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.
