July 25-30, 1955: Fun is Good Enjoyment

July 25:

Lucy's smile in panel three is an atypical expression for her.

July 26:

Whoop? Although it's difficult to think of a better bit of onomatopoeia to use here. Maybe "whine," but that's not really a sound effect. Maybe "ouch," but Snoopy can't talk. Speaking of which, Snoopy's got another thought balloon here. I think he's finally in the phase where he mostly uses thought bubbles.

July 27:

We've not gotten huge amounts of hate out of Patty and Violet yet, although it's flared up from time to time. Charlie Brown does seem to be giving Violet cause for her outburst here. How about a little personal space, kid?

July 28:

Although Snoopy doesn't talk to the characters, they've never shown themselves (to my knowledge) to have any doubts that Snoopy understands them. Charie Brown's phrase here, "You just aren't much for doing things right, are you?", sounds idiomatic in a midwestern kind of way to me, like something that might have been floating around Schulz's hearing that he thought to call up. But that's just a guess, of course. The drawing of Snoopy running here is very nice, and the next strip shows that it's not the only way Schulz has to draw it. You can imagine pretty well what Snoopy would look like in motion from these.

July 29:

This is a very "Peanuts" kind of punchline, taking something the kids have figured out (regardless of whether it's true or not) and extrapolating it to draw further conclusions. I don't think an awful lot of strips would think to do that.

July 30:

Oooooo! Not only do we not get to get the bug's "house," presumably a hole, we don't even get to see the bug. The hyphens between the Ts in "pret-t-t-y fancy" are a good textual representation of a spoken idiom. (I guess "idiom" is the word of the day.)

March 21-26, 1955: What did you expect?

March 21

This is an early version of a later strip in which Lucy complains that she didn't get what she wanted for Christmas, which was "REAL ESTATE."

March 22 

A callback to Charlie Brown's pretending to be a martian earlier.  It's interesting how television aerials were considered to be futuristic back then.  It's very much Jetson-chic.

March 23

This one's mostly an excuse to draw more funny pictures of Snoopy.  And I am not complaining at all.

March 24

Another serif'd word, the "Hey" in Lucy's speech in the first pane.  I wonder what it was that inspired Schulz to use serifs for emphasis.

March 25

This strip is the beginning of the long war between Snoopy and Linus -- to the victor goes the blanket.  Snoopy may hate cats, but he's definitely picked up this maneuver off of one of them.

March 26

But... then what prompted this exchange?  Does Charlie Brown really have that short an attention span?  TV is still young yet, so we can't blame that.

March 7-12, 1955: Candy and bugs

March 7

Snoopy's candy detecting powers at work again.  We've already established that Snoopy has a much longer detection range than this.  Note: both of them are probably inside here.

March 8

I've said it multiple times before but it really should be driven home: chocolate is toxic to dogs.  If we can bring ourselves to overlook that little thing, we can notice that chocolate creams are the default "good" candy of Peanuts.  Come back in two days to find out the default "bad" candy.

I seem to remember Snoopy doing the "mmmm" thing later on, and it annoying people.  I don't have a clear recollection of it though, it could be something else.

March 9

Linus is doing his googy face again.  It still looks funny to me.  I suppose this is the expression he makes when he sucks his thumb, but without his thumb in the way to obscure it.

March 10

Charlie Brown hates coconut.  Apparently, so does Snoopy.  (Their opinions on the issue closely mirror my own.)  In both this strip and March 8, the girl is used entirely as an observer, someone to which Charlie Brown can talk without seeming like he's talking to himself, or directly to the reader.

March 11

Lucy is at that magical time where she can say something that looks like pure glurge, but then turn it around 180 degrees in the last panel.  Charlie Brown exists in this strip to tip off the reader's reaction.  The second panel could be taken straight (it's a lesser reading, but possible), so Schulz put him in there to let us know it's supposed to seem sappy, and so we'll be able to see how loud Lucy is being in the last panel.

That disgusted look on his face in the second panel is not a standard Peanuts expression, I notice.

March 12

Somersault!  Aaugh!  You know, I think this might be Peanuts' very first "Aaugh!"

Bugs are not a part of the balance of Charlie Brown's back.

June 6, 1952: The dangers of accepting random bugs

Kind of an anti-climatic last panel here. Most of the joke, to me, comes from the idea that Lucy just thought Charlie Brown would want a bug at all. Later on, she takes to stomping such insects with exaggerated force.