Saturday, July 18, 2009

August 2, 1951: Dogs are not sporting equipment

Peanuts

Snoopy is cute again. The look in his face in the last panel is great, as is how he holds his tail straight out, a nice touch.

Snoopy's appearance in the third panel is subtly closer to his intermediate-era appearance. There are three phases Snoopy's appearance goes through. So far we've seen him in his early look, where he's always on all-fours, is sometimes drawn in three-quarters' perspective, and he is obviously a puppy. It corresponds to the first few years of the strip.

After that, moving into the late 50s to 60s, we have middle-era Snoopy, where his body is longer, he sometimes goes about of two legs (and gets his weird foot-bouncing dance), his thought balloons become integral to the character, and he has much deeper relationships with the other characters. This is also when he picks up his prodigious imagination.

The modern-era Snoopy is when his snout thickens, his nose sticks out even more like a clown nose, and he becomes a creature almost unlike a dog, and is how the character is mostly remembered today.

1 comment:

  1. This blog is compelling!

    I favor intermediate-era Snoopy. I thought he got too out there later. But the middle stuff is brilliant.

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