Lucy Van Pelt

Lucille "Lucy" van Pelt is a fictional character in the syndicated comic strip Peanuts, written and drawn by Charles Schulz. She is the main bully and the older sister of Linus and Rerun. Lucy is characterized as a crabby, bossy and opinionated girl who bullies other characters in the strip, particularly Linus and Charlie Brown.

Personality
Lucy is characterized as very loud-mouthed, violent, aggressive and temperamental. She often mocks other characters such as Snoopy, his owner, Charlie Brown and even her younger brother Linus Van Pelt.

She is also characterized as vain, as she believes she is beautiful despite frequently being described as ugly, and thinks she is perfect (though she once admitted complaining is the only thing she can do )when she has definitely no skills at all, as she is the worst and weakest baseball player, gives lousy and mindless advice, and, fittingly, cannot kick a football herself.

Christopher Caldwell has said about the character: "Lucy is no "fussbudget." She's an American nightmare, a combination of zero brains, infinite appetites and infinite self-esteem, who is (for that reason) able to run roughshod over all her playmates. At her best, she is the most terrifying character in the history of comics [strips]."

Psychiatric booth
Lucy also has a psychiatric booth, parodying the lemonade stand operated by many young children in the United States. Here, she pretends to be a psychiatrist and tells her opinions on problems for five cents to the other characters in the strip, most frequently an anxious Charlie Brown; this "advice" is always completely useless and nonsensical.

A sign on the front of the booth declares that "The Doctor is" in or out, depending on which side of the "In/Out" placard is displayed. In A Charlie Brown Christmas, Lucy reverses the placard from displaying its "Out" side to reveal the words "Real In". Another time, on the title panel of a Sunday strip, it showed Lucy chewing gum, and the sign read "The Doctor is Preoccupied."

Baseball
On Charlie Brown's baseball team Lucy plays right field (or occasionally center field), and is characterized as a bad player, who, when temporarily kicked off the team, turns to heckling the games. Lucy has a knack for coming up with a nonsensical excuse for every fly ball she misses, such as "The moons of Saturn got in my eyes" or "I think there were toxic substances coming from my glove, and they made me dizzy." Other times, she finds an excuse to have one-sided conversations with Charlie Brown at the pitcher's mound, often over some trivial thing she noticed, which usually result in Charlie Brown blowing his top and yelling at her to "Get back in center field where you belong!" Once, Charlie Brown berated her for letting fly balls drop, telling her he would not brook any more excuses; Lucy caught the ball cleanly, and tossed it back to him on the mound silently, after which he admitted he was actually looking forward to her next excuse.

In a series of strips that later became part of the 2003 TV special Lucy Must Be Traded, Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown traded Lucy to Peppermint Patty's baseball team for Marcie (and a pizza), but once Patty discovered what a terrible player Lucy really was, she traded her back. Even on the diamond, Lucy flirts with Schroeder, who plays catcher on Charlie Brown's team.

History
The third new character in Peanuts after Violet and Schroeder, Lucy made her debut on March 2, 1952. She was originally a goggle-eyed toddler who continually annoys her parents and the older kids, but aged up over the next two years so that by 1954, she was the same age as Charlie Brown (the early strips with toddler-age Lucy were not reprinted until after Charles Schulz’s death). Schulz then altered Lucy's eyes to have the same appearance as that of the other characters, except for small extra lines around them which were also sported by her two siblings.

Lucy wore a blue dress with black-and-white saddle shoes until the 1970s when Schulz began showing the strip's female characters in pants and shirts in order to keep their outfits more contemporary. By the late 1980s, she had switched to this look permanently.

Lucy frequently pulls the football away from Charlie Brown right as he is about to kick it. The first occasion on which she did this was November 16, 1952 (Violet unintentionally did the same thing a year before because she was afraid Charlie Brown would accidentally kick her), but unlike subsequent stunts, Lucy first pulled the ball away because she did not want Charlie Brown to get it dirty (he took a second try in the same strip, only to trip over it at the end). The football strips became an annual tradition, and Schulz did one every year for the rest of the strip's run. One infamous example of this is the animated special It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown, where her actions (she pulled the ball away four times) cost the school football team a win in the Homecoming game, yet Charlie Brown is blamed even though he is clearly not at fault. Charlie Brown did in fact kick the football in the September 12, 1956 strip, but with Schroeder holding the ball.

Lucy is named after a former neighbor of Charles Schulz in Colorado Springs, Louann van Pelt and, according to David Michaelis of Time Magazine, modeled after Schulz's first wife, Joyce.