July 25-30, 1955: Fun is Good Enjoyment

July 25:

Lucy's smile in panel three is an atypical expression for her.

July 26:

Whoop? Although it's difficult to think of a better bit of onomatopoeia to use here. Maybe "whine," but that's not really a sound effect. Maybe "ouch," but Snoopy can't talk. Speaking of which, Snoopy's got another thought balloon here. I think he's finally in the phase where he mostly uses thought bubbles.

July 27:

We've not gotten huge amounts of hate out of Patty and Violet yet, although it's flared up from time to time. Charlie Brown does seem to be giving Violet cause for her outburst here. How about a little personal space, kid?

July 28:

Although Snoopy doesn't talk to the characters, they've never shown themselves (to my knowledge) to have any doubts that Snoopy understands them. Charie Brown's phrase here, "You just aren't much for doing things right, are you?", sounds idiomatic in a midwestern kind of way to me, like something that might have been floating around Schulz's hearing that he thought to call up. But that's just a guess, of course. The drawing of Snoopy running here is very nice, and the next strip shows that it's not the only way Schulz has to draw it. You can imagine pretty well what Snoopy would look like in motion from these.

July 29:

This is a very "Peanuts" kind of punchline, taking something the kids have figured out (regardless of whether it's true or not) and extrapolating it to draw further conclusions. I don't think an awful lot of strips would think to do that.

July 30:

Oooooo! Not only do we not get to get the bug's "house," presumably a hole, we don't even get to see the bug. The hyphens between the Ts in "pret-t-t-y fancy" are a good textual representation of a spoken idiom. (I guess "idiom" is the word of the day.)

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.

June 20-25, 1955: But is it art?

 

June 20:

A weird art error in this one, the rain is drawn in front of the word balloons in the second and third panels.

Inthe June 15 strip we saw Lucy freak out when she demanded the rain stop, and it did. Reader John Evans reminds us that there is a sequence with Linus later in which he says "Rain Rain Go Away, Come Again Some Other Day," it does, and he's disturbed by it. That sequence, compared to these two strips' close proximity, seems to imply an underlying current in Schulz's mind.

June 21:

As long as we're talking about insights into the mind of the creator, I imagine that this question was starting to weigh in as well.

 

June 22:

A comic strip? Can it be art? Now the question, if not completely settled, is at least easier to judge (despite the tremendously influential Krazy Kat), but then comics were regarded as almost a disposable kind of art form, purchased outright from the creator by a syndicate or publisher who then hired him to produce his own work, from which he could be fired at a moment's notice. Newspaper cartoonists now have an easier time of retaining control over their work thanks in no small part to the efforts of people like Bill Watterson who refused to think of their work in belittling terms. It is important to remember, however, that Charles Schulz did not have complete control over his work -- he never did regain the rights to his life's work, and throughout its entire run it was saddled with the name Peanuts, of which he was vocal in his dislike.

June 23:

Say what you want about the lacy border, it looks to me like a girl kite flyer would need to be quite skilled to keep that thing aloft.

 

 

June 24:

A back-and-forth conversation between Charlie Brown and Lucy is becoming one of the staples of the strip. Their different outlooks provide endless opportunities for humor. It is theorized by the author of Schulz and Peanuts that Lucy is based off of Charles Schulz's first wife Joyce, which might explain their their conversations are so frequent around now, as well as Lucy's growing antagonism over the years.

June 25:

Charlie Brown only added the rec room to be able to charge higher rent.

Sunday, March 13, 1955: Charlie Brown's going to regret that "kind of dumb" remark

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Charlie Brown and Schroeder must have like no depth perception.  And that's gotta be a pretty strong wind to support a kite that small.

How does Lucy's intelligence matter to how high she can fly a kite?
 

February 14-19, 1955: Snoopy hates that balloon

February 14

Sight gag.  Did kids of Charlie Brown's age play hockey?  I think he's around seven at this time.

The splash lines around Charlie Brown's head are very effective.  If I have occasion to draw a splash, I find I do it the same way.  I probably picked that up from Peanuts.

February 15

Modern times.  If this strip were updated for the present day Charlie Brown's farm would probably be industrial agribusiness.

February 16

Brutal honesty.  More cartooning banter between Charlie Brown and Schroeder.  What is it about Schroeder that makes him a good test audience for C.B.'s work?  It might have to do with him being the mot artistically-developed of Schulz's personalities.

February 17

Turnabout.  That is a very angry Snoopy there in panel three.  On panel two though, in my experience deflating balloons don't go swish.  Instead they make a noise that is charitably referred to as a raspberry.  I wonder if this has to do with a change in balloon construction in the fifty-five years since this strip.

