October 18, 1952: Is that a blanket?

Is that a blanket that Linus is sitting on?

Noveber 29, 1951: Comic books!

The kids' love of comic books is a staple of the early years of the strip. Part of this may be due to the fact that Universal Features Syndicate published comic books in those days, in which many of their newspaper strip characters, including the kids of Peanuts, would feature. I saw an issue of their classic title Tip Top on a dealer's shelf while at DragonCon a couple of weeks ago. It was selling for around $200 dollars, if I remember correctly.

Noteworthy is the fact that, as the decades rolled by and comic books lost their prominent place in kid culture, that nothing really moved in to replace them, except perhaps television. (As we've seen, in the earliest Peanuts strips the kids listened to radio instead of sitting watching TV.) Since then there's been rock music, action movies and video games, but the kids never really caught on to those things. One can only speculate what Schulz thought about those strange advents.

October 5, 1951: Inconsiderate druggist

How about that spread of comic books? Were those days really all that long ago? It's hard to read it here, but I think the comic in the bottom-right corner of panel 2 is Nancy! And beside it is Tip Top, which appears to be a Universal Features Syndicate comic from that period that featured new adventures of their comic characters. (Universal Features Syndicate is Peanuts' owner and distributor.)

This is as good a time as any to talk about the Peanuts comic books. These weren't compilations; they were actual comic books with material created specifically for them. I don't know much about them, but I do know that some (maybe all?) of them have Peanuts art not drawn by Charles Schulz. I remember seeing one book strip somewhere on the web that I saved a copy of (and was probably lost in a recent hard drive crash, unfortunately) which involved Linus and Snoopy meeting a small robot that grabbed Linus' blanket, inserted it into a slot on the robot's body, made a grinding noise for a panel, then neatly pooped it out into a pile of pastel threads.

Forget about Shermy and Faron. Gimmie back Blanket Pooping Robot!

Some information on them appears to be here. Here's Aaugh.com's history and guide to the books.