Showing posts with label fence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fence. Show all posts

Monday, August 8, 2011

Sunday, August 29, 1954: And there on the fence I saw drawn a giant X

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

I find the huge 'X' at the end of Lucy's aborted count to be starkly evocative. Those tally marks could be raindrops, or stars, or maybe lives.

Charlie Brown remembers Lucy counting the stars in previous strips. The spectre of continuity rears its head here, and with it, unavoidably, the characters move closer towards being individuals more than interchangeable placeholder images for jokes.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Week of June 28-July 3: Chin scratching, angle worms and treads

June 28

Which is weirder: that there is a source that catalogues the tongues of different animals, or that Charlie Brown is referring to it? If Peanuts were being drawn today, CB would probably be editing a Wikipedia page.

This strip reminds me of a favorite Sunday entry from later in the run, the "Linus is aware of his tongue" strip, that injects just a tiny bit of Lovecraftian biological horror into the cartoon world.

June 29

Imperfect circles? This strip is really about defining terms: mathematically, there are only perfect circles, but practically we call all kinds of things circles that aren't precisely obedient to the rules of geometry.

June 30

Continuing from last week, more of the "Snoopy gets scratched on the chin" sequence. Charlie Brown's amused smile in the last panel makes this one for me. No one can have a character pass judgment with a simple smile like Charles Schulz can.

July 1

Charlie Brown must have rather some serious self-esteem issues here, but really, what kind of insult is "angle worm" anyway. It's got to be a real insult, of that I have no doubt because the joke of the strip relies on the reader having prior knowledge of the term, but it still seems silly, which is probably why it's no longer, to my knowledge, in currency.

July 2

Third of the chin-scratching strips. It's okay when Lucy does it, but not when Charlie Brown does? This suggests either that CB has a harsh scratching technique (perhaps clued by the fact that Lucy's "tickles" are in word balloons while Charlie Brown's are without), or that Snoopy gets something out of having his chin scratched by girls.

July 3

Oh no, Charlie Brown's been run over by a truck!

Friday, July 15, 2011

Week of June 21-26, 1954: Self-love and baseball pictures

June 21

I like how the word "tickle" is drawn larger and darker to express how the force of Lucy's tickling is increasing. This is the first strip in a sequence actually; two more are coming next week.

June 22

The clever bit of this strip, I think, is how Snoopy is just sitting there up until the last panel, where it's suddenly revealed he's the umpire. A good strip I think.

June 23

1. It should be obvious that the intent of this strip is to express "Charlie Brown is a narcissist." This strip was drawn 47 years ago. So the implications of "Charlie Brown loves Charlie Brown," that is to say self-love, are rather different now, in the age of South Park, than back then.

2. Wait, Linus loves Violet? He's like one year old! We've barely seen him in a speaking role yet.

June 24

When you trade pictures with Schroeder, what do you expect you'd get?

There is something rather melancholy about this strip for me. Already we're seeing the age of baseball card collecting receding into the past. Here they're trading full-sized pictures of ballplayers, which I expect was never really popular but might have been a fad once. The day will come, and not too far from now, when this throwaway strip meant to be understood by kids and adults of 1954 will be one of the sole surviving records of baseball player picture trading. In fact, given both Peanuts' survivability and huge place in our culture, it may some day be the last record of a fad that may once have enthralled whole schoolyards.

Peanuts was not written to be a cultural artifact but to be comprehended to readers of the time. Comic strips are particularly ephemeral because of their nature, because it's too much to ask of a cartoonist tasked with producing new material daily to give thought to his work's long-term relevance. Yet so they remain, and will only increase being so in the future, vestiges of an age long dead.

But, you know, ha ha! He gave him a picture of Beethoven!

June 25

It may seem weird that Snoopy could hold so much water until you realize that he must be mostly sponge.

June 26

That's a damn frilly sandbox for Charlie Brown. And it's also a rare show of affluence for the kid. It's usually Violet who would have the frilly, expensive sandbox, and Charlie Brown who would be the observer, and it'd also be Violet who would be showing it off.

