Sunday, June 27, 1954: Snoopy should lay off the sugar

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This strip sets a couple of precedents all by itself.

First, for a while now, there have been kind of two designs for Snoopy. One is when he's sitting down, where he is a cute, compact little dog. Then other is when he's doing anything else, in which case he'll stretch out into an animal more than twice the size of the other one.

This strip doesn't have any drawings of Snoopy sitting dog-style, which become less frequent as Peanuts continues. The other one, the one depicted here, eventually becomes predominant. It is difficult to think of a beagle so large as a puppy, which is probably why this part of Snoopy's character is allowed to be forgotten. This is a much looser style for the character, which in turn allows Snoopy to become much more expressive and energetic, which fuels the growth in his personality.

Second, this is the first strip in which Snoopy's energetic personality annoys Charlie Brown. Once it's conclusively stated that Snoopy is his, he'll say things about wishing he had a normal dog, but until then it's more like being annoyed at a weird friend (a "Kramer") than a family member. Notable is that Charlie Brown refers to Snoopy as a "person."

The drawings of Snoopy here are very attractive generally. I especially like the ones in the first two panels. The first one is iconic, the second shows him running dog-style, which we don't often see.

March 8-10, 1954: Three again

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Three more strips that were presented glued together.

March 8, 1954: Linus and his blocks again. As we saw yesterday, the kid gets a lot of use out of them. For him, a pile of blocks is a protean meta-object, a thing that can become other things.

March 9, 1954: How does Lucy say the words "Pat him on the head"? Is it a suggestion? A request? Is she just narrating her own action?

Charlie Brown's a bit more familiar with Snoopy than the others, calling him "ol' pal." It's still some time before we have conclusive evidence Snoopy is his dog, though.

Snoopy's face on that second panel is a winner.  In the last two panels he thinks again using word balloons.  In the third he does so near humans, but none of them throughout the strip seem to recognize his discomfort so I think it's safe to say they can't understand him.

March 10, 1954: Give Linus a stack of blocks and a place on which to stand, and he will build the world.

December 19, 1953: Really really really really....

This is just about Patty at her most charming.  Before she became half of the soul-destroying tag-team of Patty & Violet.  Peanuts & Schulz: A Biography implies that most of the strip's characters were based, at least originally, on real people.  I don't think it's necessarily useful or accurate to make this claim beyond the level of inspiration, but still.  I wouldn't like to think that happened between Charles Schulz and whoever Patty and Violet were based on.

(It's also possible, now that I think about it, that I'm conflating Patty and Violet's later roles.  Well, getting these things straightened out is part of the reason I'm going through the whole course of the strip.)

In the last panel there is an odd space in Patty's word balloon, like a word got whitened-out between Schulz and print.  (Also, for some reason I feel like there should be an exclamation point after her statement there, but that's not really a big deal.)

December 3, 1953: Some light cast on Violet's disdain for Charlie Brown

I suppose this shows us a reason Violet throws Charlie Brown out of her house sometimes; he won't keep quiet during a show.  Of course, it seems that Violet won't herself either.

I'm sure some form of time compression is at work here, but even so, it is difficult for me to see how she could find enough things to tell Charlie Brown not to do that it'd fill up a whole half-hour.

I think Violet's pigtail-look has pretty much vanished entirely by this point.

EDIT: Corrected typo in title

November 25, 1953: Wrath of Dog

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Snoopy only has a limited number of ways of expressing annoyance at this point.  His ears in the last panel are adorable though, in a Mickey Mouse kind of way.

Was it kids' habit back then to eat whole bags of candy at once?  I'm amazed the Peanuts kids didn't all become diabetics.

May 27, 1953: Falling off the Tricycle

This is a funny strip I think.

Charlie Brown is the most versatile, by far, member of the cast. He can by turns be a smart-aleck, a victim, a bit of a jerk, a bit stupid, sly, witty, determined or hopeful.

Patty is becoming less of a foil for Charlie Brown, and Violet is turning against him generally. Those two characters mostly exist to bounce off of CB; Schulz seems less able to think of things for them to do on their own. Shermy has even less of his own existence.

Schroeder probably has the deepest private life of all the characters. Lucy and Linus sometimes each get strips to themselves, although, strangely, not too many with just the two of them. Snoopy gets his own strip sometimes too; he hasn't made a habit of having his own thoughts yet, though, so most of the time his strips have to be pantomime which is harder to write.

How do you fall off a tricycle?

March 30, 1953: Lucy could take the circus or leave it

I didn't get this one as a kid, reading Peanuts compilations from the library of our elementary school. I didn't get the meaning of the phrase "holding it over my head". Just another demonstration that Peanuts isn't really made for children.

Circuses really aren't all that hot when you think about it. Too much forced joviality, too much seediness just off the sidelines. (Of course, the seedy atmosphere is why some people like it.)

Too many clowns.

January 28, 1953: Ah, here we go

This is upping the ante a bit in terms of the violence level of the strip.

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.

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.