February 22, 1954: The sun is a mass of incandescent gas

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

We're here on the ground floor of another emerging Peanuts story theme, Lucy's willful ignorance.  She's come a long way from her doll-like, third-person-referring, self-pitying ("Poor Lucy") early personality.  Her mistaken knowledge of the universe, and her spreading that knowledge to Linus, is an upcoming cause of Charlie Brown's stomachaches.

The way the path behind Charlie Brown, in the first panel, curves up only to disappear is strange when you notice it.  I think it's being represented as disappearing over a hill and Schulz didn't draw the horizon.  My guess is, drawing the horizon line would connect the two characters visually, subconsciously connecting them when the whole theme of the strip is disconnection.

Lucy's pose in the second panel is great.  She puts a lot of energy into her mockery.

Ho ho ho!

Sunday, June 1, 1952: Don't let him bluff you!

This is one of my favorite Peanuts strips of all. It's just really funny. I've related this one from memory to people on several occasions. Artistically it's pretty good too, the characters don't look like disassociated images that don't relate to each other except by proximity here, which I think is a problem sometimes with Peanuts. Look at Snoopy jumping up on Charlie Brown, and the two running around the tree. I think this is Peanut's first really great Sunday strip. It all works extremely well here. Schulz must have been pleased with it himself, I think, and yet in the cartooning biz there is no time to bask in the glow of a well-made strip; it's always, immediately, on to the next one.

Notice Snoopy gets a thought balloon here containing English words (his second ever), but it isn't the traditional style. It has a tail here. Snoopy's reaction is priceless. "Can this be true?"

And in terms of construction this is also an excellent strip. It's one of the first Sunday strips which tells a complete story instead of a collage of related jokes. Notice how Charlie Brown and Snoopy's positions have become Patty and Charlie Brown's, respectively, in the last panel.