Sunday, July 4, 1954: Snoopy vs. The Bird

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Independence Day, 1954. Nothing patriotic or so here, but we do have the return of the Realistic Bird.

This is uncharacteristically violent of Snoopy. If he had caught that bird what would he have done with it? The thing's smaller than his mouth.

It is making a bit of an assumption, but it is possible that this is THE bird, Woodstock's mother. Woodstock came into the strip as one of a number of birds who were born there in a nest on Snoopy's stomach in a well-remembered sequence. She disappeared from the strip and was never seen again, although Schulz made a big thing about Woodstock's pining for her.

June 14-19, 1954: Let's play H-Bomb Test!

June 14

No cutting and pasting here. Charles Schulz draw out every "BANG" in this strip, or I don't see any at duplicates at least.
June 15

A simple Murphy's Law type of premise. It's another look at the famous doghouse too, which implies that Snoopy must have an owner, whoever it is.
June 16
gocomics.com's image for this strip is a duplicate of June 14th's. Can anyone with access to the Fantagraphics collection fill us in as to what's supposed to be here?
June 17

The drawing of Snoopy eating the ice cream scoop is rather charming.
June 18

History: Wikipedia notes "The first fusion bomb was tested by the United States in Operation Ivy on November 1, 1952, on Elugelab Island in the Enewetak (or Eniwetok) Atoll of the Marshall Islands, code-named 'Mike.'"
This is one of my favorite early strips, it really sticks out in my memory. Lucy is extremely, panel-fillingly loud for the first time, an ominous development from the young girl. The seriousness with which Charlie Brown pushes down the plunger and Patty holds her ears is great. And of course it's a reference to the biggest damn firecrackers the human race ever made, which were new developments at the time.
As a purely random aside, the comparison, however slight, between a child and a piece of nuclear weaponry unavoidably reminded me of this.
June 19

When you have two characters talking to each other in a comic strip, and their words are the point of the strip, it becomes necessary to have them do something with their bodies during that time. Unlike as with mere text, here a comic strip's graphic nature provides extraneous information, and could actually be distracting if not handled well, but if not considered could lead to the infamous "talking heads" effect. It happens enough, in most humor strips, that a cartoonist must make plans for it. (In dramatic strips, the quality of the drawing and the "camera angles" might be enough to sustain interest.) It is a fundamental problem for most cartoonists who hope to have careers longer than a couple of years. Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes would sometimes approach talky, philosophical strips by putting the two in a wagon and sending them over a cliff; this is one of the many reasons we love Calvin and Hobbes.
Throughout Peanuts' run, characters do various things when there's a talky strip, such as walking across a field, sitting beneath a tree of standing behind The Brick Wall. There are probably thousands of such strips, and this is one of them. It is probably not the case that Schulz obsessively planned these out, but in this one at least the art serves to accentuate the conversation: the balancing in the first panel illustrates the carefree nature of the conversation, Charlie Brown hiding behind the tree shows he's anxious about his upcoming revelation, and having the characters sit at a curb in the four panel lets Schulz draw CB in an appropriately slouched pose.
One thing about this strips that has always subtly bothered me is how rapidly the characters change poses. They go from playing on the curb, to walking across a field, to a small tree, then back to a curb, over the course of a three-sentence exchange in a single conversation. Peanuts characters are not generally shown as being hyperactive, but there is a certain restlessness here.

March 11-13, 1954: Three again, again

Read these strips at gocomics.com.

Some more glued-together strips. I'm going to have to go in and fix these when/if they correct these images.

March 11, 1954:
More head-patting from Snoopy, with another word-bubble depiction of his thoughts. The big punchline in A Charlie Brown Christmas when the kid puts his ornament on the Christmas Shrub, is kind of a callback to this.

March 12, 1954:
Taken with the last three strips, Schulz has alternated between Linus block strips and Snoopy head-pat strips this whole week. When he on a whim (it seems to me) made Schroeder into a musical prodigy it became a permanent part of his character, but Linus' block-building skills don't seem to have survived into the later years of the strip.

March 13, 1954:
Snoopy's versatile ears come to the rescue of his sensitive head.

Sunday, January 31, 1954: Snoopy, Time Lord

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This is the first strip that implies that Snoopy's doghouse has some extra-dimensional property, that it's bigger inside than outside, although one can take Schroeder's comment to suggest that the rec room is in a basement, and thus underground.  Dog houses don't usually have basements, true, but....

