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 18, 1954: Who needs peppermint?

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Here we have one of the more interesting questions about the Peanuts strip.  Schulz and Peanuts makes the claim, if I remember it correctly, that the two Pattys, the original and the "Peppermint" variety, were based on the same person.  At first that assumption seems laughable, despite the two sharing the same name, but think.  Besides this strip, every physical contest we've seen Patty in (marbles, mostly, and mostly against Charlie Brown), she's won.  And their times in the strip don't intersect very much; one wanes right when the other waxes.

Oh well.  Idle speculation aside, I think this strip has a hilarious final panel.  I don't know of any other strip that would think to end it so understatedly, or half as effectively.

One weird thing though: look at the backgrounds of the last two panels.  They're completely different!

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 8, 1954: I can't resist a sight gag

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

I probably should stop linking to every sight gag strip.  This one's pretty funny for that last panel, and contains a chagrimace, and it has to do with baseball, and has an non-musical appearance by Schroeder, but other than those four things isn't that interesting.

Well, the floppy baseball in the first panel is funny too.  Other than those five things, it isn't that interesting.

April 1-2, 1954: Two on Baseball

April 1:

The second panel here is a particular favorite of mine.  Lucy is weighing her options.

This may be the first direct instance of direct violence in Peanuts.  There have been chases before, and chases of being hit by projectiles (like one where Lucy hits Charlie Brown with a snowball at very cose range) but I don't think anyone has actually hit another kid before now, with hand or weapon.  I'm sure one of you will correct me if I've remembered wrong.  (In fact, I'm looking forward to it.)

April 2:

Now that another character has directly remarked on Charlie Brown's lack of playing skill, it has become a bit more solidified as an attribute of the character himself.

March 29-31, 1954: Three at sea

Read these strips at gocomics.com.

I'll say this much about Universal's archives having poorly-cropped strips at this point; by doing three at once, we're making fairly good time through 1954.  Although they do prevent me from skipping strips, or organizing like strips together (like the saga of Linus' block building skills).  These three strips finish out March.

March 29, 1954:
This strip implies some kind of empathy between the young Linus and Snoopy.  Snoopy is running towards Linus at full speed, so Linus knows to build a wall for Snoopy to jump over, and he knows that Snoopy will see this as a fun thing to hurdle, and not an effort to get him to crash.

It doesn't look like Linus is building quickly here, but he can't have had more than a few seconds to construct that wall.

March 30, 1954:
This is one of the earliest indications of Charlie Brown's poor baseball skills.

March 31, 1954:
Charlie Brown lecturing Snoopy?  Another point of evidence that he is Snoopy's owner, at least legally -- Snoopy isn't exactly reverential here.

Serif Z!

August 7, 1953: This strip blows my mind, Beethoven edition

How is that even possible?

I'll tell you what though. Twisting your brain around so that this strip somehow makes sense in an ordinary way is a fun intellectual exercise in self-derangement.

Maybe Schroeder is sponsored by a local bakery called, for some reason, the "Beeth Oven." Or maybe it's renowned for the cooking of pastry. Pastry that contains beets. Beets, and extraneous H's.

Or maybe Beethoven was foresighted enough to leave a provision in his estate to support the sporting life of young enthusiasts of his work? And the representatives of that estate, to promote their own firm perhaps, decided to demand that the name of their long-deceased sponsor be put upon the jerseys of the beneficiaries.

Or maybe a local music store uses the composer's name as a trademark. Yeah, that seems plausible. And boring.

Has anyone tried saying "Beethoven" three times in a row, to summon his spirit?

There is still more interesting about this strip... apparently, Charlie Brown's barber Dad's shop is called "Family Barber Shop." This (and tomorrow's strip) may be the only time this is mentioned.

Finally, it is possible sometimes to believe that Beethoven Schroeder is a different character than Baseball Schroeder, since the two don't often express the interests of the other. Sometimes Schulz has Schroeder whistle something while walking up to talk to Charlie Brown, but that's infrequent. Here, at least, we have a solid (if silly) point of connection.

