Sunday, March 21, 1954: Eight stages of grief

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Beginning with panel eight:

1. Shock
2. Disbelief
3. Confirmation
4. Anger
5. Blankness
6. Taking off your shirt(?)
7. Wide-mouthed frowning
8. Sighing

They might not be the official stages, but they work for Charlie Brown.

This is possibly the most directly hostile act so far seen in Peanuts.  It would be worthy of Lucy.  There are no extenuating circumstances, and nothing sets Patty off, yet she accomplishes her self-appointed task with relish.  It's kind of out of character.  Even when she's part of the team act with Violet against CB, their methods are less overt.

Switch the gender roles here and the strip would turn out quite different.  Even this early, it doesn't seem to be in Charlie Brown's nature to do something this mean.  It's the kind of thing Calvin might do to Susie, but not without some form of judgmental comeuppance from the cartoonist.

May 31, 1952: I RIDE YOUR TRICYCLE

There is just something very blatant about Patty's commandeering of Charlie Brown's tricycle. He loves his trike and pleads about how he was looking forward to tooling it around, but to no avail. She rides off, the look on her face indicating that she spares not a thought about CB's opinion. She feels no shame, and neither does she feel vicious pleasure. It is a tricycle; Patty likes riding tricycles; anything standing in her way, then, of riding the tricycle is an obstacle to be overcome.

This is really more of a Lucy move, but she has yet to come fully into her infernal powers.

November 10, 1951: The claws come out

Another unexplained burst of rage from Patty and Violet, who in later strips would become almost defined by their disdain for Charlie Brown. When I was a kid reading 50s and 60s Peanuts strips in compilations, I thought the characters existed mostly to hate him.

This one implies that the two characters were reacting to something distasteful Charlie Brown did. Is it possible that the characters were always considered to be reacting to something CB said, offscreen, but in later strips the setup was just left out to save space?

October 16, 1951: A familiar joke

The premise of this joke should seem somewhat familiar, as Patty and Violet behaved in a similar way in a previous strip, except they were talking about how sweet and gentle girls are.