August 8-13, 1955: How dare they sully the good name of Crockett?

Sunday, August 7 isn't on the gocomics site.

August 7:

Charlie Brown experiencing this kind of outburst is rare, through the overall history of the strip. This is more the kind of thing the other characters would do, although CB will do it if it regards someone he really admires. Less often Davy Crockett, more often Joe Shlabotnik.

August 8:

Linus hasn't spoken a word to another person yet, but he plays baseball. (Of course, Snoopy never speaks to another person -- or rather, doesn't say things other than "Boo.") Everyone remember Schroeder-the-musician, but Schroeder-the-catcher appears frequently, if less distinctively.

August 9:

Canine prodigies are disconcerting. Sarcastic ones moreso.

August 10:

Yeah Linus, I know how you feel. The blanket hasn't become a big element of the strip yet, but we're getting there.

August 11:

How does Schroeder know about used cars? I like how the kids don't refer to the baby sitters by name, just by their attributes and reputation. It's an impersonal relationship, that between the high school student and her temporary charges. The most legendary babysitter in comics would have to be Calvin's nemesis Rosalyn. It's really difficult to picture a character like her in Peanuts, and not just because she's an adult.

August 12:

Charlie Brown has mostly laughed at this kind of rejection up to now, but this is getting more to his familiar personality from later strips.

Aside:

Since the last post, the comics world took a grevious blow when Richard Thompson, creator of the best modern comic strip going by a wide margin, Cul De Sac, had to lay down his pen due to encroaching Parkinson's Disease. I'm sorry I wasn't about to work in more references to it in these posts; it is wonderful in a way that fans of Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes will find familiar, but still manages to be distinct from both of them in both style and tone. Alice is kind of like Calvin but more realistic and much more random; Petey is like Charlie Brown except much more introverted and nervous. The strip ended just after its fifth birthday, and in far fewer newspapers than you'd expect from its extreme brilliance, but I'm still suffering from a strong sense of deja vu from when C&H closed up shop. Thompson says he's quitting because the disease made it hard to keep up with the strong deadlines of a newspaper strip, so I'm hoping, kind of like Michael J. Fox, that we haven't heard the last from him, or his brilliant creation maybe in some other form.

August 1-6,1955: Boring days in Peanuts-ville

Not a lot to say about most of these strips.

August 1:

Patty and Violet have taunted Charlie Brown with party exclusion before, but now it's starting to look particularly malicious.

August 2:

Not really a lot of joke here, I guess. It does look a little more like Snoops is Charlie Brown's dog, however. I wonder, in the future post-apocalyptic culture-to-come that treats comics as holy texts, if the mystery of Snoopy's early ownership will become fiercely-contested dogma and the subject of vicious crusades?

August 3:

That's a lot of effort Charles Schulz put into that big star on the left. Remember: these panels are blacked-out, so those stars are all made out of negative space.

August 4:

It just occurred to me, we don't see an awful lot of the Peanuts kids hanging out around water throughout the strip. I remember seeing C.B. at the seashore some time back (Patty and Violet mistook his head for a beachball), and there have been several wading pools.

August 5:

I wonder... is that tree back there the same tree, earlier in life, that we would frequently see the kids laying beneath later on?



August 6:

Charlie Brown's attitude in panel 2 is largely my own opinion on riddles. Neither of us would do very well if tasked to win magic rings from slimy cave-dwellers.

 

 

Sunday, July 31, 2012: 1,000 posts!

This strip is a solid point of development towards Snoopy's status as a foil to Charlie Brown. There's a lot of other classic elements in this strip: Charlie Brown's failures as a ball player, Schroeder's role as catcher, Snoopy kind of playing a role as a fielder and his playfulness, and CB's impotent reaction to it at the end.

Notice:

* The short distance between the pitcher's "mound" and home plate, and how Charlie Brown has to throw the ball in an arc to avoid the strip's title.

* Snoopy's cloud of "R"s in panel five.

* The tiny Patty off the field in panel six. There's another tiny figure in the background, but I can't tell who it is.

* Panel nine: "Oh good grief!"

* The vigor and looseness of the entire sequence. I think this is Peanuts art at its height right here.

* Snoopy's smug expression in the last panel. That dog!

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And that's 1,000 posts, I think! (Blogger's numbering might be counting some future posts I have scheduled that haven't appeared yet.) Posts have been slow as of late, and for that I apologize, but it's been some weird times out here. We've got some interesting strips coming up though so it should pick up for a while, hopefully I can keep up the energy through the next thousand.

May 22-28, 1955: Scenes from an Illustrated Childhood

Sunday, May 22

These old Sunday strips show off just what Schulz was capable of when his drawing hand was at its best. Just look at all that. In panel 6 Charlie Brown is leaping a barbed wire fence, and those cans in panel 9 can't exactly be safe to wade through either.