July 1, 1953: That's a big outfield

At some point Lucy's problems with outfielding become more the result of her fussiness and ill-temper than more personable factors. At least her absence from play doesn't see to have caused Charlie Brown's team any problems this time.

June 29, 1953: Lucy in the outfield

The beginning of a long-standing Peanuts theme, Lucy as problematic baseball player. Note here her position is center field. I'm not sure, but I think most of the time she is a right fielder.

May 21, 1953: On the mound: The origin of the pitcher's mound

This is the first strip in which there is an actual pitcher's mound, and not a flat spot of earth. Of course the later mound is a lot wider, but it's not actually much shorter.

One flaw with the premise of this strip: when the other team is up to pitch, wouldn't it help them just as much?

May 18, 1953: On the mound: The baseball changes hands

In an earlier strip the baseball was Schroeder's, and Charlie Brown told him to take it and run home when his team was in the lead.

I think this is the first use of the term "good grief."

May 13, 1953: Baseball Blockhead

First use of the word "blockhead." Also, the first strip in which another character comments on Charlie Brown's lack of pitching skill.

May 8, 1953: Mania, meet mania

For those of you too young to remember those strange things called "ree-cords," they were fragile platters of vinyl on which were engraved grooves which, when used in the proper player, could reproduce sound.

The shockwave coming off of Schroeder's head in the last panel, is one of those comic conventions, here as a depiction of surprise or dismay, that is mostly just accepted. But what is it supposed to represent? What is it a visual metaphor for? What's to stop us from creating our own such visual metaphors? (I think it'd be fun to do this but make them crazy and nonsensical.) How do these things get invented and agreed upon?

May 6, 1953: Snoopy in the outfield

Give him some time Charlie Brown. Eventually Snoopy becomes the team's star player, winning the admiration of the team and the respect of competitor "Peppermint" Patty.

Sunday, April 19, 1953: Shermy Pitches

In this early baseball strip Charlie Brown's team is losing even though he's catching this game.

Look at that first panel for a moment. There are six kids pictured. Counting from the left, it's hard to tell who the second and third ones are. The second kind of looks like Charlie Brown, and the third like Shermy, but they're already in the shot viewed up close. This would make these two kids the first "extra" human characters in all of Peanuts. (Animals have had a couple of extras so far, an anonymous dog and a bird.) Some of the other panels have unknown extras too, as well as Lucy and Schroeder a couple of times.

April 8, 1953: On the mound: Charlie Brown's pitching isn't that great

These are the strips that initially establish Charlie Brown's lack of playing skill. Not really a lot to say about them other than that.

April 6, 1953: On the mound: Charlie Brown dodges his first line drive

A notable series much later has Charlie Brown getting hit by a line drive and lamenting how his reflexes are going as he gets older.

April 2, 1953: On the mound: I think they're scoring a little high

How does a team earn 89 runs in a game that's not even over yet?

One potential problem, avoided I think, with this strip is the use of the word "home" in the last panel, which is a baseball term. Schulz plants the idea of Schroeder's home life in the reader's mind in the third panel however, which allows CB's line in the last to be more cleanly read as referring to Schroeder's house instead of home plate, would would have confused the joke.

March 31, 1953: On the mound: Schroeder the catcher

This is the very first of a staple strip-type of Peanuts throughout its history, Charlie Brown the pitcher interacts with a member of his team who has come up to talk to him during a lull in the game. It even has Charlie Brown's usual expression of annoyance at having to put up with one of his teammates. It is missing the pitcher's mound, but that's fairly minor.

This is also, to my memory, the first time Schroeder has been catcher, which pretty much becomes his set role on the team.

October 1, 1952: HA HA METAHUMOR

Peanuts has sometimes been taken seriously by folks, including Schulz himself, but there are moments like this every once in a while. There isn't really any connection, other than motive, between Schroeder's discovery and his remarkably knowledgeable comment. I can picture Schulz laughing at the idea of a character annoyed at being in a comic strip and looking for any excuse to work it in.