Sunday, June 5, 1955: What's this? A piece of candy.

This one's more about Charlie Brown creating his own problem than any malice on Lucy's part. There are fun drawings of Snoopy in the first two panels, Schulz is loosening him up more and more. His body is longer now, and so is his snout, which enables him to smile a lot more broadly.

That's a good drawing of dismay on Charlie Brown's face in the next-to-last panel.

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It's been slow going here due to interference from other projects. The blog's not dead quite yet though.

Sunday, May 10, 1953: Lucy and the Balloon

Here we get a glimpse at the struggle that roils just beneath Lucy's exterior. Notice how she alternates between pleading and threatening? Speaking in terms of the development of her personality, the threatening would eventually win out. Later Lucy would probably pop the balloon just from the dire intensity of her incredible wrath.

The lead panels, not printed by some papers and thus optional, are interesting here. What do put put in those panels so that it's still understandable from their absence, but still in some way contributes to the story? Schulz had yet to hit upon his trick of putting an abstract drawing in the first panel. Here, they're used to underline the point that Lucy has anthropomorphized the balloon.

This is also the first strip I've noticed in which Peanut's catch-all expletive "Rats" is used.

May 8, 1953: Mania, meet mania

For those of you too young to remember those strange things called "ree-cords," they were fragile platters of vinyl on which were engraved grooves which, when used in the proper player, could reproduce sound.

The shockwave coming off of Schroeder's head in the last panel, is one of those comic conventions, here as a depiction of surprise or dismay, that is mostly just accepted. But what is it supposed to represent? What is it a visual metaphor for? What's to stop us from creating our own such visual metaphors? (I think it'd be fun to do this but make them crazy and nonsensical.) How do these things get invented and agreed upon?