Sunday, July 3, 1955: Serif Grief

Snoopy is back to using thought balloons here, though just one, and he's thinking in lower-case and serif letters.

The content of this strip is pretty light. This could just as easily been a daily strip. The art is worth a little examination though.

Snoopy is still getting longer and more cartoony. We get six drawings of his head in three-quarter perspective here, and like many comic characters when you view them at an angle the cartoonist has to cheat to keep the character recognizable and expressive. This is really one of the black arts of cartooning -- how to distort heavily-stylized characters so they still read as the character when viewed from angles other than straight ahead of the side. The "weirdsnoopy" image I use as my Google portrait, and the hand puppet-like drawings we saw in the very early strips, show what happened when Schulz was still working on getting Snoopy to look good at an angle.

I can only assume it took him a lot of work to find a good three-quarters look for Snoopy, because it doesn't look like an intuitive solution to me. Snoopy's nose is wider when viewed from an angle, his snout seems shorter, and his mouth, instead of wrapping around his snout as a real dog's would, is drawn on as if his face was a flat surface.

I think this is a place where the progression of the art indirectly influenced Snoopy's character development. Drawing him this way is necessary to keep Snoopy's expressions readable, which is especially important here since Snoopy still doesn't use thought balloons very much. These expressions would not work on an anatomically canine head, because a real dog's mouth wraps around his snout. So, to keep Snoopy more relatable and more of a full character, Schulz has to draw him a bit more like he was a human, distancing him from his doggy roots.

As a proportion of Peanuts' 49-year run, Snoopy takes his more recent "bloated" form much more than this look. But that's a bit of a shame I think; I like this look for Snoopy, and I like it when he behaves like more of an everyday dog, although I think the more recent versions of Snoopy have their charms too. They're just different, incompatible charms.

February 2, 1954: Grape is the lightest of the flavors

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

We've returned to the subject of Snoopy's amazing ears.  Lucy's reaction is interesting.  Increasingly we're getting a sense that the Van Pelt kids, for whatever reason, have their own ways of seeing the world that is different from the other kids.  Linus is able to stack blocks in strange and physics-defying ways, and Lucy seems to have secret knowledge about the gravity-defying properties of grape (or, more likely, artificial grape flavoring).

One could attribute this to their youth.  And indeed the other young member of the cast, Schroeder, also exhibits a unique psychological property -- he's a musical prodigy.  Youth, in Peanuts, seems like it may be a quality tied with genius.  This doesn't last forever however; to my memory, Sally doesn't really seem to ever exhibit these kinds of abilities.

Snoopy seems to be really pleased with himself concerning his trick now.

January 13-15, 1954: Snoopy's ears creep me out

January 13, 1954:

January 14, 1954:

January 15, 1954:

Snoopy's ears demonstrate once more how they can be held rigid in place in weird poses at will.  They're almost like additional limbs.  Of course they have their limits: they don't seem capable of supporting much weight, and they don't seem capable of supporting Violet's ire, that killjoy.

The third strip gives us a lot more Snoopy drawings than the standard daily strip.  I love the one at the top-left of the third panel, where you only see his feet peeking into the frame.  But there's a three-quarter "puppet head" view of Snoopy smiling in that one too, which we haven't seen for quite a while.

Charlie Brown is the one giving Snoopy his walk, which points the "owner" needle more firmly towards him again.  But we've still gotten no concrete indication of whose dog Snoopy is.  This may be the first time, however, that Snoopy's relentless enthusiasm has gotten on the kid's nerves, which is an oft-used gag over Peanuts' run.

March 28, 1953: Snoopy goes crazy

I think this strip illustrates pretty well why Snoopy is kind of jaded over Charlie Brown in later strips. He gets maudlin if you get too friendly with him.

We do get one of those rare, ultra-cute three-quarters drawings of Snoopy with his mouth open in the second panel.

A new tag introduced in this post: "allpurposeears". I wonder what that could mean.