This strip is also evidence that Snoopy is not yet considered to be Charlie Brown's dog.  If Snoopy really were his, wouldn't he already know all this?  As a kid I stumbled upon this strip and wondered why the neighborhood kids were invited into Snoopy's doghouse while Charlie Brown was not, even though he was Snoopy's owner.  It seemed to project upon the kid a sense of being a social pariah that I think stuck with him when I read other, later strips.  Viewed in context with the Peanuts strips up to this point, he doesn't seem to be quite so excluded.

Does Snoopy's rec room have as low a clearance as his entrance?   That could be considered to be something of a flaw if the people he usually has over are all kids.

May 12, 1953: Snoopy's duplex

This strip is a variant of those previous sight-gag strips in which Snoopy's house had a TV antenna and where he lived in a hotel.

It's funny, but it also slowly pushes the edge on what is seen as "normal" in the Peanuts world. Snoopy's growth into his vibrant later personality is gradual, the change accomplished slowly through strips like this.

April 3, 1953: Kid spite

So they asked Charlie Brown for his opinion specifically to go against it? That's not very friendly. The wide smile on Schroeder's face doesn't seem to bear much malice; they don't appear to be intending to pass judgement on Charlie Brown with their action. It's just the way they decided to pick a color.

After a few strips that appeared to fairly solidly clinch Snoopy's owner as Charlie Brown, this one throws the question back up in the air a bit. Why would they be painting Snoopy's house if he were exclusively CB's? Wouldn't they grant his opinion a bit more weight in that situation?

Chagrimace!

November 13, 1952: The snowdog

Another strip in which Snoopy's human-like qualities form the punchline. I've said before, some of these strips seem like prototypes for the many snowman jokes of Calvin and Hobbes. (This isn't one of those, though.)

Sunday, October 19, 1952: Snoopy dance!

It's Snoopy's first time doing the "Happiness" dance, here with forelegs folded in a Russian style. It's also Snoopy's first time as the life of the party.

It's not his first time with a thought balloon. If I'm remembering right, it is the third legitimate time his thoughts have been represented. One of the two times was with the now-familiar thought bubble (with small circles replacing a tail), and the other time was like it is here, with a tail on the balloon. It is also the second time Snoopy's doghouse has been depicted with a TV antenna.

This is an important strip along Snoopy's development. Except for the way it is drawn, it could easily be a strip from ten years later. It is solidly Classic, as opposed to Early, Peanuts.

As far as the question of Snoopy's ownership, this is another step away from his being owned by Charlie Brown or another kid, back towards his being a neighborhood dog who's just "around," although he does seem to own his own house. (And a TV set and electrical power.)

February 7, 1952: Snob Dog

Oh come on now.

December 15, 1951: Doghouse Roof

At what point did Patty stop hanging out with Charlie Brown, and go to being more, along with Violet, of a co-antagonist?

My theory is it was about the time that Linus aged to the point of being CB's primary friend. Maybe it was something nagging at Schulz, how the main character of his strip, despite being around six or seven years old, seemed to be spending most of his time with girls. Shermy, for whatever reason, never seemed to relate to him the same way.

December 11, 1951: Snoopy Lives His Dream

Snoopy can't talk. He hasn't even gotten thought balloons yet. So, how does Charlie Brown know that Snoopy always wanted to live in a trailer? At least the barely-verbal Schroeder can play Beethoven.

September 6, 1951: Another dog?!

It's a dog other than Snoopy or his brothers! This strip establishes that, for now at least, Snoopy is noticeably smaller than other dogs.

September 4, 1951: Snoopy's yard

This one shows us, again, that Charlie Brown is probably not Snoopy's owner yet, but that someone owns him, or where else would he have gotten that doghouse? The expectation that his yard should be mown expands Snoopy's personality further; in the middle-era, when his doghouse burned down, it would be revealed that he lost a pool table and a Van Gogh in the fire.

The dial of a rotary phone is also visible here, which things, as I mentioned before, are now receding into memory.

April 27, 1951: First use of a blush

Is it just me, or does Snoopy's tongue being stuck out in the third frame seem a little like it's over-stating his attitude? Schulz usually leaves more to the reader's imagination.  But anyway, it's the first doghouse, or birdhouse I suppose, seen in the strip, so it's worthy of commemoration.  It also marks the first time a character blushes to show embarassment.