April 5, 1954: Snoopy will not be deterred

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Another Snoopy power! This makes sense once you realize that Snoopy's open mouth is magnetically attracted to treats. (Oh if you want to be boring you could say he just smelled it.)

Snoopy is slowly becoming looser in design, and it has been good for the character. He was almost like a piece of clip-art at first, but now he's slowly growing larger (more obvious when he's walking -- note how large he is in the last panel compared to the rest of the strip) and his mouth is capable of opening wider, in the second panel here particularly. He's slowly turning into the outgoing, wildly imaginative werewolf we all know.

February 22, 1954: The sun is a mass of incandescent gas

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

We're here on the ground floor of another emerging Peanuts story theme, Lucy's willful ignorance.  She's come a long way from her doll-like, third-person-referring, self-pitying ("Poor Lucy") early personality.  Her mistaken knowledge of the universe, and her spreading that knowledge to Linus, is an upcoming cause of Charlie Brown's stomachaches.

The way the path behind Charlie Brown, in the first panel, curves up only to disappear is strange when you notice it.  I think it's being represented as disappearing over a hill and Schulz didn't draw the horizon.  My guess is, drawing the horizon line would connect the two characters visually, subconsciously connecting them when the whole theme of the strip is disconnection.

Lucy's pose in the second panel is great.  She puts a lot of energy into her mockery.

Ho ho ho!

February 18, 1954: Baby Linus has a lot of energy

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Schulz uses a few different styles of large-form lettering, and we can see them all here in close proximity.  We find outlined and filled in examples of:

serif:

serif-ed

sharp-cornered (in the M)

square-cornered

rounded simulated pen strokes 1

rounded simulated pen strokes2

February 13, 15, 16 and 17, 1954: Lucy, Patty and Violet

The strips for February 9-12, and the 14th, are currently missing from Universal's website.  We'll skip those for about a week, then will probably try to get them from another source.

February 13, 1954:

Lucy seems to be exhibiting problems with her indoor voice.  When she's shouting, notice the post of dismay Violet is wearing.  But Lucy doesn't have "angry eyebrows" in any of these panels.
Sometimes Charles Schulz will draw a doll in one of the panels, and I'm always amazed by the effort that goes into them.  Like I said about the last strip, showing a character small isn't really like just drawing it at a smaller scale.  The doll here shows so much attention to detail looks like it could well have been a new character.

February 15, 1954:

 Here is what I meant by "angry eyebrows."
I assume this is before class started, or else I'd think Violet's outburst would cause a disruption.
The change in Charlie Brown's poses from panels 2 to 3, and from 3 to 4, are strange.  He goes from happy, to flinching like he's about to be hit, to a kind of casual leaning back.  Violet is still pretty angry in the last panel though.
For some reason my attention is drawn to Violet's exclamation in the third panel.  It doesn't have an exclamation point, and it has an apostrophe noting the removal of the "e" in "the."
This is not the first strip that shows characters in a school setting, but it might be the second.

February 16, 1954:

This is classic Lucy, and helps to show what a terror she's developing into.  Although there's no spite shown on her face it's difficult to avoid assuming some.  We also get a somersault here, although it's not the side-view one we usually get later.

February 17, 1954:

The question presented by this strip is, is Patty's long pause her intended to be hers, or are we just sort of seeing Charlie Brown's mental state illustrated?  The latter is a bit of a stretch, so I believe it's the former.
Note Charlie Brown's expression in the last panel is not a chagrimace.  It's more like a frown.

February 8, 1954: Lucy is Loud

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Lucy's not been an overly loud character so far, but the sheer size of her voice becomes a distinctive feature in the coming years.  (But not before another character becomes known for it....)

This strip depicts Lucy in four different sizes.  One of the interesting things about comic strip art, I think, is that it is almost always depicted in set sizes.  Considering how fluid is the medium, it seems weird that characters are always produced at the same sizes each week.

There is at least one good reason for this.  Comic characters are drawn using pen lines, and those have set thicknesses.  If you reproduce a comic character, especially a black-and-white one, at a larger size but without using a thicker line, they tend to look a little funny, like they're "lighter" than they should be.  The opposite happens if you draw a character smaller but use the same size line.  And comic artists, who must be able to precisely reproduce characters, probably have concerns about their ability to do that with different thicknesses of pen.

If you draw the character at its usual size and just resize it using printing equipment, however, it will stick out if it shares a frame with other objects drawn at normal size.

