Sunday, December 5, 1954: Large-format Pig-Pen

  

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

1. "Poor ol' Pig-Pen" indicates a certain amount of resignation from Charlie Brown concerning Pig-Pen's condition.
2. The joke about raising a cloud of dust while running on a sidewalk would be reused multiple times over Peanuts' run. This is the first use.
3. This is a hilarious strip in how throughly it imagines the intersection between those two ideas, "Pig-Pen" and "candy." "I can't get it out of my pocket... IT'S STUCK!" Oh god.
4. Pig-Pen is totally ignorant of Charlie Brown's discomfort. That kid must have an amazing immune system. I'm reminded of a bit from James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small books where the Yorkshire country vet describes the amazing health of the kids of the local knacker-man, who have been brought up all their lives amid the end-products of the most amazingly deadly livestock diseases.
5. Charlie Brown's concern for Snoopy's well-being is touching in a way.  The dog helped him out, it's only right he return the favor.  (If the candy had fallen on the ground, it might not have gotten any dirtier but Pig-Pen might not recognize it as being any more sullied.  He may even have found it there.)
6. Good grief!
7. Scribble of... what, really?

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Sorry for the delay in this update.  Foolishly, I went ahead and updated to iOS 5 only to discover my blogging client crashes when uploading images on it, so I'm going to have to use Blogger's web interface to post for a while.

November 22-27, 1954: Phooey to you, Charlie Brown!

November 22, 1954

People haven't really given apples to teachers, that I'm aware of, in the years since 1954, where as Charlie Brown remarks was already an outdated notion. And yet, we get this joke, the lore of teacher-apple-giving still lives. (My guess, which could easily be wrong, is that the custom arose as a way of helping to support teachers, who were traditionally spinsters.)

November 23, 1954

Oh, how I love this strip. It's awesome. I love it so much that, over on Metafilter, I've started using "phooey" as a general term of disdain, usually against people who are trolling or spouting incredibly stupid opinions. (Them: "I don't vote, and I don't see why anyone should!" Me: "Phooey to you. Phooey all over you.")

I think why I love this, more than how funny and yet satisfying it is to read "Phooey to you Charlie Brown," is that Schroeder says it twice. The first time we don't know why he's angry; the second time reminds us of his anger. It is perfectly constructed, it reads great, the sentence has a great rhythm, just, wow. This is one of my favorite strips to date.

November 24, 1954

This is either the beginning, or close to the beginning, of Lucy's obsession with bugs, which drives a good number of strips to come.

November 25, 1954

In case you hadn't noticed, Charlie Brown embarrasses easily.

November 26, 1954

A strip like this reminds us of how relatively recent casual sexism was. I'm not sure many comic characters could get away with Charlie Brown's rude summation, although to Schulz's credit it is rare that a male character gets away with declaring superiority to females without some form of rejection, refutation or comeuppance. Calvin might declare how much better boys are than girls, but he certainly wouldn't be allowed to get away with it.

November 27, 1954

The animated adaptions of Peanuts, in addition to not showing adults, also replaced speech with muted trumpet noises. I think the later days of the comic tried to get away with not printing adult words, but in the early days at least Schulz was not above the occasional adult speech balloon.

November 15-20, 1954: I've known people like that

November 15

This strip begins a sequence where Charlie Brown frets over Lucy's willful ignorance of the world. Coupled with the Sunday strip we just saw, I think we're now just at the beginning of Peanuts' "classic" period, where Schulz comes to more fully inhabit his characters and deal with them as people, with developing personalities.

November 16

Sarcasm is no use; Lucy is impervious to it.

November 17

One interesting thing about this sequence is that Charlie Brown is depicted as really worked up over Lucy's ignorance. Could it be that she's trolling him? From a modern perspective, from all the willful ignorance we see in the world today, I think I sympathize with Charlie Brown a bit more here.

November 18

For some reason here, I imagine Lucy as Stephen Colbert and Charlie Brown as one of his guests. That's a pretty funny drawing of Charlie Brown there, although it seems to suggest he might have a neurological condition.

November 19

Panel three here, that's one of the most frustrated looks we ever get out of Charlie Brown, I think. Later on he's more the type to suffer with a sigh, but he boils over here.

