Sunday, June 22, 1952: For the Kiddies

I love this strip! I saw it when I was a little kid in an early Peanuts compilation and it's stuck in the back of my mind ever since. The "For the Kiddies" in funky script at the top drives the joke home.

Check out all the names: Mangle, Slaughter, Throttle, Jab, Terror, Choke, Crush, Run (something), Mob, War (twice), Thrill, Smash, Murder Comix, Killer, Hate, Ouch!, Hit!, Mur-something (maybe Murder again), Terror, Gouge, Stab!, Kick Komics, something I can't make out, Kill Komics, Murder Comics, Smash, and Blast Comics.

In addition to some rarely-seen cultural commentary from Charles Schulz in the form of those titles, we get Charlie Brown professing to being discouraged here. And the Druggist is basically an unseen character here.

Drug stores used to be an important center for the community. How far they've fallen since those days. I have never seen an operational soda fountain in a drug store in my life.

EDIT: Fixed comic.

October 5, 1951: Inconsiderate druggist

How about that spread of comic books? Were those days really all that long ago? It's hard to read it here, but I think the comic in the bottom-right corner of panel 2 is Nancy! And beside it is Tip Top, which appears to be a Universal Features Syndicate comic from that period that featured new adventures of their comic characters. (Universal Features Syndicate is Peanuts' owner and distributor.)

This is as good a time as any to talk about the Peanuts comic books. These weren't compilations; they were actual comic books with material created specifically for them. I don't know much about them, but I do know that some (maybe all?) of them have Peanuts art not drawn by Charles Schulz. I remember seeing one book strip somewhere on the web that I saved a copy of (and was probably lost in a recent hard drive crash, unfortunately) which involved Linus and Snoopy meeting a small robot that grabbed Linus' blanket, inserted it into a slot on the robot's body, made a grinding noise for a panel, then neatly pooped it out into a pile of pastel threads.

Forget about Shermy and Faron. Gimmie back Blanket Pooping Robot!

Some information on them appears to be here. Here's Aaugh.com's history and guide to the books.