1. Did Schulz chafe at the apparently simplistic art style of Peanuts? Did he throw in the realistic closeup of the telephone in the first panel to show he could draw in a more detailed style?
2. Lucy's expression in the last panel is very interesting. Comic strips so often come down to the same basic faces over and over again. People don't tend to think about it, but it's harder to come up with non-standard face expressions than you'd think. Here I think Lucy's expression might be a little overdone, but you can still get the point of the joke from her words combined with the expression, so it's okay.
This strip has a particularly dated feel to it -- unusual for Peanuts -- both in the vintage rotary telephone and the term "head of the household," which usually implied the "man of the house." The latter probably would have made the strip even funnier to readers in 1952.
ReplyDelete