November 20

To finish out the week, a bit of silliness with Snoopy. Every one of these drawings of him is a winner, but I especially like the ones in the first and last panels. Peanuts have to be drawn carefully, I'd say; the characters depend heavily on the angle they are viewed at to read properly. This is actually true of most comic strips, but it's especially true of Peanuts. If the top of Snoopy's head were facing away from the reader in the last panel, I'm not sure there's any way he could be drawn that would read well. (Although it's entirely possible there IS such a way; I just can't think of it.)

November 7, 1954: Linus Van Pelt: Master of Card Houses and the Slow Burn

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Lucy is such a caring and supportive sister. Her laughter consists of the serif'd letters of malice.

I love how Linus carefully puts all the cards back in the pack before throwing it at Lucy.

November 1-6, 1954: Leaves can be surprisingly vindictive

November 1

This strip reminds me of later strips in which characters try to figure out what to do with jack-o-lanterns after Halloween. I seem to remember "Peppermint" Patty trying to make a pie.
November 2

Oh they look harmless, but don't make them mad!
November 3

More of Lucy's off-kilter way of looking at the world. She's old enough now that she knows a bit of the world, but isn't old enough that she has all the concepts right in her head, which I expect made her a fun character to write for. Which might explain why we've had a lot of her lately.
November 4

Why is Pig-Pen so happy in the third panel? The rest of it is easily understandable, but why is he so amused there? Is it because he knows Snoopy standing there and he sees the hole Charlie Brown is digging for himself? Is it just that he doesn't care how he is perceived?
November 5

Oh, to be delivered unto Lucy's tender mercies! Linus is right to be afraid. "AAGH" doesn't seem to be nearly frightened enough by my reckoning.
November 6

Well, getting a picture is a lot easier than taking a whole bath.

October 17, 1954: Outing Flannel

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This isn't Linus' first time with the security blanket, but it's the first time it's presented in terms of providing security. It's not called a "security blanket" yet, but it's almost there, it just needs to connect those two nouns with nothing else in-between. This is a term that entered our language largely because of Peanuts, so this is a momentous strip.

I like Lucy's loud "INSANELY happy!!" I can't picture that coming out of Nancy or Sluggo. Here Lucy is generally in favor of Linus' blanket. Her attitude later on wavers between for and against, with their blanket-hating grandmother pushing her against I think. Charlie Brown, contrary to his general opinion later, seems to be against it on principle, but willing to give it a try. Isn't a blanket more than just a swath of material, though?

Linus' expression in the first panel is interesting, an expression that doesn't read easily. The sequence from panels 6-8 are interesting for how unconcerned Charlie Brown and Lucy are about Linus' feelings throughout their conversation; his reactions to them are pretty funny.

Sunday, September 19, 1954: It's no fun if you just give it to him

The week of September 13-18 is missing from gocomics.com. It's just completely gone; the strip browse sequence goes directly from the Sunday strip of September 12 to the following Sunday.

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This is a good strip to contemplate how Snoopy's design has changed so far.

He began as a very puppyish dog, much smaller than any of the other characters. While very cute, he looked almost like a piece of clip-art. Many strips these days use images of their characters in various stock poses, but not Peanuts. Schulz gradually began loosening up the design of the characters. Snoopy is the character that would develop into the loosest, and although he's not there yet, he's a lot more flexible here than he was in those first comics.

Snoopy becomes quite thin (especially when standing upright) before expanding into the "balloon animal" shape of later strips. The drawings of him in the first panels are particularly engaging. The wide smile is a distinctive mark of classic Snoopy. I notice in panels six and eight, where you can't see his mouth at all, his snout looks a little thicker than in the other strips.

Week of August 16-21, 1954: Airplanes must fly around clouds or else crash

August 16

It is odd to think of Pig-Pen as going to kids and bumming sand off of them. I can understand if he's unnaturally attuned to the stuff, but it can't be that expensive can it?
August 17

Lucy is kinder here than she was back on February 15 16, but it's still a mean trick.
August 18

At this point Pig-Pen is rolling along as if he's going to become a major character. It won't be for too much longer I think.
August 19

One problem with the week-at-a-time format is, often there's just not much to say about a strip. I'll probably start leaving some out before long -- I didn't mean this to become a repost of every strip....
August 20

If Peanuts were still being printed er, I meant written today, Lucy would be denying climate change. Charlie Brown's reaction is priceless. I find this kind of reaction funnier than the headaches and stomaches the poor kid's afflicted with later.
In the last panel, Lucy's laughing expression, with the slanted eyebrows, is atypical for Peanuts.
August 21

Charlie Brown brings his hand to mouth in wonder in the third panel is nice. Peanuts kid arms are usually drawn as simple tubes, so I find the shape of his arm there interesting. Not hugely interesting, but still.

