Week of June 28-July 3: Chin scratching, angle worms and treads

June 28

Which is weirder: that there is a source that catalogues the tongues of different animals, or that Charlie Brown is referring to it? If Peanuts were being drawn today, CB would probably be editing a Wikipedia page.

This strip reminds me of a favorite Sunday entry from later in the run, the "Linus is aware of his tongue" strip, that injects just a tiny bit of Lovecraftian biological horror into the cartoon world.

June 29

Imperfect circles? This strip is really about defining terms: mathematically, there are only perfect circles, but practically we call all kinds of things circles that aren't precisely obedient to the rules of geometry.

June 30

Continuing from last week, more of the "Snoopy gets scratched on the chin" sequence. Charlie Brown's amused smile in the last panel makes this one for me. No one can have a character pass judgment with a simple smile like Charles Schulz can.

July 1

Charlie Brown must have rather some serious self-esteem issues here, but really, what kind of insult is "angle worm" anyway. It's got to be a real insult, of that I have no doubt because the joke of the strip relies on the reader having prior knowledge of the term, but it still seems silly, which is probably why it's no longer, to my knowledge, in currency.

July 2

Third of the chin-scratching strips. It's okay when Lucy does it, but not when Charlie Brown does? This suggests either that CB has a harsh scratching technique (perhaps clued by the fact that Lucy's "tickles" are in word balloons while Charlie Brown's are without), or that Snoopy gets something out of having his chin scratched by girls.

July 3

Oh no, Charlie Brown's been run over by a truck!

April 12-17 1954: A week at once

Let's do a batch of six this time.

April 12, 1954:

This is the first strip of a new running gag, where Charlie Brown reads something about Beethoven aloud to Schroeder from a book, and he reacts loudly to it.  Like Snoopy vs. the Yard or Linus' surreal block-building skills, or indeed Charlie Brown drawing cartoons, this goes on for a bit.  Schulz must have found the idea interesting.

April 13, 1954:

More development of Charlie Brown's defeatist personality.  There is no hard dividing line between what I call "early" Peanuts and "classic" Peanuts, the strip's evolution isn't actually reducible to those terms, but if we accept them anyway I'd call this definitely a "classic" strip.

April 14, 1954:

This is the first time Snoopy has been shown digging.  It's a good pose for him.  The first panel shows Schulz's new, loosened style for drawing him.   Snoopy has already evolved quite far from the cute little puppy that walked beneath Patty's window.

The throwing of the golf clubs is slightly shocking, because they are presumably the result of an action performed by (gasp!) adults.  We should be coming up soon on that weird section soon with Lucy in the golf tournament, which actually has adult figures in it, although never their faces in detail.

April 15, 1954:

Next on his reading list: "Who's On First," by B. Abbot and L. Costello.

April 16, 1954:

This shows, a bit, how Peanuts kids differ from real kids.  What child in the world has ever said "Well!  What an insult!" in response to anything?  I assume from this that the fussing in question is a kind of unspoken, whiny kind of thing, which Schulz didn't attempt to depict visually like he did with the white noise from a few days ago.  He could have depicted the singing with a musical note, but it would have spoiled the joke.

April 17, 1954:

Oh I am so not making a "two girls one dish" joke.  I'm only mentioning it here to prevent any of you from bringing it up in comments.

July 31, 1953: A well-established fact

This is an emerging theme of Peanuts strips, where one character reads something in a book and reacts to it. Often these reactions are solitary, just a way to present a statement for a character react against.

Usually these statements are meant to be accepted uncritically. Not in this case however, here Snoopy's reactions directly disprove the book's declaration, which makes the strip into a commentary upon it.

As for whether dogs really can't reason, well, I doubt that severely. I've known a couple of very smart dogs in my time, one really quite freakishly so.

Charlie Brown's personality is still fairly mischievous at this point. He doesn't do this much more often. It seems like all the mischief in his soul disappears as it increases in the other characters, particularly Lucy. So maybe there's some kind of spirit transference going on here.

Scribble of ire!

Sunday, July 12, 1953: A page-turner

The various characters are picking up quirks that help to differentiate them. In the near future:

Lucy is a reader, but also gets facts wrong readily and laughs off suggestions that she might be wrong. Charlie Brown, on the other hand, when he gets something wrong he's very self-conscious about it, and Lucy's continued willful ignorance will give him ulcers. Linus, even when he starts really talking, is pretty quiet. Patty and Violet aren't that different, but Violet is more antagonistic, cold, sometimes even hostile to Charlie Brown. Schroeder, well, is obvious. Snoopy has problems with inanimate objects.

I think it's obvious that Shermy is in the pool in the first panel, but it's less evident that the kid he's with is Schroeder. It probably is, but that's mostly because I don't think Schulz would throw an extra in there just to have one.

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.