Sunday, August 16, 1953: Full Frontal Snoopy

More three-quarters' drawings of ol' Snoops. We also get more of his thoughts, again delivered as speech balloons. Here it is obvious that none of the kids can hear his thoughts. I think we're approaching the point soon where Schulz abandons the speech balloons for the dog's thoughts and switches over fully to thought bubbles.

August 6, 1953: The weirdness of Patty's dress

Lucy exhibits surprising self-awareness here.  She loses these introspective powers as she comes into her own as neighborhood terror.

It's worth noting, for a moment, the bizarre attributes of Patty's dress. All the girls typically wear skirts in this phase of Peanuts' development. Some time earlier, when a girl bent over Schulz didn't bother to wrap the skirt around the legs. In this strip, however, he cheats Patty's legs and skirt longer as she stoops down to Lucy's height.

Even more interesting, however... look at the cross-hatch pattern on her dress. Does something look odd about it? It's like the cloth is a shaped hole in the paper, revealing the pattern behind it. Due to the small size of the panels on the page, I think the pattern reads better this way than if it were more realistically drawn.

I love it when comic strips do things like this. A contemporary example, to borrow from outside the artform for a moment, is in the Monkey Island series of computer games. Most of them feature a salesman character named Stan who wears a loud checked sportcoat. The pattern on the coat is applied across the folds of cloth in much the same way as the pattern on Patty's dress. This fan drawing on Stan (taken from here) illustrates the effect:

Recently the series made the jump to polygonal, 3D graphics. The pattern on his coat is considered to be such an integral part of the character that the developers went to special trouble to preserve the effect (source page):

July 27, 1953: Schroeder's On Fire

It is the summer months in the strip right now, making this feasible. I can't help but think that big hole overhead must affect the acoustics somehow.

One interesting thing about Peanuts' art style is how the characters' mouths disappear when closed. It's particularly evident on Schroeder's face here, since he doesn't speak in this strip.

When viewed from the front, the characters' mouths have generally been visible up until now, even if only as a short line. We'll see in the years to come that Schulz plays around with this a bit, that there will be times when characters seen from the front will strangely have no mouths.

June 22, 1953: Lucy and the bugs

When I read this strip, I have a strong sense that we are now firmly in the era of classic Peanuts. The characters are solidly of that style, as opposed to the early or modern styles. There's still some evolution left to occur within the style, everything becomes just a little simpler over time and the characters get slightly more realistically proportioned, but we're mostly there now I think.

Two things that really drive this sense home for me. First, the theme and writing of the strip are solidly of the classic versions of the characters. We haven't really seen a crabby Lucy yet, but Lucy was never an entirely angry little girl, she has good days even in her tyrant years. And second, Charlie Brown's eyes when facing the reader, here, seem to be closer together than we've seen recently, which was the major thing about him that still harkened back to the old style.

June 20, 1953: Peanuts' evolving sense of humor

A different strip would have Snoopy bite down on the bone, have a sight gag of his reaction, and then maybe him chasing Charlie Brown. In fact, Peanuts itself wouldn't really be above that kind of joke right now.

But where this strip shows growth is that Schulz purposely passed up the chance to draw a funny picture of Snoopy biting a rubber bone to make a strip where he's embarrassed because he expected treachery and didn't find it.

Schulz also avoided Talking Head Syndrome (where a strip's joke is entirely dialogue, using art pretty much solely to attribute speech) by giving us good drawings of mortified Snoopy, laughing Charlie Brown and thoughtful Patty.

June 11, 1953: You DOG You

Snoopy in the first panel looks so serious. Snoopy in the second and third panels is a little weird. Snoopy looks a bit different when seen in three-quarters perspective, I think. His face changes shape a little, becomes more rounded and flatter. Peanuts is so stylized that the characters have what amounts to different designs when seen from different angles.

June 5, 1953: Back when Charlie Brown had self-esteem

I have to admit to feeling this way myself sometimes. I don't usually take Charlie Brown's tack to resolving it however, because... well, for exactly this reason.

In panel two, compared to the door, notice that Charlie Brown seems very small. There is no way he could reach the door handle. To state it plainly, usually the characters are drawn so they wouldn't have to reach up so far to reach doorknobs.

Made a minor edit....

June 1, 1953: Lucy's infatuation grows

More storm clouds on the horizon for poor Schroeder.

Compare, for a moment, the length of Schroeder's arms (the only straight arms in this strip) with those of the girls. It points out a notable quirk of Peanuts' art style, one that I seem to remember reading somewhere Schulz lamenting. That is, the normal length of the kids' arms only works if they're held straight. If they're bent they're obviously too short, so Schulz has to cheat them longer a bit. If he drew them longer when held straight they'd reach down too far, almost to the knees.

May 11, 1953: Snoopy and the realistic bird

This is only the second bird ever seen in the strip; the first was seen early on, and actually looked more like Schulz's adult bird design (which to clarify _doesn't_ look similar to Woodstock) than this one.

This is only the third non-Snoopy animal seen in the strip. (The second was a generic dog who chased a car.) The worm would be the fourth, I guess.

April 27, 1953: Dig that crazy rain

The sketchiness and wavering line of later Peanuts has a charm that goes well with the personality of the strip, but let’s never forget that early Peanuts showed great technical ability.  We saw that back in the golf strips a couple of days ago, and we see it again here in this wonderful depiction of a rain storm.

The thing that makes it really appealing to me is the darker hatching used to represent obscured scenery in the background.  It’s wonderfully suggestive without being too precise.  It actually looks better to me this way than the backgrounds that would usually be back there.  It must have taken a long time to draw.