Week of August 2-7: Linus is very good at building card houses

This week, there is no sign of Patty, Shermy or Violet.

August 2:

The existence of fingerprints is a little convenient, don't you think?

August 3:

In 1954 Linus would be called a prodigy. Now, he'd probably get labeled autistic, or diagnosed with ADD. Although his ability to build things like card houses so quickly, or gravity-defying stacks of blocks, borders on the magical.

The first baby in the strip was Schroeder, who developed into a musical genius. Here we kind of see Schulz taking the same steps with Linus, although his personality became rather different.

August 4:

Do they have little flourishes at the edges of the ridges? Do the whorls form a delightful swooping pattern?

August 5:

Be careful what you beg for, Snoopy. I hope Linus didn't go back to sucking on that thing afterward. Notably, we don't actually see Snoopy link the thumb; we infer it from his reaction.

August 6:

Charlie Brown seeks to branch out into adventure comics. Adventure comic strips are a sad and moribund category any more so some of you might not be familiar with them. The real money now, such as it is, is in comic magazines*, with their X-people and their Superfolk and their Batguys and their....

* I've decided: I'm reviving this usage. Who's with me?

August 7:

Silly Lucy, everyone knows only the index finger contains a gun barrel.

Week of July 19-24: Some more Pig-Pen

July 19:

There are certain problems with having a genius for a friend. Sometimes, when a melody strikes your head at just the right angle, you just have to get it out, your prized copy of Detective Comics #1 not withstanding.

I like how Charlie Brown still calls it a "comic magazine." I guess that term was current at the time.

July 20:

This is before Pig-Pen's messiness becomes a quasi-magical ability in later strips, where dirt appears on him spontaneously while he walks down the street.

July 21:

Snoopy's ear doesn't really have the pointy tip that a shark's fin has. But, then, it's a wading pool.

July 22:

Heh heh, I like this one. Reminds me of Lucy's gray jellybeans.

Pig-Pen is remarkably forward with his request for candy. Charlie Brown will hint and plead, but Pig-Pen (I'm not abbreviating it for what I take will be obvious reasons) just says "Gonna give me some?" Most Pig-Pen strips end up being about his messiness, which is really a shame because he has a unique personality among all the Peanuts cast.

July 23:

This is very much classic Lucy in personality. I joke about her incredible wrath and compare her to Cthulhu, but she's not all bad. She is funnier that way though. This is a pretty funny strip in all. It's not hard to invent gags about a really dirty kid, although later on they become less about the raw fact of his dirt and more about how comfortable Pig-Pen is in his own skin (and the layer of grime that covers it).

July 24:

I love the way Lucy looks at Snoopy in the third panel. I have to wonder about the source of Charlie Brown's "imitation people" comment though. Maybe it was something in the cultural air at the time.

Week of July 12-17, 1954: Pig-Pen

July 12

It's funny, but before Linus comes on the scene, Lucy fills many of the same rolls, as someone Charlie Brown can just talk to. Maybe that's why she's so cruel to Linus.

July 13

He's here! This is Pig-Pen's first strip, and it's also the first real sequence in Peanuts, by which I mean, a good number of strips in a row that all deal with the same thing. Schulz has done multiple strips on a topic many times up to this point, but he's spread them out. (Lucy in the Golf Tournament could be considered such a sequence I suppose, but it's only over Sunday strips.)

Pig-Pen is also the first of a long long of minor characters. (Unless you could the realistic bird that harassed Snoopy recently, who has been seen once before.) And he's the most persistent of all of Peanuts' side cast. Sometimes months or even years may go between appearances, but Schulz never completely forgets about the kid. Contrast this with Charlotte Braun, or 5, or Roy, or Molly Volley. Pig-Pen is also longer-lived than most later major characters. Frieda appears frequently for a while, as does Eudora for a while, but both of them eventually fade into obscurity, while Pig-Pen remains, as steady as the earth with which he is covered.

Pig-Pen's annoyed statement that he doesn't have a name is funny, but is largely accurate. We never, to my knowledge, get a name for him.

Notice that it's Patty that first meets the kid. Violet and Lucy were first met by Charlie Brown. Schroeder was first met by Patty off-stage, but his first strip also had Charlie Brown. There! That's enough OCD for one day....

