Sunday, March 20, 1955: STOMP STOMP STOMP

1. As Lucy gets angrier, she shifts from speaking in normal letters, to serif'd letters, to thick letters.  That's some temper she's developing there.

2. Schroeder has picked up some additional disdain for Lucy since the occasions around his piano.

3. I think this one is slightly stronger without the two lead-in panels.

4. Scribble of ire!

Sunday, November 21, 1954: The Most Aggravating Person In The World

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This is a wonderful strip overall. Although the punchline (or punch panel) is kind of flat and could have been done in a daily strip, the buildup to it is marvelous. Charlie Brown and Lucy's argument is wonderful and energetic, especially panels six and seven, where the characters lean into the other as they express their anger. Although most of the strip is just talking, it's far from static talking heads, Charlie Brown really acts out his frustrations.

The first two panels make the strip, for that feeling of dread Charlie Brown suffers through knowing what's about to happen while powerless to stop it. (It also gives us another use of thought balloons, which are far from a standard part of Peanuts at this point.) Lucy, as is often the case, argues from a misguided position, but she still believes in it and defends it.

I'm not sure I've seen a strip yet with this much shouting and anger. That recent Lucy and Schroeder strip had Schroeder quite angry, but it was a single burst of emotion, not a sustained assault. This seems like a breakthrough strip to me, in terms of Schulz's depiction of conversation and anger, and just the energy he infuses into it.

Sunday, March 21, 1954: Eight stages of grief

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Beginning with panel eight:

1. Shock
2. Disbelief
3. Confirmation
4. Anger
5. Blankness
6. Taking off your shirt(?)
7. Wide-mouthed frowning
8. Sighing

They might not be the official stages, but they work for Charlie Brown.

This is possibly the most directly hostile act so far seen in Peanuts.  It would be worthy of Lucy.  There are no extenuating circumstances, and nothing sets Patty off, yet she accomplishes her self-appointed task with relish.  It's kind of out of character.  Even when she's part of the team act with Violet against CB, their methods are less overt.

Switch the gender roles here and the strip would turn out quite different.  Even this early, it doesn't seem to be in Charlie Brown's nature to do something this mean.  It's the kind of thing Calvin might do to Susie, but not without some form of judgmental comeuppance from the cartoonist.

February 25, 1953: The Peanut Butter Sandwich That Broke the Camel's Back

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

I love this one.

How is Peanuts unlike other comic strips?  Look here.  It's not that Charlie Brown ripped the sandwich apart.  It's Lucy's expression of dismay, and her horrified observation, "He tore it to pieces with his bare hands...."

February 20, 1954: Violet's short attention span

Read this strip at gocomics.com.


Violet throws Charlie Brown out rather often.  She forgets why she was mad at him fairly often too.

Sunday, January 24, 1954: Lucy flips out

Lucy goes on a glorious campaign of destruction here.  It's the closest she's yet gotten to her malevolent destiny.

I think maybe part of the reason Schulz drew this one is just so he could draw lots of tiny little things flying around the room.  Anyway, I didn't know Violet had a stamp collection.

The lead panels, as usual, aren't needed to get the joke, although they do explain why Schroeder is involved in the mob.  (Linus is too young for such things.)  Of all the offended chasers, everyone seems to be yelling at Lucy except for Charlie Brown, who is uncharacteristically grim-faced.

New Year's Day, 1954: Linus is still scornful

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This strip is a reprise of the joke from Sunday, 2/15/53.  In that earlier strip, Lucy doesn't seem quite so vicious, because in that one Linus is trying to play with her stuff, while here, Lucy is outright taking Linus's cookie unprovoked.

This might mark the first moment where Lucy seems to be truly evil, in a way it's impossible to explain with another motive.

I love Linus's face in the second panel.

October 29, 1953: Lucy is indignant

If you wonder where the point was that Lucy went from being an innocent little girl to Cthulhu in a dress, well, there is no exact point. It's not even a sliding scale between the two; they exist in quantum superposition, sometimes she's one and sometimes she's the other. This one does seem to be partway between the two though. At least she's not saying "Poor Lucy" anymore!

(I've been known to deliver pizza sometimes, and want to say that Lucy's attitude and power to change things exactly mirrors my own when stiffed for a tip.)

August 17, 1953: Potato chips, oh boy!

Walking over the potato chips that she's dumped onto the floor is a nice touch.

June 13 and Sunday, June 14, 1953: The evil side of Charlie Brown

Charlie Brown isn't a very nice kid in these two comics.

June 13, 1953

Patty and Violet's reaction at the end here (including off-screen violence) is a bit exaggerated. I mean, they didn't have to follow CB's suggestions.

Sunday, June 14, 1953

This one is actually a little disturbing, considering that Schulz actually drew the flashbacks of Charlie Brown's antisocial behavior. Violet's reaction here seems quite justified. We can accept Charlie Brown's rueful chagrimace at the end as due to regret over personal failings rather than a "that's the way it goes" kind of resignation.

