Sunday, June 12, 1955: Chomp Chomp Chomp

It's harder than you think to come up seven different ways to draw a smiling, begging dog. My favorite drawing, however, is the next-to-the-last one where Snoopy is basically threatening to eat Linus's head. The kid knows he is but a paper beagle, however.

New Year's Day, 1954: Linus is still scornful

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This strip is a reprise of the joke from Sunday, 2/15/53.  In that earlier strip, Lucy doesn't seem quite so vicious, because in that one Linus is trying to play with her stuff, while here, Lucy is outright taking Linus's cookie unprovoked.

This might mark the first moment where Lucy seems to be truly evil, in a way it's impossible to explain with another motive.

I love Linus's face in the second panel.

December 10, 1953: Limits to Lucy's fussiness

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Here Schulz subverts the pattern he's used several times, where Lucy finds fault with some kindness of Charlie Brown's and he upends something on Lucy's head in response.  Thing is this time Lucy has a point, but puts up with it anyway if there's no alternative.

June 30, 1953: Linus' first steps

Linked for notability.

When Rerun joins the cast much later, in a way it's almost like these early strips with Linus return. Rerun looks so much like Linus, even if his personality is a little different, that it's hard to escape the conclusion that Schulz named him as a self-referential joke.

Sunday, February 8, 1953: J'ACCUSE

This is an excellent strip.

I love Lucy's direct, indignant accusation of Snoopy: "You took TWO!" Although nowhere in her counting panels does she say the word "two," which makes me wonder if the spoken-aloud counting is a sham.

If the counting is taken to be real, my explanation is that Lucy has developer her own, personal representation of the number system, which she uses internally and translates when speaking to others. When she's speaking out loud as an aid to counting however, she uses her own symbols.

The question marks (excusing the fact that there are three of them) in the last panel are a bit weird, like he's questioning now Lucy's counting system but his own inability to comprehend it.

Oh, and Snoopy has thought balloons with word balloon tails here again.

Sunday, January 4, 1953: The Cookie-Hound

Snoopy at his cutest harasses the hapless Linus for his cookies. Eating a whole box of the things probably isn't very good for either of them.

Question for you. If Linus weren't on the scene yet, would it be suitable to use this same strip, all other things being equal, with Lucy when she was an infant? Even with her put-upon early personality, it doesn't quite seem like it would be a suitable strip for her, which indicates that the characters' do have a developed personality at this point.