Overthinking a plate of peanuts (which are a kind of bean)
A selective trip through all of Charles Schulz's classic comic strip. Updates daily.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh no, Charlie Brown's been run over by a truck!
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.
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.
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.
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!
It may seem weird that Snoopy could hold so much water until you realize that he must be mostly sponge.
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?