Is that how Violet fell off her tricycle? Because CB pushed her?

Who really throws lumps of sod at people? Did Schulz choose a clump of earth because it's less injurious than, say, a rock?

Wait a second, did he say plaid ice cream?

June 9, 1953: Violet throws Charlie Brown out again

This strip is another episode of the "Violet evicts Charlie Brown" saga that has been going for some time. At some point, possibly when the art style became more detailed, this stops seeming cute and starts seeming cruel. It's not now because Violet has a change of heart, but eventually her reservations diminish.

Charlie Brown's playing with blocks seems odd here. Although he's represented as being very young, he and his friends more typically play cowboys or spaceships. Blocks are usually used for the (even) younger characters, Lucy and Linus.

Scribble of ire!

May 25, 1953: You 'Ol Charlie Brown, You

This is the unreasoning hatred we're used to seeing from Violet, as well as the self-esteem issues of CB. It's been interesting to watch Charlie Brown's self-satisfaction fade for the past couple of years of the strip. The other characters still a lot of wearing down to perform on him though; Lucy hasn't even come into her full malicious strength yet.

Sunday, May 10, 1953: Lucy and the Balloon

Here we get a glimpse at the struggle that roils just beneath Lucy's exterior. Notice how she alternates between pleading and threatening? Speaking in terms of the development of her personality, the threatening would eventually win out. Later Lucy would probably pop the balloon just from the dire intensity of her incredible wrath.

The lead panels, not printed by some papers and thus optional, are interesting here. What do put put in those panels so that it's still understandable from their absence, but still in some way contributes to the story? Schulz had yet to hit upon his trick of putting an abstract drawing in the first panel. Here, they're used to underline the point that Lucy has anthropomorphized the balloon.

This is also the first strip I've noticed in which Peanut's catch-all expletive "Rats" is used.

April 4, 1953: Of interest to trivia quizzers

Q: In the comic strip Peanuts, what is Violet's last name?



[In case the img source for this comic goes dark later: it is Gray.]

Characters with last names that we know:
Charlie (and Sally) Brown (of course)
Linus and Lucy (and Rerun) Van Pelt
and now: Violet Gray

There are a few other characters with known last names. "Peppermint" Patty has one, Reichardt.

January 24, 1952: MEOW

The first hint in the strip of Snoopy's dislike/fear of cats, which would find fullest expression in his battles with World War II, the unseen Cat Next Door with the incredibly destructive claws, a creature of wrath so potent as to nearly rival fell Lucy herself.

Sunday, December 14, 1952: Sandwich histrionics

Lucy remarks about Charlie Brown's annoyance with her asking him to do something. This is another case of a character's personality becoming defined from another character's verbal recognition of it.

That happens because comics use exaggerated behavior as a way to communicating effectively to the reader. To show anger, you show a character actually kicking the thing he's angry at, even though a real person would not usually do such a thing. It illustrates anger effectively however, and I think readers subconsciously recognize this and adjust their expectations. But it also means that, to actually establish a character's personality, you have to describe it explicitly somewhere, and in a strip that doesn't (generally) use narration like Peanuts you have to do that by putting that description in the mouth of another character.

Schulz would become quite masterful about adjusting reader expectations. His characters are able to act out theatrically when necessary, but can also play it very far down at times.

I also like the serif lettering on "RATS!" in panel 7.

Sunday, November 9, 1952: Not mad anymore

This joke has been made before, and I don't think it's the last time it will be made. Patty and Violet's antipathy towards Charlie Brown are built off of moments like this one, but again, it doesn't last for the length of the strip.

October 28, 1952: Fickle Lucy

There are some character combinations that seemed to inspire funny situations to Schulz, while some others didn't get used much. Lucy is funny with many other characters (Charlie Brown and Linus now, Snoopy and Schroeder later on). Patty is most often shown interacting with Charlie Brown or Violet. Maybe that's one of the things that led to poor Shermy's obsolescence, he doesn't have many other characters who react to him.

October 13, 1952: Snoopy the Musician

This is one of the first strips in which a character actually shouts at another one, in larger letters. We've yet to see our first AUGH, though.

Sunday, September 21, 1952: Man's Superiority Over Beast

I love this strip:

Lucy saying "Oh, my, yes!" in the second panel. No one says "Oh my!" anymore. It makes me want to revive it.

Snoopy's laughing poses in the last three panels show considerable visual ingenuity. The second panel there could be a counterpart for WEIRDSNOOPY. Snoopy has gone back to being small again in this strip, even though panel seven would probably read a little better if he were longer.

The funniest thing about this strip, I think, isn't Snoopy's laughing, or Charlie Brown's disgruntlement, but Lucy's silent watching of the hilarified dog. "This certainly is an odd thing that is happening to that animal. I should quietly observe the situation."