These strips show us a kind of iconic, idealized version of the world of kids that largely doesn't exist anymore, one made up of unfenced backyards, vacant lots, junkyards, back alleys and broken fences.

May 23

Lucy doesn't have many weaknesses, or at least ones that she'll admit to, but rollerskates are one of them.

May 24

The Peanuts characters are accident-prone.

May 25

Shades of Calvin and his bicycle here. And a scribble of ire!

A character displaying affection, love, tolerance, pleasure, joy? These things are not funny. Conan! What is funny in life?

May 26

Lucy turns into quite the feminist later on, this attitude turns out to be fairly atypical of her.

May 27

It's possible to miss it if you just glance at the strip, but the joke here is that Lucy is missing one skate, which is the one that Snoopy's riding.

May 28

Violet and her mud pies again. Old habits die hard. Y'know, I don't remember if we've ever seen any of the Peanuts kids eat one of those mud pies. I'd assume that they're just playing, but that look of distaste on Charlie Brown's face implies that he at least has considered eating one of the things. I guess kids had stronger immune systems back then.

May 2-7, 1955: Lucy the Environmentalist

May 2

We could take a bad message away from here if we were to relate Lucy's silly concerns with those of the then-nascient environmental movement. Lucy's had enough weird notions in that head of hers from previous strips, however, that I find it possible to ignore that reading.

May 3

This is Peanuts' first "full" story, consuming every weekday strip for the week. The whole thing is her imposing her concerns upon her friends. I note that the only value judgement made by any of the cast members on her concerns is made here, by Charlie Brown. All of the other reacting characters wear Peanuts Expression #24, "blank observation." Her face in the first panel is vividly rendered. ("Good grief" sighting.)

May 4

It's easy not to notice that Pig-Pen is in this strip, but without his trademark dust cloud, perhaps because it would confuse the gag of the strip.

May 5

This strip and the previous this one are the same general joke, and they have exactly the same punchline. It feels like Schulz is padding out the story here.

May 6

It's not just that Lucy believes her friends are eroding the Earth, it's that she's vividly imagined it as becoming the size of a basketball, an image worthy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

May 7

This isn't the first time Lucy has responded to a direct refutation of her beliefs with a non-sequitur counterattack. Lucy's not the sort to waste too much time on introspection.

Comic images from gocomics.com.

 

April 25-30, 1955: I'm Well Read

April 25

At least it wouldn't all melt before she could eat it. The word "Boy" in the third panel is both serif'd and contains lowercase letters.

April 26

Once in a while Schroeder says something that indicates there's a slight change he could end up reciprocating Lucy's crush someday. It's quite rare, but it happens once in a while.

April 27

As has been remarked in the comments before, there really aren't a lot of Pig-Pen strips when measured as a percentage of all the Peanuts strips Schulz draw. He's fairly common in this period though.

April 28

Somewhat uncharacteristically, Pig-Pen gets angry at the way people refer to him here. It's a bit difficult, through all the grime, to read his expressions of ire. I'm not quite sure I get this strip though -- I sense there's something about it, maybe some context from the time, that I'm missing. I'm not actually sure the girls are judging his appearance, although if they're not then why would Schulz use Pig-Pen here?

April 29

I think Schulz spelled it "SKWEEK" in the third panel just to mix things up a bit. We get another funny drawing of Snoopy here, who is already the most plastic of the Peanuts characters.

April 30

My favorite thing about this strip is the slight irregularity in Snoopy's jaw in the third panel, indicating Snoopy chewing. Lucy's mouth seems to be missing in the first panel.

 

April 4-6 & Sunday April 10, 1955

April 4

A bit of simple wordplay, but one could take it to provide a lesson on the difficulty in living up to the divine. If one was disposed that way, that is."Pig-Pen" was the first minor character introduced into Peanuts, and is by far the longest-lived. Although present only in a very small proportion of strips, Schulz obviously found the character more compelling even than later "major" characters like Frieda and Eudora. Unlike the rather bland Eudora however (about the most I can remember about her is that she wore a hat and was a girl), Pig-Pen still has a strong personality, and is almost unique among the Peanuts kids in that he doesn't really seem to have any hangups. Linus is the closest to that blissful state, but even he had the blanket for a while, and the Great Pumpkin too.

 
April 5

A weird hanging question ends this strip. The point is clear -- there is nothing to say what we believe now won't be seen as similarly bizarre to people hundreds of years from now.

 
April 6

I think the Neighborhood League, if such an organization actually exists, should probably reconsider their retaping regulations.This is probably a joke on kids playing with laughably decrepit baseballs, but not having had what one might call a sporting childhood I am unfamiliar with the lore in that area.

 
gocomic's archive is missing strips for the 7th through the 9th of April, 1955. Can anyone tell us what the Fantagraphics collections have for those days?