February 18

Unexpected honestly mixed with ignorance.  This is the first time any of Schulz's characters has really engaged in writing. While the  intellectual development of the characters is fluid depending on the needs of the strip, there does seem to be a sort of consistency to it.  To my knowledge Schulz doesn't use Lucy for jokes about school reports, like he does for Peppermint Patty or Sally, which sort of implies the character is a good writer just from the absence of examples of her being bad at it.

And can't you just imagine Lucy writing a newspaper column?  Probably "Diary of a Fussbudget" can be found on the Opinion page.

February 19

Another sight gag.  More lines like the surprise lines in the first strip.  Sometimes Snoopy is disdainful of being expected to perform dog-like activities, but sometimes he goes along with it.

Sunday, January 23, 1955: Charlie Brown's deep attachment to an ephemeral thing

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This is one of those strip concepts Schulz returns to later. I remember there being a similar strip involving Snoopy, who befriends a snowman, and is heartbroken when it melts away. Cut to Charlie Brown and Linus, who have been watching. Linus: "Poor Snoopy, he's too sensitive." CB: "I notice he's not too sensitive to eat the carrot." I'm paraphrasing, but it happened more or less like that. Even the carrot eating is here, which makes me wonder if that later strip weren't a conscious callback on the part of Schulz.

Anyway, this strip provides a good example of Charlie Brown's developing depression. He really takes this too seriously. I mean, going so far as to beg the sun to stop shining? Wow. A futile statement of man protesting against the universe! I smell a thesis coming on....

As the first panel indicates, snowman building is an artistic statement with Charlie Brown. He's a sculptor who works in the medium of snow, and he's at least got Schroeder's admiration for it.

I wonder if this isn't some kind of statement, conscious or not, by Charles Schulz about the ephemeralness of his own medium? Peanuts will probably be around much longer than other concluded strips, mind you. There are a lot of forgotten newspaper comics out there.

January 17-22, 1955: It Snow Trouble

Another snow pun for a title! Get used to them, it's far from the last....

January 17

We had another strip like this not long ago, where Charlie Brown didn't seem to come out of it too badly, but poor Snoopy was overwhelmed. Like in that strip, the funniest thing to me is how effortlessly Charlotte Braun belts out her words. There's a good set of lungs on the girl.

January 18

Oh no. Oh, no no no no no. What character in comicdom can get something as willfully wrong as can Lucy Van Pelt? Other than Mallard Fillmore, of course. Lucy actually knows she's wrong unconsciously, I think, which is why she sets herself against Charlie Brown's disagreement before she even hears his opinion. She's so happy with her discovery.

January 19

Notice... both here and in the previous strip, Schulz draws forward-facing characters with neutral expressions without a mouth, possibly for parity with the way he draws his characters when they face the side. He experimented with this a time or two before. He abandons it eventually.

January 20

I've had conversations with people that have gone exactly like this, right down to my depressed skulking away at the end.

January 21

Another mouthless face. And Lucy called Charlie Brown's face funny-looking.

Charlie Brown has some standard ways of expressing displeasure, which are already beginning to get set in. 1. "Good grief." 2. "I can't stand it." 3. "My stomach hurts."

January 22

Schroeder is practicing his scowl for the role.

January 10-15, 1955: Lucy is hard on toys

January 10

A disturbing insight into Lucy's attitude towards property.

January 11

For some reason this strip reminds me of that disco version of Beethoven's 5th Symphony.

January 12

That's kind of hyperbolic. Lucy didn't even know what a metronome was before Monday!

January 13

Girls in Peanuts tend to be rather more rough-and-tumble than in other strips. Lucy, of course, eventually gets to where she won't think twice about returning a slug in the jaw for an insult. "Peppermint" Patty won't even be arriving on the scene for many years yet.

January 14

When someone tells you to close your eyes, yeah, it's usually a good idea not to if you can get away with it. Anyway, why doesn't Violet just rummage through her candy bag facing the other way?

January 15

An enthusiastic speech by Schroeder, boldly staking his claim as the neighborhood artist.

Sunday, November 14, 1954: C'mon, forget about Beethoven for awhile

November 8-13, 1954 are missing from gocomics' archive.

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

We've seen Lucy and Schroeder fight over the piano before, but this one I think puts Lucy's case forth as sympathetically as we ever see. Panel seven in particular is surprisingly effective, almost pleading. The dramatic thrust of the strip seems to imply that it was the offer of hot chocolate in the next panel that caused Schroeder's rejection. How mundane! But what else could she offer -- er, that's suitable for a kid's strip, of course.

Schulz and Peanuts seems to suggest that Schulz got ideas and energy for the Lucy vs. Schroeder strips from his personal life with his first wife. Schulz's family disputes that he got as many ideas for strips from his relations with people that the book suggests. My own theory, which I've stated before, is that a cartoonist can't help but draw from his surroundings, that eventually the contents of your brain end up on the page whether you intend it or not, and that would seem to agree with the book's angle on Schulz's work.

