Who’s responsible for the most epic story ever told? Homer maybe? Mr James Joyce perhaps? Or is your money on Mr JRR Tolkien? According to Professor Robert Thompson, that accolade goes to Mr Charles M Schulz’s Peanuts comic. Clocking in at 17,897 published strips (not to mention the TV, film and Broadway spin-offs), the scholar called it “arguably the longest story ever told by a single human being”. Its subject matter belied its juvenile façade. With wry wit and a singular wisdom, Mr Schulz tackled topics such as politics, gender inequality and race as deftly as he touched upon the more mundane: relationship woes, familial tensions and the everyday existentialism (“My anxieties have anxieties”) that worried the young inhabitants of Hennepin County and, by extension, all of us.

With so much material to work with, it’s hardly surprising that we still identify with the trials and tribulations of Peanuts’ rag-tag cast of characters. “How can I ever forget them?” Mr Schulz wrote in his final goodbye to Charlie Brown and his friends in 2000. The style world, it turns out, is just as sentimental about the cartoon. Vans, Gucci, Levi’s and many more have all featured the Peanuts gang in their designs in recent years.

Loath as we are to pick a favourite, there is one member of the crew who continues to capture our imaginations more than the others: Snoopy, in his many guises. Whether as a writer (“It was a dark and stormy night”), WWII flying ace (“Keep looking up, that’s the secret of life”) or as an astronaut, the black and white beagle nurtured dreams far beyond his doghouse. And in 1969, those dreams came true when a lunar module named after the pup landed on the Moon in a dress rehearsal for the Apollo 11 manned mission. Snoopy wasn’t the first dog in space – that accolade goes to Laika, the stray from the streets of Moscow, who orbited Earth in Sputnik 2 in 1957 – but the pooch soon became the mascot for the US space programme as well as the face of the Silver Snoopy, an award for astronauts who display outstanding achievements in flight safety or mission success.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11’s touchdown on the Moon, The SkateRoom has teamed up with the cartoonist’s estate to release a series of limited-edition skateboard decks that feature the astro-beagle, with 25 per cent of the proceeds benefiting Art for Social Impact. “As a member of the skate community myself, I’m thrilled that Astronaut Snoopy will be featured on these extraordinary skate decks,” says Mr Schulz’s daughter Ms Jill Schulz, owner and director of All Wheel Sports. “This partnership combines the best of all worlds – Snoopy plus sport plus art plus benefiting young people around the world – and my dad would have enthusiastically approved.” Like Lucy’s football, Peanuts collaborations are notoriously hard to get your hands (or should that be feet?) on, so we’d advise being quicker than Charlie Brown off the mark.