January 10-15, 1955: Lucy is hard on toys

January 10

A disturbing insight into Lucy's attitude towards property.

January 11

For some reason this strip reminds me of that disco version of Beethoven's 5th Symphony.

January 12

That's kind of hyperbolic. Lucy didn't even know what a metronome was before Monday!

January 13

Girls in Peanuts tend to be rather more rough-and-tumble than in other strips. Lucy, of course, eventually gets to where she won't think twice about returning a slug in the jaw for an insult. "Peppermint" Patty won't even be arriving on the scene for many years yet.

January 14

When someone tells you to close your eyes, yeah, it's usually a good idea not to if you can get away with it. Anyway, why doesn't Violet just rummage through her candy bag facing the other way?

January 15

An enthusiastic speech by Schroeder, boldly staking his claim as the neighborhood artist.

June 19, 1952: They grow up so fast

A momentous strip: Lucy has lost her eye-circles then facing forward! And she's talking just like everyone else! And she isn't referring to herself in third-person anymore! And it reveals a glimmer of the raging inferno beneath the surface too! Oh, it's also a funny strip.

(Note that there is a Sunday strip coming up where she has eye circles. And in a couple of months she refers to herself in the third person one more time. This doesn't mean Lucy's early self is entirely banished just yet....)

June 5, 1952: Standing on one foot

Lucy's monomania is developing in this strip, but I link it mostly because you get a really good look at her clothes in this one.

Lucy wore two primary outfits that I know of in Peanuts' run. This shows her earlier outfit and the one she wore during most of the classic period, a slightly formal number with a bow in the back, and colored blue on Sundays. Here the skirt is fairly normal, later on it would become highly stylized and stick out almost at right angles to her body. In later years, probably as a nod to changing fashions, Schulz would adopt a kind of jumpsuit for her attire, which made her look vaguely more athletic.

She still has the round eyes here. I never get tired of pointing them out. They won't be here much longer. When Linus shows up, which is in a month or two I think, he has the same eye style as Lucy but from the start he has her parenthesis, or "Binkley," eyes.

May 14, 1952: Lucy in Profile

Slowly over the months, the character's shapes have been edging closer to the modern style.

All of the characters except Lucy have thick eye-dots, solid little ovals of black. Lucy instead has those wide circle-eyes, at least when we see her from the front. Here she's only seen from the side; when seen in profile, or when she's looking at something out of the corner of her eye, Schulz tends not to draw the complete circle, which makes her look a lot more like her modern look.

Thus in this strip, Lucy looks very much like she does in the years to follow.

April 8, 1952: Followed By Monomaniacal

I love the look on Lucy's face in the third panel. The glaring round eyes really work for that one.

It might just be the printing, or the scan, but the second panel looks like Schulz didn't completely encircle the eyes, they look more like the parenthesis eyes Lucy and Linus get later.

June 18, 1953: "And soon I'll know the wonders of the sunken city."

There is an unexplained gap in Comic.com's archives over June 10-17.  I should have a look in Fantagraphic's Peanuts compilations to see if strips are missing or if Peanuts was on hiatus during that period.

This is a vaguely creepy strip.  If the eyes aren't Charlie Brown's, whose are they?  And why is he hanging out in the sewer?  My vote goes to a suburban Deep One. (That's right, Peanuts and the Cthulhu Mythos, baby!)