This is also, I think, the first panel in which Lucy notes her own face as being pretty, a habit of hers that spreads to her dealings with other characters, especially Charlie Brown.

Sunday, October 10, 1954: Snoopy vs. The Yard: Another Leaf

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Snoopy shows a lot of the passion of his younger years here. Later he's a much more sedate dog, maybe because his late-era character design is incapable of much motion.

Panel two is rather cute, I think anyway. Panel four is a transition between compact, sitting-down Snoopy and stretchy, loose running-around Snoopy.

Sunday, September 19, 1954: It's no fun if you just give it to him

The week of September 13-18 is missing from gocomics.com. It's just completely gone; the strip browse sequence goes directly from the Sunday strip of September 12 to the following Sunday.

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This is a good strip to contemplate how Snoopy's design has changed so far.

He began as a very puppyish dog, much smaller than any of the other characters. While very cute, he looked almost like a piece of clip-art. Many strips these days use images of their characters in various stock poses, but not Peanuts. Schulz gradually began loosening up the design of the characters. Snoopy is the character that would develop into the loosest, and although he's not there yet, he's a lot more flexible here than he was in those first comics.

Snoopy becomes quite thin (especially when standing upright) before expanding into the "balloon animal" shape of later strips. The drawings of him in the first panels are particularly engaging. The wide smile is a distinctive mark of classic Snoopy. I notice in panels six and eight, where you can't see his mouth at all, his snout looks a little thicker than in the other strips.

Sunday, September 5, 1954: Lucy, Patty and Violet

The beginning of this strip demonstrates how Patty and Violet are slowly becoming a double-act, reinforcing each other's opinions and building up the will to confront Lucy. Lucy is also true to form here, fussing and throwing a tantrum about "not playing her way." (That generic reason for the confrontation and tantrum seems kind of weak, but it serves to keep the focus on the characters and their reactions, and not whatever game it is they're playing.)

This strip also demonstrates that Lucy's behavior is, to some extent, an act she puts on to attempt to get her way. When it's evident that her ruckus is to no avail she comes around quickly.

The drawings of her tantrum are very energetic. Panels five through ten show particularly varied reactions. Schulz must have put some thought into how to illustrate characters pitching fits or otherwise expressing anger/dismay. Note, Charlie Brown hit his own head against a tree not long ago, and now Lucy is doing it too.

Sunday, August 1, 1954: Whoops!

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Sometimes the heavy stylization of Peanuts works in the service of a gag. In this strip, it isn't clear what exactly it is that Snoopy is doing until he tells us in the last panel. Although "whoops!" is kind of a weird thing to say in response to something cold pressed against your back.

Snoopy isn't as long in these panels as he was a few weeks back, he looks to be of a more reasonable size compared to when he's sitting down. But we do have a few panels where we see his face in three-quarters' perspective and get that weird broad face. Snoopy's snout really only exists in profile.

Sunday, July 18, 1954: The nature of nothing

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

From the Wikipedia article on Virgil Thomson:
"[...] Thomson was famous for his revival of the rare technique of composing "musical portraits" of living subjects, often spending hours in a room with them before rushing off to finish the piece on his own. Many subjects reported feeling that the pieces did capture something unique about their identities even thought nearly all the portraits were absent of any clearly representational content."

A sly strip. Schroeder's looks of concentration, followed by his throwing his hands up, are important for understanding that he's giving up. I think it works better this way, allowing us to see him throwing in the towel, than being told directly that he's got nothing, which would seem a bit harder on Charlie Brown's feelings.

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.

June 14-19, 1954: Let's play H-Bomb Test!

June 14

No cutting and pasting here. Charles Schulz draw out every "BANG" in this strip, or I don't see any at duplicates at least.
June 15

A simple Murphy's Law type of premise. It's another look at the famous doghouse too, which implies that Snoopy must have an owner, whoever it is.
June 16
gocomics.com's image for this strip is a duplicate of June 14th's. Can anyone with access to the Fantagraphics collection fill us in as to what's supposed to be here?
June 17

The drawing of Snoopy eating the ice cream scoop is rather charming.
June 18

History: Wikipedia notes "The first fusion bomb was tested by the United States in Operation Ivy on November 1, 1952, on Elugelab Island in the Enewetak (or Eniwetok) Atoll of the Marshall Islands, code-named 'Mike.'"
This is one of my favorite early strips, it really sticks out in my memory. Lucy is extremely, panel-fillingly loud for the first time, an ominous development from the young girl. The seriousness with which Charlie Brown pushes down the plunger and Patty holds her ears is great. And of course it's a reference to the biggest damn firecrackers the human race ever made, which were new developments at the time.
As a purely random aside, the comparison, however slight, between a child and a piece of nuclear weaponry unavoidably reminded me of this.
June 19