The solution, as Schulz demonstrates here, is to redesign the character at different sizes, simplifying it the smaller it's drawn.  Lucy gets less detailed the further away she gets from the viewer.

Sunday, February 7, 1954: The nerve-wracking sled ride

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

In an unusual inversion from the norm in later strips, here it's Charlie Brown's imagination that's active and Snoopy is the realist.  I can't help but think Charlie Brown realizes his little sled ride's kind of pathetic; otherwise why would he talk it up with exclamations like "Down! Down! Down!" or "Racing like the wind..."

The chain he's using to hang onto the sled is a nice touch, as is the care Schulz uses to draw the sled.  It's very well-rendered!

The lead panels, which can be kept or left off of a strip at the newspaper's option, are a continual problem with Peanuts' storytelling.  Schulz has to write each strip so that it works either with or without those panels, which sometimes messes with his timing.  Here he presents what is probably a little too much lead-in, which slightly damages the joke.

EDIT: As Sarah Loyd rightly noticed, Snoopy is sporting a chagrimace in the next-to-last panel.

January 26-28, 1954: Cold weather gear

January 26, 1954:

January 27, 1954:

January 28, 1954:

The first two strips here are reminiscent of the bits from A Christmas Story where Ralphie's brother Randy is so over-covered with coats and scarves he can't put his arms down, or get up once knocked over.  I suppose that kids aren't bundled up so well with heat-preservers these days.  Of course Schulz grew up in, and at the time was living in, Minnesota, which is rather infamous for its harsh winters.

The third strip is a demonstration of Snoopy's boundless enthusiasm, which I think became less apparent in the final years of the strip.  Shermy is in the first panel mostly to give context to the object Snoopy is chasing; hockey pucks don't real well if they just show up unheralded.  I think the last panel is a rare design misstep on Schulz's part; the motion lines produced by Snoopy look to more like a solid object than an effect of the dog's motion.

January 23, 1953: Snoopy vs. The Yard: The Newspaper

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Another strip showing the dog getting stymied by some artifact of human civilization.  These are kind of boring I think, except for panel two, which is the closest I think we've gotten to this point to the "classic" look for Snoopy, that is to say the late 50s-to-60s look where Snoopy was long, lean and drawn loosely.

By the way, sorry for being a little slow with posts, shepherding the Kickstarter project has consumed a lot of my time over the past two weeks.

January 6, 1954: Ribbit

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Snoopy looks kind of frog-like in the first panel here.

"Have you ever been a dog?"  "Of course not."  I think this strip is actually funnier if you give it the 3eanuts treatment.

December 14, 1953: Lucy goes that extra mile

Read this comic at gocomics.com.

In this strip, we begin to see that Schulz is becoming more careful about showing emotions.  It's not just the hilariously shaken image of Linus in the last panel, it's that we can't get a good read on why Lucy did this.  She betrays no satisfaction or joy throughout the process.  It's like she's just doing what her mother told her like a good little girl.  But why is she sneaking up on her blissful brother?  Why is she shouting at him?  Later on the thrust of whole strips turn on whether a character's mouth was drawn with a slightly upturned stroke.

This is the third strip to use the "somersault" visual shorthand for violent disruptive motion.  The first time was in the first football strip (which has still yet to become a yearly thing).  The second time was, interestingly, another instance involving Lucy shouting near Linus.

December 5, 1953: Reciprocal slobber

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

There are a few strips that notice a basic similarity between the behavior of very little kids and dogs, and by my reckoning this is the first.  I seem to remember a few strips that played this up when Sally comes on the scene, when she and Snoopy team up to steal Linus' blanket.

Why is the noise of Snoopy licking depicted as "smack," and why is it in a word balloon?

When characters stoop over, like Lucy is in panel three, it seems easy to imagine them unfolding their legs and ending up much taller than they should be.

December 4, 1953: Winter in Peanutsland

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This strip has some very nice backgrounds in it.  Later on Schulz, for whatever reason, would largely abandon tying to depict his characters' world in such detail, so let's enjoy it while it lasts.

November 16, 1953: You'll like it because it mentions Shubert!

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Another of the "Charlie Brown: Budding Cartoonist" series.  In these strips Schulz pokes fun at his own pretensions, but they also show how engaged he was with his craft.

