Read this strip at gocomics.com.
Independence Day, 1954. Nothing patriotic or so here, but we do have the return of the Realistic Bird.
This is uncharacteristically violent of Snoopy. If he had caught that bird what would he have done with it? The thing's smaller than his mouth.
It is making a bit of an assumption, but it is possible that this is THE bird, Woodstock's mother. Woodstock came into the strip as one of a number of birds who were born there in a nest on Snoopy's stomach in a well-remembered sequence. She disappeared from the strip and was never seen again, although Schulz made a big thing about Woodstock's pining for her.
The interesting thing here is the fact that the bird actively reacts with ? and ! . (Apropos of this, there was an earlier strip in which the bird bothering Snoopy yawned in his face.) These bits add a cute touch of fantasy to an otherwise "quasi-realistic" scenario in which the doghouse actually IS a real-life, 3-D doghouse.
ReplyDeleteMy recollection is that, a year or so before Woodstock was introduced, in the late '60s, Schultz did a series featuring Snoopy palling around with some adult birds, much as Snoopy would do with Woodstock and his little buddies later on. I got the sense indirectly that one of these birds was Woodstock's mother.
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