February 28-March 5, 1955: Everybody look down, it's all in your mind

February 28

The phrase "Good Ol' Charlie Brown" was used in the very first Peanuts strip, and continues to show up from time to time.  For a long while it shared the lead panel with the title.

March 1

This is the beginning of a sequence in which Charlie Brown pretends to be a spaceman.  I like the retro-look of the helmet, I might have to use that somewhere.

March 2

An often under-noticed problem with wearing glass space helmets on planets with both atmospheres and mischievous little girls.

March 3

One of my favorite things about the spaceman sequence is the straight face Charlie Brown keeps through most of it.  We have another example here of a character looking slightly silly when they look directly up.

March 4

Well, almost all of it.  Charlie Brown takes a lot of guff all because his head is styled a little differently from the others.

March 5

This repeated strip is probably a problem with gocomics.com's archive.

April 12-17 1954: A week at once

Let's do a batch of six this time.

April 12, 1954:

This is the first strip of a new running gag, where Charlie Brown reads something about Beethoven aloud to Schroeder from a book, and he reacts loudly to it.  Like Snoopy vs. the Yard or Linus' surreal block-building skills, or indeed Charlie Brown drawing cartoons, this goes on for a bit.  Schulz must have found the idea interesting.

April 13, 1954:

More development of Charlie Brown's defeatist personality.  There is no hard dividing line between what I call "early" Peanuts and "classic" Peanuts, the strip's evolution isn't actually reducible to those terms, but if we accept them anyway I'd call this definitely a "classic" strip.

April 14, 1954:

This is the first time Snoopy has been shown digging.  It's a good pose for him.  The first panel shows Schulz's new, loosened style for drawing him.   Snoopy has already evolved quite far from the cute little puppy that walked beneath Patty's window.

The throwing of the golf clubs is slightly shocking, because they are presumably the result of an action performed by (gasp!) adults.  We should be coming up soon on that weird section soon with Lucy in the golf tournament, which actually has adult figures in it, although never their faces in detail.

April 15, 1954:

Next on his reading list: "Who's On First," by B. Abbot and L. Costello.

April 16, 1954:

This shows, a bit, how Peanuts kids differ from real kids.  What child in the world has ever said "Well!  What an insult!" in response to anything?  I assume from this that the fussing in question is a kind of unspoken, whiny kind of thing, which Schulz didn't attempt to depict visually like he did with the white noise from a few days ago.  He could have depicted the singing with a musical note, but it would have spoiled the joke.

April 17, 1954:

Oh I am so not making a "two girls one dish" joke.  I'm only mentioning it here to prevent any of you from bringing it up in comments.

Sunday, September 6, 1953: MAYBE

This one's awesome for that last panel, and that note of concern you can hear in Charlie Brown's voice. Yes I said hear. I know they're just words on the page, that doesn't mean I can't hear it.

This does put the uncertainty back into just who is Snoopy's owner. It still has not been conclusively said at any point, it's just been implied from time to time.

August 26, 1953: Charlie Brown the killjoy

Most of the characters in your standard comic strip have what might be charitably termed "quirks." Usually, comics don't intend you to emphasize with them. The humor comes from laughing at rather than with. One of Peanuts' great innovations is in making all of its characters, at one time or another, truly relatable. Even the terrible Lucy, at the height of her fell power, had strips in which she was a more-or-less normal little girl.

But of all these characters, Charlie Brown, the one Schulz himself described as the Everyman of the cast, is the one who is obviously the one intended to be empathized with the most. That's why I like these strips in which the focus is on another character reacting to CB, instead of the reverse.

August 24, 1953: Oh Come ON Charlie Brown

This is at least the second strip with this theme. Currently, Schulz's emphasis is on showing that Charlie Brown's neuroses are paranoid, and even a bit egotistical. That goes away after a while.

July 7, 1953: Charlie Brown gets it wrong

A scene from the midpoint of the arc of Charlie Brown's personality, on his way towards the lovable sad sack we all know. I'd say it's only partway there because there's actually a bit of egotism in this, that CB assumes the girls must be talking about him, that he lacks in later strips.

March 19, 1953: That's the Charlie Brown we remember

I think this is the first strip to really solidify Charlie Brown's emerging personality. That of the depressed everyman, who considers himself mediocre and ends up being, so partly because of his belief, and partly because everyone can't be Dave Singleman. Who even his own dog (now cemented as Charlie Brown's in three strips) finds boring.

Chagrimace!

Valentine's Day, 1953: The First Time Charlie Brown Got No Valentines

The Little Red-Haired Girl is some time off, but still, this is the first time Charlie Brown is depressed from getting no valentines. It's got a "chagrimace" and everything.

Aren't school valentines a shamefully artificial thing these days anyway? In order to prevent kids from feeling rejected, I seem to remember that we were encouraged to just give one to everyone in class, regardless of gender.

October 3, 1952: Depressed kids

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

July 1, 1952: "I won..."

Charlie Brown's losing streak in nearly all games has yet to be firmly established, but it's coming. He somehow loses thousands of games of Checkers against Lucy in the coming months alone.

The storytelling in this one's excellent. Charles Schulz uses repetition in Peanuts in a way that no other comic strip, that I can think of, does. It's a really complex idea to get across in four panels too, of Charlie Brown getting beaten down by Patty's dismissal of his victory, yet I don't see the strip making its point more effectively with more panels.

May 15, 1952: Exit, pursued by girls, stage left

It's another turnabout/chase strip, although the cause this time isn't Charlie Brown smarting off, or at least not on purpose.

What is it about comic characters chasing each other that works? What would they do if they caught him? Inflict violence? Is that funny?

I don't seem to remember Lucy being the chaser in many turnabout strips. Generally, she's probably more likely just to slug someone and get it over with.

October 3, 1951: Guess I'll go eat some worms

Charlie Brown takes a big step towards his familiar personality with this strip, in which Snoopy rejects him in order to beg for Patty's ice cream cone. The falling leaf in the last panel is a nice touch.

September 22, 1951: Why is everybody always picking on me?

Stuff like this can't be good for a little round-headed kid's self-esteem. His long-term personality is settling into place. By the way, that's a particularly Calvin-like drawing of him in the second panel.

Novmber 11, 1950: Kind of calculated, isn't it?

CB is just so sensitive.

November 9, 1950: Frightens me too, bud

Another premonition of Charlie Brown's later outlook on life.

Notice, "another sixty years."  He was nearly ten years short, but still, Peanuts remains in print to this day.

October 19, 1950: Depression

A premonition of Charlie Brown's later personality.  In these early strips he's fairly well-adjusted.  Although there are scraps between the characters as we've already seen, they're fairly well-off.  The oft-collected "I'm not the hero, I'm the goat" sequence seems unthinkable in these very early days.