One thing I really like about all these is that, for all of C.B.'s faults as a cartoonist, he at least knows enough to work large.  Held edgeways, that sheet of paper is as tall as he is, sans head.

November 3, 1953: Snoopy vs. the yard: Attacked by leaves

Click through (opens in new window): http://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1953/11/03/

That's a nice drawing of Snoopy lying down, which is a pose that modern Snoopy could never hope to assume. It does make him seem a bit larger than usual.

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So I'm currently supplying a link to the gocomics page of the strip in question. I'm including a target="_blank" attribute on the link that causes it to open in a new window by default, so at least you won't leave the blog each time you want to look at a strip.

But this causes me to think: shouldn't it be possible to do this automatically? And maybe not have it open in a new window, but inside another HTML element, or something? Didn't there used to be, long ago, an ancient website entity, something called a frame, that this page could be opened in?

But I'm not thrilled with the idea of making a site with frames in 2011. If we assume that gocomics is going to persist in their no-inlining policy until the end of time, though, then I think it's evident that we're going to have to do something to make seeing the individual strips easier. At least loading their site in a side frame would count as a page view on their site, wouldn't it, giving them the opportunity to make ad revenue off the load.

Still trying to puzzle this one through. I'm open to suggestions.

October 26, 1953: The mystery of Snoopy's snout

Snoopy's head is one of the most problematic entities, artistically, in Peanuts. From the side it's great, but from a three-quarters perspective it is weird. His cheeks round out a bit, to give his mouth more room for expression.

It's still less of a cheat, in my opinion, than late-era Snoopy, which rounded out his head in profile but is more problematic in terms of eye and mouth placement. (Of course, there's no law against cheating, especially if most people never notice the cheat!)

October 10, 1953: The costs of having a kid

Lucy examines the question of her existence in terms of economic transactions.

Panel two shows Lucy with a non-typical "making a point" post, and panel three has Violet sitting on a sloped surface, both kind of unusual poses. That second panel, her pose more resembles later Lucy, say, behind her Psychiatrist booth.

September 17, 1953: Flimsy reason

Charlie Brown and Patty discuss why they like each other. I think this one is fairly interesting for that. How many of us like someone just because they like you back. Is that enough? Should it be? I actually think that yes, it should be, given that the initial liker isn't guilty of any gross defects that would preclude reciprocal liking. (Favorite phrase of the hour: "reciprocal liking.")

Patty's incidental jumping rope here is interesting because the characters are more realistically-proportioned than in the earliest days of the strip. Schulz doesn't have to distort the length of Patty's arms in order to get the rope around her huge, bulbous head, although she still must hold her arms at an angle that looks a little weird when you think about it.

Specifically, in the first panel. Maybe my knowledge on rope-jumping technique is faulty, but most kids don't hold their arms straight out, or let the rope fold in the air like Patty does. Schulz has to cheat it a little. These cheats are not a sign of artistic defeat, quite the opposite: it shows that he's put thought into depicting these weird little figures and how they could participate in typical childhood pastimes.

Chagrimace!

Sunday, September 13, 1953: Three shades of green

Another bit of metaphorical art in the title panel. This is one of my favorite strips, Schroeder's personality comes out very vividly here.

September 9, 1953: Hearing marshmallows

Part of the fun of the character is that Snoopy is both a person and not, and Schulz can decide for himself which he is more like. When one is expected and the other provided, there is humor in that moment.

This is a weird place in the development of Snoopy's visual development. He's thicker here than in the years to come. He gets longer and leaner for a while, but afterwards seems to pull back a bit into the "balloon animal" shape of the later years of the strip.

I might have missed one or two, but this is the first time I can recall seeing a single, serif Z representing sleep. Such Zs become an important part of the strip's comic language.

August 15, 1953: Snoopy punches the clock

This one's linked mostly for the perfect view of Snoopy from a three-quarter perspective. We don't see him in the hand puppet pose anymore, but still this is an unusual depiction of the dog if you look closely. Snoopy's face appears to be narrower when viewed from the side than from an angle. Notice, you only rarely see a character's face straight-on; they're almost always at least a little angle in there. In most of the kids' cases this is probably so their nose doesn't look funny since that C-shape best reads as a nose in profile. Although Snoopy doesn't have the nose problem, his snout is even harder to read straight on. It's like how Mickey Mouse, in cartoons, his ears are always shown in profile, and sometimes artists depicting the mouse have to be clever so they read correctly.