 
Sunday, April 10

Oh, what a tremendously formative strip. It's not the first time Charlie Brown has expressed a mania for baseball (I think we've had one other strip so far where he's wanted to play while everyone else has gone inside), but this one seems rather more Charlie Browny, especially his expression in panel 7, that's pretty iconic right there.

Sunday, August 8, 1954: Lucy in right field

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This isn't the first time Lucy's played baseball, but it confirms her position in right field. This is the first bona-fide joke about how bad Lucy is as a fielder. Charlie Brown's comment in the first panel implies that Lucy already has a negative reputation as a ball player.

Week of June 21-26, 1954: Self-love and baseball pictures

June 21

I like how the word "tickle" is drawn larger and darker to express how the force of Lucy's tickling is increasing. This is the first strip in a sequence actually; two more are coming next week.

June 22

The clever bit of this strip, I think, is how Snoopy is just sitting there up until the last panel, where it's suddenly revealed he's the umpire. A good strip I think.

June 23

1. It should be obvious that the intent of this strip is to express "Charlie Brown is a narcissist." This strip was drawn 47 years ago. So the implications of "Charlie Brown loves Charlie Brown," that is to say self-love, are rather different now, in the age of South Park, than back then.

2. Wait, Linus loves Violet? He's like one year old! We've barely seen him in a speaking role yet.

June 24

When you trade pictures with Schroeder, what do you expect you'd get?

There is something rather melancholy about this strip for me. Already we're seeing the age of baseball card collecting receding into the past. Here they're trading full-sized pictures of ballplayers, which I expect was never really popular but might have been a fad once. The day will come, and not too far from now, when this throwaway strip meant to be understood by kids and adults of 1954 will be one of the sole surviving records of baseball player picture trading. In fact, given both Peanuts' survivability and huge place in our culture, it may some day be the last record of a fad that may once have enthralled whole schoolyards.

Peanuts was not written to be a cultural artifact but to be comprehended to readers of the time. Comic strips are particularly ephemeral because of their nature, because it's too much to ask of a cartoonist tasked with producing new material daily to give thought to his work's long-term relevance. Yet so they remain, and will only increase being so in the future, vestiges of an age long dead.

But, you know, ha ha! He gave him a picture of Beethoven!

June 25

It may seem weird that Snoopy could hold so much water until you realize that he must be mostly sponge.

June 26

That's a damn frilly sandbox for Charlie Brown. And it's also a rare show of affluence for the kid. It's usually Violet who would have the frilly, expensive sandbox, and Charlie Brown who would be the observer, and it'd also be Violet who would be showing it off.

The attitude of Charlie Brown here is interesting. Who must have built this sandbox? I don't think his parents, and anyway I can't picture Charlie Brown speaking so badly of his folks. I think he must be talking about the workmen who installed it. But what could that mean, that he commissioned the thing?

Week of May 10-15, 1954: Jellybeans, Coconut, Baseball and Swings

May 10:

I really hope they aren't resting in a bowl of milk. Most breakfast cereals probably have close to that much sugar as it is.

May 11:

A nice understated last panel on this strip.

May 12:

This is similar to a certain Friz Freling-directed Sylvester and Tweety cartoon, in which, in an effort to get high enough to grab Tweety's cage, Sylvester swings back and forth in a swing, going higher and higher. Unfortunately, part of the arc happens to intersect the field of motion of a pole-driving machine, and....

May 13:

The more I think about this strip the more grossed-out I get. Maybe she should wash them off in a bowl of milk? (We already knows she likes putting her hands in milk from a previous strip.) Maybe Schulz had jelly beans on the brain at the time he wrote these.

May 14:

Every so often a character reacts with surprising self-knowledge. You don't tend to get that kind of reflection from Beetle Bailey. It's a bit unsettling when it happens, whether in the comics or in real life.

May 15:

Coconut-flavored cough medicine?

This is a structure Schulz uses sometimes, where a character reacts strongly in the third panel, and another character shows up in the last panel expressly to watch and explain why the first character is reacting. Violet's wide smile here is interesting -- why is CB hating coconut funny? My interpretation is, it's the joy of watching someone you know act in an expected fashion. "Good ol' Charlie Brown. Boy, does he hate coconut!" That radio is really an innocent party in this however. Charlie Brown is just kicking the messenger.

Notice that Schulz isn't spelling it "cocoanut" anymore.

April 23, 1954: The aerodynamic properties of that ball seem unsuitable

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

It's harder to throw, but you can't expect it to go so far if the batter gets a good whack at it.  However, if he hits it really solidly it will probably take several minutes just to put the ball back together.

I think this is one of the few strips with Shermy, Schroeder and no one else.  (Charlie Brown is mentioned but not pictured.)