When you have two characters talking to each other in a comic strip, and their words are the point of the strip, it becomes necessary to have them do something with their bodies during that time. Unlike as with mere text, here a comic strip's graphic nature provides extraneous information, and could actually be distracting if not handled well, but if not considered could lead to the infamous "talking heads" effect. It happens enough, in most humor strips, that a cartoonist must make plans for it. (In dramatic strips, the quality of the drawing and the "camera angles" might be enough to sustain interest.) It is a fundamental problem for most cartoonists who hope to have careers longer than a couple of years. Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes would sometimes approach talky, philosophical strips by putting the two in a wagon and sending them over a cliff; this is one of the many reasons we love Calvin and Hobbes.
Throughout Peanuts' run, characters do various things when there's a talky strip, such as walking across a field, sitting beneath a tree of standing behind The Brick Wall. There are probably thousands of such strips, and this is one of them. It is probably not the case that Schulz obsessively planned these out, but in this one at least the art serves to accentuate the conversation: the balancing in the first panel illustrates the carefree nature of the conversation, Charlie Brown hiding behind the tree shows he's anxious about his upcoming revelation, and having the characters sit at a curb in the four panel lets Schulz draw CB in an appropriately slouched pose.
One thing about this strips that has always subtly bothered me is how rapidly the characters change poses. They go from playing on the curb, to walking across a field, to a small tree, then back to a curb, over the course of a three-sentence exchange in a single conversation. Peanuts characters are not generally shown as being hyperactive, but there is a certain restlessness here.

April 27, 1954: With real working truck bed!

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This is a frequently-used structure by Schulz at the moment. It goes:

1. A character does or says something silly.
2. Another character, or in the case of Snoopy vs. The Yard plain old physics, shows why the thing done is silly.

It's not much by itself, so these strips usually have something else going for them, either funny art (as here), empathy with one of the characters (such as the silly one who realizes by the end his mistake), or in some cases the silly character bullheadedly persisting in his error regardless. This happens with Lucy a lot, but Linus also becomes susceptible to it, every Halloween....

April 19, 1954: Lucy, team paperweight

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Lucy's mostly-permanent position in right field is some time off, but this is the first time she's shown as a player (excepting perhaps last week's rain-out).

The baseball gloves in Peanuts are laughably outsized compared to the kids.  This one's the size of Lucy's head!  It looks like her arm could just about fill one of those gigantic fingers.

Sunday, April 11, 1954: I'm getting worried about Charlie Brown

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

I think this is a very important strip.  It establishes that Charlie Brown doesn't just play baseball but is kind of obsessed with it.  Of course it could well have been a transitory aspect of the character at this point, valid just for one strip, but already Charlie Brown is really the only character of Peanuts' cast who works here.  Linus is too young, Schroeder isn't so serious about anything that isn't music, and Shermy is kind of a non-entity.  Snoopy is still too dog-like, and anyway can't talk.  While Peanuts' girls aren't very girly overall, it would take a tomboy type to be this obsesses over sports, and "Peppermint" Patty is still many years away.

At the end of it we kind of feel sorry for Charlie Brown, standing alone in the driving rain, even as we recognize his predicament is his own making and continuing.  Part of that comes from Schulz's art, which is top-notch here.  One of the most effective techniques in his cartoonist's bag of tricks is the way he depicts rain, which requires great attention to line thickness and patience in just rendering all those lines.

It's very easy to mess up, but the effect is wonderful.  The way the lines blend in with each other in the last panel, how they get darker above the horizon to provide the illusion of a blurred backdrop, the care he takes to make sure that the important parts of the panels aren't too broken up by the crosshatching, it all demonstrates the immense care Charles Schulz took in rendering the strip.

Notice where a character has a dark portion of his clothes or hair, that he changes how he shades it in.  He's also careful to make sure the rain doesn't make it difficult to read a character's identity of expression.  Character faces are mostly unobscured.  This strip must have taken Schulz some serious time to put together, and all for one day's output.  Whether you think Peanuts has yet attained the status of art, it's certainly got the chops when it comes to craft.

Here's a question for you: who is the kid in the next-to-last panel?  Shermy is the character is most fits, but he ran away in the previous panel.  He is carrying a baseball glove in panel six and is holding it overhead in panel seven, so I guess there is some continuity there.  But looking closely at panel six, it's not entirely convincing the way he holds his glove there.  It looks huge there in any case.

April 6, 1954: So that's what radio static looks like

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Some nice, although strangely un-Peanuts-like, abstract art here brought to field in the cause of drawing white noise.  Charlie Brown is still kind of silly/naive sometimes; Linus would be more the type to listen to static later.  Of course it has to be Schroeder who offers to fix C.B.'s radio, because he cares enough about music to help people experience it better.