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!

March 18-21, 1954: Three in a tree

Read these strips at gocomics.com.

Another triple.

March 18, 1954:
If you're as small as Linus, a bag of blocks is in fact a very useful thing to have.  Of course most little kids don't have the block-stacking skill or the utilitarian frame of mind to make the proper use of them.

March 19, 1954:
Linus' block-stacking powers have met their match.

March 20, 1954:
This is sort of a response to Charlie Brown giving Violet chocolates for Income Tax Day back on Monday.  Charlie Brown's "Wow!" in the first panel is mighty fancy, like a small version of the looping letters Schulz sometimes draws large.

March 11-13, 1954: Three again, again

Read these strips at gocomics.com.

Some more glued-together strips. I'm going to have to go in and fix these when/if they correct these images.

March 11, 1954:
More head-patting from Snoopy, with another word-bubble depiction of his thoughts. The big punchline in A Charlie Brown Christmas when the kid puts his ornament on the Christmas Shrub, is kind of a callback to this.

March 12, 1954:
Taken with the last three strips, Schulz has alternated between Linus block strips and Snoopy head-pat strips this whole week. When he on a whim (it seems to me) made Schroeder into a musical prodigy it became a permanent part of his character, but Linus' block-building skills don't seem to have survived into the later years of the strip.

March 13, 1954:
Snoopy's versatile ears come to the rescue of his sensitive head.

March 8-10, 1954: Three again

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Three more strips that were presented glued together.

March 8, 1954: Linus and his blocks again. As we saw yesterday, the kid gets a lot of use out of them. For him, a pile of blocks is a protean meta-object, a thing that can become other things.

March 9, 1954: How does Lucy say the words "Pat him on the head"? Is it a suggestion? A request? Is she just narrating her own action?

Charlie Brown's a bit more familiar with Snoopy than the others, calling him "ol' pal." It's still some time before we have conclusive evidence Snoopy is his dog, though.

Snoopy's face on that second panel is a winner.  In the last two panels he thinks again using word balloons.  In the third he does so near humans, but none of them throughout the strip seem to recognize his discomfort so I think it's safe to say they can't understand him.

March 10, 1954: Give Linus a stack of blocks and a place on which to stand, and he will build the world.

March 4-6, 1954: Three more glued together

Read these strips at gocomics.com.

Second verse same as the first.

February 4, 1954:
Linus: kid of impossibility!  This is what I was talking about, some time back, about the Van Pelt children being kind of... uncanny.  While Lucy grows into her powers and becomes a supervillainess, Linus, taking Jesus Christ as his model, chooses the role of teacher.  Well, eventually.

February 5, 1954:
Poor ol' Charlie Brown.  Poor ol' frustrated Charlie Brown.

February 6, 1954:
This is a great strip!  I love the third panel especially:

We know these characters so well now that, even without the other three panels, we're pretty sure which of the two kids is saying YES and which was saying NO.  But even by their postures, Violet seems just that much more adamant.

A points of note in the art:
In the zoomed-in panel, notice that the characters don't look as angry in the other panels; their emotion is diluted by the energy they're putting into shouting.

P.S. There is a They Might Be Giants song for every occasion.

January 16 & Sunday, January 17, 1954: Trials of a Baby

January 16, 1954:

Sunday, January 17, 1954:

Surprisingly many of Peanuts characters have a special talent, one that overrides the limitations of real life.  Snoopy has many such "powers."  The force of Lucy's anger (later on) is terrifying to behold.  Charlie Brown's ability to lose has already been been demonstrated while playing checkers.  And Linus has a way of making or doing things that doesn't seem quite "right."  Stacking the blocks like he does in the first strip is an example.  He's also great at blowing up balloons halfway, and other unlikely feats of what I'm going to call, for lack of a better term, dexterity.

The second strip is the first time we get something akin to a stream of dialogue from Linus.  Until now his words have been things like "dottie dottie" or loud laughs of derision in the face of Lucy's selfishness, but here are several full sentences.  Noteworthy, however, is that although his words are in speech bubbles so generally are Snoopy's, and neither character has been shown using full sentences to communicate with the other characters.

I like how big kids are represented as running in herds that clean the floor of toys in their wake, like cattle devouring whole fields of grass.

January 11 & 12, 1954: The Van Pelt kids with blocks

January 11, 1954:

January 12, 1954:

The first one is more an observational strip about human nature than Lucy's personality specifically, although we might conclude that she's been somewhat spoiled by her tremendous winning streak at Checkers against Charlie Brown.  The second is a more typical strip about sisterly concern, but it does give three more of those great serif'd sleeping Zs.

(I should note that, despite what the title of this post might lead you to conclude, Lucy and Linus' last names have not been revealed in the strip yet.  Or if they have, I certainly don't remember it happening.)

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.

Sunday, June 21, 1953: Linus thinks

Being thoughts, this doesn't count as Linus' first words. I'm not even sure this counts as Linus' first thought balloons, but I can't find the strip in the archives in which he complains about "big kids," which is the prior use I remember so maybe that comes later. But I think it is the first example of Linus' voice really coming through clearly to the reader, even if it isn't audible to other characters.

Linus is interesting because we first get a few strips with him thinking before he actually starts talking. Sally also does this when she shows up. I think Rerun gets it too.

December 6, 1952: Delayed reaction

I think it's just the idea of "BOO" that startles Charlie Brown in this strip. A philosophical horror at the nature of the word.

I think it's almost funnier that Lucy's so confident that her trick will work.

May 17, 1952: Blocks have many uses

Lucy gets a lot of use out of her blocks.

The premise of this strip relies on Charlie Brown not noticing Lucy as she constructs her staircase. If he had looked over and Lucy making her ramp he probably wouldn't be scared. So, a subtext of this strip is that Charlie Brown gets deeply involved in books, and Lucy knows this well enough to rely upon it for her prank.

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.

May 9, 1952: Oh no no no no no no no

The image for May 8 is broken on Comics.com's site.



Lucy would show her gratitude towards Charlie Brown for not demolishing her block tower by pulling away a football more than 40 times.

April 10, 1952: Stacking blocks

This strip is here mostly because it seems a lot like something Linus would do.

Also, while there might be an earlier example, this is definitely one of the first times Schulz uses a bent-over, upside-down, floating in mid-air character as a way of representing them tumbling through the air as they fall. This gets used most often when a character is shouting at another one or, of course, then Lucy pulls away the football as Charlie Brown tries to kick it.

March 12, 1952: Lucy is top-heavy

Lucy's third strip here. She looks fairly different with those huge eyes, doesn't she? Probably added to make her more visually distinct from Violet, they don't last very long.