz's hometown paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, from 1947 to 1949. (Apparently, the fist two panels ran in the Minneapolis Tribune).
The strip already contained characters and themes that later reappeared in Peanuts: a well-dressed young man with a fondness for Beethoven, a dog with a striking resemblance to Snoopy, and a boy named Charlie Brown.