May 1, 1955: Silly Snoopy, rope-jumping is for kids

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

A wonderful strip, mostly for the expressions on Snoopy's face. It's a difficult strip to visualize in motion though. Schulz is depicting the dog jumping rope as a (soon to be) standard Snoopydance, but it looks like he's skipping in a lot of little hops, if his hind feet are technically leaving the ground at all.

I think the strip works a little better with the lead-up panels giving Snoopy's enthusiams a little time to warm up, rather than just having him jump in after watching Lucy for a single frame.

 

January 24-29, 1955: Snoopy unmoors from reality

January 24

Another early Linus/Snoopy interaction. That's a rather overstated frown in the last panel there.

January 25

A simple gag about a kid not understanding an idiom. Yeah yeah, let's get to the real reason we're here:

January 26

THIS. One of the most important strips in Peanuts' entire run. The first strip in which Snoopy fantasizes about being something else. In these four panels we see the origin of the World War I Flying Ace, Joe Cool, and a hundred World Famous things. They are cute strips of course, but there are strange depths buried there.

This strip is a bit problematic mechanically though. Schulz uses a thought balloon for Snoopy's thoughts in the first panel, but in the second the balloon does double-duty as a thought and speech balloon, which makes it seem like Snoopy is speaking in English.

Charlie Brown's wide, amused smile is, in its way, as funny as Snoopy's snarl.

January 27

Lucy is willfully wrong about something else. Some notes here:
1. The subplot about Charlie Brown's paddleball is a nice touch.
2. The letters asked about and responded with are written with serifs and with little single-quotes around them.
3. Charlie Brown's annoyance that Lucy refuses to believe 'F' follows 'E' in the alphabet is interesting. He seems to care that Lucy get her facts straight, and takes it personally when she refuses to see reality. That's admirable in a way, but will probably cause him problems later in life, for there is no shortage of Lucys in the world.

January 28

When I was a kid, I would read these strips where Lucy is referred to calmly as a fussbudget, and the sarcasm flew roughly two miles over my head. It didn't help that Lucy would then respond without a trace of irony. The humor of Peanuts could be really dry sometimes.

January 29

Violet's smile throughout this strip is vaguely infuriating.

November 17, 1953: Lovecraftian horror!

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Oh it's not Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos; or Shub-Niggurath, Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young.  It's just Linus.  Just little, innocent Linus!

OR IS IT?

This is a retread of the "girls in stadium boots" strip from just ten months back, although the horror is more vague here.  Notice that it's entirely Charlie Brown who's getting worked up.  Lucy knows exactly what's going on.

November 11, 1953: Schroeder conducts in front of Snoopy, Take 2

Read this strip at gocomics.com

The previous Sunday strip had mostly the same idea, but with a different payoff.

I think this could be taken to show how careful Schulz is to mine his premises well. As I've said before, drawing a daily comic strip is one of the most creatively demanding occupations one could hope to find. Imagine the pressure of having to come up with one joke a day for the rest of your life. Schulz is showing good sense by getting additional gags out of his premises.

September 18, 1953: Made in Taiwan

Wait, what?! Is Snoopy wearing an ear-wig? And how does he blush through fur? WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU SNOOPY?!

April 21, 1953: Put 'em up, Snoopy

A very funny strip. The key to the humor, I think, is how Linux Linus maintains the same expression through it, just as if he knows how Snoopy will react.

Contrast this with Snoopy's discomfort around cats during Faron's short-lived stint on the strip, and his total fear of the dreaded Cat Next Door, he of the doghouse-rending claws.

EDIT: Made the correction above. Damn muscle memory.

March 21, 1953: Charlie Brown Is Not A Manipulator

Shermy's developed a fair amount since the early strips. Here's a strip with him from March 28, 1951, just two years before:



Of course Violet's changed a lot too, but we so rarely see Shermy.

The very earliest strips, to me, look like the kind of thing that might be drawn for a magazine periodical like the New Yorker, which fits Schulz's early sale to the Saturday Evening Post. The characters as we see them in today's strip up above are actually less stylized, they have proportions closer to the human norm, but they're also more obviously something of Schulz's own devising.

February 12, 1953: Hey! Hey!

Doesn't this actually just serve as more evidence that Charlie Brown's right? If Shermy had used Snoopy's name Charlie Brown wouldn't have thought he was being called.

September 16, 1952: Schroeder's dad is awesome

Watch Violet's arms in this one. Posing them in a way that looks natural and relevant to the scene is harder than it looks. There is an exaggeration to them here, but it's not too exaggerated.

July 3, 1952: Cute little puppy dog

How does someone with a face covered with hair blush?

Looking at Violet walking here, she looks very similar to the style of the characters for the next few years. She's almost at the proportions of classic Peanuts now. Charlie Brown is the human character who still looks the most like the original, with his oval head and thick eye-dots. And Snoopy takes still more time, and doesn't get to the familiar look for many years.

Turnabout strip! What does it say about the Peanuts world that chasing someone, presumably to inflict violence, happens so often?

June 13,1952: The shame of it all

Subtly revealing of Schroeder's personality. He's not just a musical genius, he's a picky genius.

May 23, 1952: Snoopy is not weighed down by life

This is a great strip. It has a theme I heartily agree with, it's cute, and shows a hint of Snoopy's developing personality. It could pass for a strip a few years later all except for the art style, which looks even better, I think, with old-style Snoopy doing it.

Notice that word balloons with music notes do not count against Snoopy's no-talking prohibition.

May 6, 1952: The monster is sighted

This is the first strip in which Lucy does something actively antagonistic against another character (who is not her unseen father). It is also quite a clever little joke on pool ol' Charlie Brown.

May 2, 1952: When Schroeder Met Snoopy

I believe Snoopy and Schroeder have been in the same strip before (a Sunday baseball one), but this seems to be the first one in which the two interact.

I suppose we should be thankful that Snoopy isn't a musical prodigy too.

February 19, 1951: Belittling remark

A rare piece of cartoon metaphor here, as Patty's words literally diminish Charlie Brown in stature. I think this is probably the only strip which does this. Schulz must have been dissatisfied with this solution, as later strips show embarrassment using cross-hatching to represent blushing.

Snoopy's smug look in the last panel is a winner. There are strips where Snoopy just sits there smiling, uncomprehending, like a real dog, and there are strips like this one where he has more of a personality. Not close to Snoopy's later brilliance, but still, a step along the way.