Here's some more rain from a few days later, just because I probably wouldn't link to the strip otherwise:
May 2, 1953:

March 2, 1953: Treat Schroeder's piano with respect!

This is the first of a long-running theme of the strip, other characters not giving Schroeder's piano the respect it deserves. By the way, isn't that an evocative drawing of the ringing on Snoopy's ears? Just wide looping scribbles. Looking at them, I can practically hear it.

January 30, 1953: Charlie Brown, Jr.

I've seen this strip about a half-dozen times now, and the thing about it that always strikes me is how much like modern Charlie Brown the doll is in the last panel. I always end up wondering if Charles Schulz edited the strip long after its original publication, because with that hat it's a dead ringer for Charlie Brown in his baseball days.

Sunday, January 25, 1953: Schroeder at his zenith

This is a good example of a kind of Schroeder strip that never gets seen later on. It does a fine job of illustrating his personality. Schulz here presents the true Schroeder, not some dilettante doodler at the keyboard but a determined artist. In the classic age of the strip Schroeder is by far most often seen as a supporting character, setting off Lucy's monomania or Snoopy's whimsy. Here he trains alone, building himself up to be capable of performing the music he hears in his mind, determined to live up to his vision.

While we might can sympathize with the spurned Lucy's pleas for affection, and his maniacal worship of Beethoven is often played for laughs, Schroeder is generally an admirable character.

January 15, 1953: Modern Snowman Art

This is another of those posts that Blogger shuffled off to the Drafts folder without telling me:



Another snowman strip. Peanuts is becoming a bit more topical. But more interesting than that is the way Charlie Brown is drawn in side-view, especially in the third panel, which is closer to the classic (as opposed to early) Peanuts look than ever before. When viewed from the front it's less obvious, since his eyes are still pretty far apart from that angle.

November 15, 1952: Head of the household

1. Did Schulz chafe at the apparently simplistic art style of Peanuts? Did he throw in the realistic closeup of the telephone in the first panel to show he could draw in a more detailed style?

2. Lucy's expression in the last panel is very interesting. Comic strips so often come down to the same basic faces over and over again. People don't tend to think about it, but it's harder to come up with non-standard face expressions than you'd think. Here I think Lucy's expression might be a little overdone, but you can still get the point of the joke from her words combined with the expression, so it's okay.

October 21, 1952: Snoopy takes offense

The third panel here is a good depiction of emotion. It's easy to represent happiness, just draw a smile. Anger is a scowl and slanted-downward eyebrows. Snoopy's emotion here is wounded pride, which is rather harder to represent. It helps that the dialogue clearly tips us off as to how Snoopy feels.

September 20, 1952: Snoopy the Daschund

Snoopy gets longer when he runs or lays down. Look at his appearance two days ago:



He has a much greater volume when he's in motion! It's easier to draw a larger animal when moving; it's hard to picture a little lump like Sitting Snoopy getting up and having a stroll. I expect that Schulz noticed this too, which may be why the dog gradually increases in size.

The strip itself is another on the theme of Snoopy steals something then eludes his human pursuers in some manner. Kind of light as far as gags go.

The "YIPE!" is a little interesting. Schulz has been using these outline letters for onomatopoeia for a while, and they, like the fancy question-marks, are a subtle trademark of the early strip. They're fairly striking.

June 5, 1952: Standing on one foot

Lucy's monomania is developing in this strip, but I link it mostly because you get a really good look at her clothes in this one.

Lucy wore two primary outfits that I know of in Peanuts' run. This shows her earlier outfit and the one she wore during most of the classic period, a slightly formal number with a bow in the back, and colored blue on Sundays. Here the skirt is fairly normal, later on it would become highly stylized and stick out almost at right angles to her body. In later years, probably as a nod to changing fashions, Schulz would adopt a kind of jumpsuit for her attire, which made her look vaguely more athletic.

She still has the round eyes here. I never get tired of pointing them out. They won't be here much longer. When Linus shows up, which is in a month or two I think, he has the same eye style as Lucy but from the start he has her parenthesis, or "Binkley," eyes.

May 14, 1952: Lucy in Profile

Slowly over the months, the character's shapes have been edging closer to the modern style.

All of the characters except Lucy have thick eye-dots, solid little ovals of black. Lucy instead has those wide circle-eyes, at least when we see her from the front. Here she's only seen from the side; when seen in profile, or when she's looking at something out of the corner of her eye, Schulz tends not to draw the complete circle, which makes her look a lot more like her modern look.

Thus in this strip, Lucy looks very much like she does in the years to follow.

March 11, 1952: Throws like a girl

It's a fairly funny joke here, not the usual source of humor in this one. Most comics (including Peanuts up to this point), it would just be enough to stretch the first two panels here over four.

Consider, for a moment, the comic strip Nancy. Nancy is, itself, a kind of classic, an endless elaboration upon a basic set of jokes. And yet, it cannot really be said to have evolved over time. Ernie Bushmuller was a craftsman. A really good one actually; few comic strips could have maintained the level of competence he provided for Nancy over that period. That is a good word for what Nancy is: competent.

Schulz, we see here, was not interested in mere competence. We can see here that he wasn't interested in applying a formula over and over again forever, that he was engaged with his work and responding to it in an iterative manner. In this strip, he comments upon a kind of joke that just a year earlier he would have made without second thoughts. This is why Bushmuller was a craftsman, but Schulz was an artist.