The attitude of Charlie Brown here is interesting. Who must have built this sandbox? I don't think his parents, and anyway I can't picture Charlie Brown speaking so badly of his folks. I think he must be talking about the workmen who installed it. But what could that mean, that he commissioned the thing?

Friday, May 20, 2011

February 23, 1953: At the Writin' Fence


Read this strip at gocomics.com.

I think we can safely assume that the upper graffiti is Patty's doing.  It is important to the joke here that Lucy is depicted as very young, so as to provide an explanation for the illegible scrawl on the bottom of the fence.  In fact, I think Schulz is actually cheating Lucy slightly shorter than she usually is, so the joke is clearer.

The strip for February 12, 1954 (presented here, fourth down) has Shermy writing on a similar wall.  On that strip, njguy54 commented that Shermy's use of cursive was "interesting."  It was, there, since who writes in cursive on large, vertical surfaces?  But the use of cursive here is much more important, since it provides important visual similarity between the two writings.

Did Schulz plan the two strips at the same time?  Probably; there are many examples of similar strips separated by a small number of days, enough to suggest part of his creation strategy: to hit upon some idea, to mine it for joke potential, then to draw some or all of the ideas, ideally seperated by a few days to keep things mixed up.

At some point, I conjecture, Schulz realizes that he doesn't always have to spread the strips apart like this, and he takes to running "theme weeks," where a number of consecutive strips feature a similar premise.  That eventually leads to sequences of linear storytelling, such as Charlie Brown progressively leading his baseball team to failure.  (Another sequence leading to that is the upcoming Lucy in the Golf Tournament story that plays over consecutive Sundays.)

Monday, April 25, 2011


January 19, 1954:

January 20, 1954:

January 21, 1954:

Let's do a few this time:
January 18: This strip is a callback to December 16, 1953.  Like that earlier strip, Schroeder's legs reveal attention to how they're braced against the fence.  Nowadays it seems weird that a kid would get off of school for his birthday, or that of any random classical composer.  That fence is weird -- it's in both strips.  This must be the edge of Schroeder's yard.  Chagrimace!

Of note for trivia contests: Schroeder's birthday is January 18.

January 19: It would be so easy to derive a political message from this strip.

January 20: This strip is something of a callback to July 2, 1953.  In that strip the kids are saddened by the prospect of being left with a babysitter.  Here, they're gloating at the prospect of the other being left behind.  Gradually, their relationship is evolving.

January 21: I like this one for how the shape of the notes in the last frame fill in the space between the top and the piano.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Christmas Day and New Year's Eve, 1953

December 25, 1953:

December 31, 1953:

The Christmas strip is another message to the reader, which I don't think generally work for Peanuts, but at least there's a joke to it this time. It's funny that, if you give him enough space, Charlie Brown draws his letters with serifs.

The New Year's Eve strip isn't holiday-specific, but is funny. It's something of a follow-up. I love Schulz's giant serif Zs, which we can take to indicate the sound, and loudness, of Snoopy's snoring. Schulz returns to this particular gag later.

The motion lines make it look like Snoopy is being thrown out of a basement.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

September 5, 1953: More on Lucy's picnic school career

Peanuts

Previously.

I still don't know what the heck picnic school is. Nice fence, though.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

March 30, 1953: Lucy could take the circus or leave it

Peanuts

I didn't get this one as a kid, reading Peanuts compilations from the library of our elementary school. I didn't get the meaning of the phrase "holding it over my head". Just another demonstration that Peanuts isn't really made for children.

Circuses really aren't all that hot when you think about it. Too much forced joviality, too much seediness just off the sidelines. (Of course, the seedy atmosphere is why some people like it.)

Too many clowns.

Friday, August 28, 2009

October 4, 1951: Editorial judgement

Peanuts

How does crossing the message out in panel three result in its seamless alteration in panel four?

Oh, and happy birthday Dad!

Sunday, June 21, 2009

August 7, 1951: Background detail

Peanuts

Panel two has one of the most detailed backgrounds seen so far. Just look at it. It's almost un-Peanuts-like.