Showing posts with label depressed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label depressed. Show all posts

Monday, December 13, 2010

August 6, 1953: The weirdness of Patty's dress

Peanuts

Lucy exhibits surprising self-awareness here.  She loses these introspective powers as she comes into her own as neighborhood terror.

It's worth noting, for a moment, the bizarre attributes of Patty's dress. All the girls typically wear skirts in this phase of Peanuts' development. Some time earlier, when a girl bent over Schulz didn't bother to wrap the skirt around the legs. In this strip, however, he cheats Patty's legs and skirt longer as she stoops down to Lucy's height.

Even more interesting, however... look at the cross-hatch pattern on her dress. Does something look odd about it? It's like the cloth is a shaped hole in the paper, revealing the pattern behind it. Due to the small size of the panels on the page, I think the pattern reads better this way than if it were more realistically drawn.

I love it when comic strips do things like this. A contemporary example, to borrow from outside the artform for a moment, is in the Monkey Island series of computer games. Most of them feature a salesman character named Stan who wears a loud checked sportcoat. The pattern on the coat is applied across the folds of cloth in much the same way as the pattern on Patty's dress. This fan drawing on Stan (taken from here) illustrates the effect:

Recently the series made the jump to polygonal, 3D graphics. The pattern on his coat is considered to be such an integral part of the character that the developers went to special trouble to preserve the effect (source page):

Sunday, May 9, 2010

October 3, 1952: Depressed kids

Peanuts

I'm rather glad to see a strip about depression in which Prozac or other pharmaceuticals do not come up.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

July 21, 1952: Sad Sad Snoopy

Peanuts

I do think I prefer this age of Peanuts, in terms of art style, to all the others. It's true, when Peanuts' art became simplified and iconic it allowed the strip's humor and voice to aim for the stratosphere, but we also come to lose things like Snoopy's expression in the last panel here. Now that's a depressed dog.

This is a bit more confirmation for the idea that Snoopy belongs to Charlie Brown, I think.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

May 28 & 29, 1952: Two strips about baseball

Peanuts

Peanuts

In the first of these two strips Charlie Brown is catcher and Shermy is (I assume) pitcher, but the curse of CB's team is already beginning to take hold. The other strip is the first record I've noticed that CB's team usually loses, and the first time he's noticeably upset by this.