Note: Although this is still solidly Peanuts' classic period, there are sometimes strips of which there isn't much interesting to say. It has never been the aim of this blog to cover every Peanuts strip, just the most interesting ones. This doesn't matter for this post, but in the future I will start skipping over uninteresting strips again. This is so that A. I don't spend the rest of my life maintaining this blog, and B. because legally, we'd be on more unsteady ground if we ended up effectively mirroring gocomics' entire archive.
May 8, 1955, a Sunday strip, is missing from gocomics' archives.
I like the injection of a little horror into Peanuts' gag-a-day world. Would we be creeped out by mailman-shaped dog biscuits? I don't know what it is about serif lettering, such as used in Snoopy's "SHUDDER!," but Schulz uses it a lot in this stage of the strip.
This is a very interesting strip. Who decided who plays what? We're left to assume it's Patty. Keep in mind, this is still solidly the 50s we're in, so we're probably left to assume that queer readings of this strip are unintended.
In any event, it probably doesn't matter much to their game who is who. I'm surprised one of 'em isn't Davy Crockett or some such.
More marbles. Decades from now, when the game of marbles has long vanished from the strip, I like to think of its legacy living on in the name of one of Snoopy's brothers, Marbles.
Cats will regularly do this at any excuse, and sometimes even without one.
We aren't privy to what Charlie Brown and Violet are arguing about. Actually, we don't know whatever it is is in the newspaper at all -- C.B. is holding a book.
Once you wind Schroeder up, it takes a while for him to run down. It must be nice to be able to lose one's self in a memory like that.
Even Snoopy's vaunted candy-detection abilities have their limits. Serif Z! Also, a serif'd "sigh," in lowercase.
In the May 10 strip, I really don't like Charlie's "embarrassed" face in the third panel. Punch line isn't so great either. It would have worked so much better if the kids were either oblivious to any possible question about their playing reversed genders, or if Charlie had some perfectly reasonable explanation for it. Like: "To be fair, they're her toy guns, so she got to choose."
ReplyDelete1.That's not funny in 1955
Delete2.1955 not Charlie Brown to wordy.
3.Kid didn't know about LGBTs exsisting in 1955.
4.Charles Schulz didnt consider your ideas
Wow, way to take a throwaway comment seriously, heh heh.
DeleteI'm a child of the 50's and the May10th strip could have easily been my sister or myself (as Patty) and CB would have been our younger brother, Wayne. We were always dressing him up as a girl and he just did what we told him to do, hense the resigned "That's the way it goes...". Once our father found out he would get angry with us and only after that did Wayne become embarrassed if someone found out. Of course he outgrew us dressing him up I think around the time he started school.
ReplyDeleteThis is a pretty neat blog. Glad I stumbled upon it! Have a good weekend.
ps - Ding Dong school was very popular when I was a child in Pennsylvania. Miss Francis introduced me to my favorite (of all time) stuffed animal and bedtime buddy, Algy, the allergen free teddy bear. I slept with him for my whole childhood.