Patty describes Pig-Pen as "little," putting his age less than both hers and CB's. We don't yet have any information on whether Lucy is older or younger. While the ages between characters tend to compress over time, the order remains the same I think. This puts the order of ages at (">" means "is older than"):

Shermy & Patty > Charlie Brown > Violet > Schroeder > Pig-Pen & Lucy > Linus

July 14

Pig-Pen is the most zen-like of Peanuts' cast, even more so than Linus I think. He's a one-joke character but is very self-assured in his quirk. He sees absolutely nothing wrong with his messiness, he's comfortable with it, and I think there's something admirable in that.

July 15

Pig-Pen also has a sense of humor about himself. That implies being able to see himself from others' perspective, which itself implies maturity. Alternatively we could consider that this means he's internalized his messiness and considers it an alterable part of his personality, which could be regarded as a problem.

July 16

Snoopy's got word bubbles for his thoughts again. He actually uses them here while around another character; we're expected to see, I think, that his comments are a kind of internal monologue, presented theatrically.

July 17

Pig-Pen must spend a substantial amount of his time in the cleanliness/messiness cycle. Again, he is fully cognizant of his "fault," and doesn't consider it a fault at all. Later strips make it clear that Pig-Pen's dirtiness is actually a quasi-magical attribute; he gets dirty just walking down the street.

Pig-Pen's untied shoes are a nice touch.

Week of July 5-10, 1954: Developing personalities

July 5

This strip has been some time in coming. I love it. Charlie Brown's look of disgust in the third panel, and Schroeder's of dismay in the fourth are what make it. But also making this strip funnier is that we know by now that Schroeder is a Beethoven freak. We have that reminder in the second panel for those just coming to the strip, but Schulz is more confident that Schroeder's character is established now. Schroeder has been the least tabula rasa of the characters since that day he started playing the piano. Charlie Brown, whose attitude has been becoming steadily more defeatist, comes in second. Some other characters exhibit personality quirks (Lucy's winning streak at checkers & skill with golf, Patty's with marbles, Violet's obsession with mud pies) but not much personality yet.

Snoopy and Linus/Lucy/Schroeder-as-baby don't count, since up to this point they're mostly used in their capacity of dog and baby. Remember, the Peanuts characters got their start as a series of New Yorker-style one-off strips for the Saturday Evening Post. That kind of humor (some would hesitate to call it funny, I understand) is mostly about universal types in funny situations. Peanuts started out solidly as that kind of thing, but now the characters have made for themselves ruts, and those ruts are becoming worn in the soul.

As time passes, characters either develop these kinds of ruts (Lucy's loudness, brashness and anger management issues, Linus' philosophy, etc.) or become bland enough that they fade right out of the strip (Shermy, but also Patty and Violet eventually). It is interesting, I think, that after his success with Schroeder, who was Schulz's first unique creation, that he didn't go and try to do that with all his characters. I think it shows that he still values them as general people rather than specific ones, and perhaps that he views Schroeder's personality as something he shouldn't try to force.

Two more things:

First, although people have criticized the book Schulz and Peanuts for relating everything in the strip to Schulz's life (I think the approach has some merit, but maybe not that much), I think it might have been right about the nature of Patty, that the later character of "Peppermint" Patty is kind of a revision/realization of the original. And "Peppermint" is very strongly typed compared to original-Patty's blandness.

Second, next week we have the introduction of Peanuts' many side characters, who tend to be introduced more for having specific traits than for being every men/women. He's also by the far the longest-lived of these characters, for although gaps may occur in his appearance rate he is never forgotten about like the others.

July 6

Snoopy vs. the Living Room. It's cute, but not much else.

July 7

A group of misfits? Is this a 50s counterculture thing?

Notice the completely unnecessary birds in the background in the second panel.

July 8

But Charlie Brown, no one says you have to give some of your ice cream to Snoopy. I think your tendency to be swayed by begging is more what trapped you than your shadow.

July 9

Charlie Brown here talks to Snoopy as if he were a human. This is not necessarily unusual; I've known a few people who, even if they would admit if you directly asked them that animals don't understand our crazy moon language, still act pretty much like animals are just kind of overcoming a difficult language barrier, speaking loudly and slowly to emphasize to them some thing they aren't supposed to do. Sometimes I think animals must consider us to be crazy at best, and Lovecraftian, unknowable entities at worse.

July 10

I like this one. Schulz is referring to his own tendency to draw serif-Zs that would look at home on a wooden alphabet block.