November 29-December 4: GOOD OL' CHARLOTTE BRAUN

November 29, 1954

He is a dog, after all. I'm surprised that Snoopy's amazing, candy-detecting nose failed to realize Charlie Brown had no candy on him.

November 30, 1954

Here is introduced the second of Peanuts' one-joke characters, and the first character to eventually leave its cast. 'Pig-Pen' lasts until nearly the end of the strip because there have always been, and could well always be, dirty kids. Poor ol' Charlotte Braun's niche gets taken up by Lucy pretty quickly though.

How weird is it that CB's friends tend to call him "Good Ol'" Charlie Brown, and that he remarks upon it?

December 1, 1954

This is one of those strips where the setting changes from panel to panel in such a way that it implies that the conversation is longer than we're seeing on the page. Particularly, between panels two and three, Violet and Charlotte suddenly go from standing on a path to sitting at a curb, and Charlie Brown has had materialize a tree to ineffectively hide behind -- which suggests that Charlie Brown has been stalking the two to eavesdrop on their conversation.

December 2, 1954

December 3, 1954

Charlotte's mouth in the third panel is pretty funny. I think, some time later, some of Charlotte's character was used for Sally; the hair is somewhat similar, and she has a similar head shape.

Snoopy shows distress very well. And I love how Charlotte doesn't even look particularly distressed when she shouts in the last panel. The reactions of Charlie Brown and Snoopy serve to illustrate her volume.

December 4, 1954

I don't think this will be the last time we see those words spoken. Scribble of ire!

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.

Sunday, January 3, 1954: More of Lucy's infatuation with Schroeder

Read this comic at gocomics.com.

We've recently seen more hints about Lucy's developing self-centered personality.  We've seen a little of it before in one prior strip, but this here is the true beginning of Lucy's long-running crush on Schroeder, what Charles Schulz had been known to call her "weakness."

While Lucy can be bossy, crabby and fussy, in some ways she's rather admirable.  She has a very strong personality, is (usually) very confident, and doesn't often take 'no' for an answer.  The second panel here is a good depiction of this side of her.  Generally the Schroeder strips depict Lucy at her best, although this is far from universal.

Panel three is rather abrupt if the first two panels, which newspapers sometimes remove, are missing.  The only previous hint of Lucy having a crush on Schroeder was that other strip almost a whole year back.





Most Lucy vs. Schroeder strips make the musician a bit more inscrutable.  We're usually on Lucy's side in the struggle.  That had yet to develop in this strip, which is more egalitarian in presenting clash of the characters' wants.

We get another somersault here.

September 30, 1953: You won't know for sure until you count them

This strip marks the beginning of one of Schulz's longer-running jokes in the days of early Peanuts: Lucy counting the number of stars in the sky. She keeps that up for years.

Sunday, July 5, 1953: First use of "real" extras

We've seen one-use animals other than Snoopy before (a dog and two birds), and we had one strip in which we saw other kids from a distance. But this here is the first time in Peanuts we've seen entirely non-regular character designs as throwaways. Also included: the first kid with glasses, and a kid with a "Jughead" hat.

Note: of all the extras in that sandbox, only two of them are girls, and both are cast members. Also, Violet wears her hair down this time; she's got it in a bob most appearances now.

The tiers of Peanuts characters:
"Cast" characters are the main guys. There are some characters who, once they arrive, are frequently seen for a while. Some of these are long-term characters (like Charlie Brown, who was in the first strip and the last).

We might call "understudy" characters those who join for a little while, like Frieda, but then digress into occasional appearances, usually disappearing completely some time later. Eudora is also one of these, I'd say.

Some never seem to progress beyond being bit characters. These guys are usually introduced as part of a story, and sometimes get used as extras in group scenes. Roy is a good example; he's not quite an extra, and in fact has an important place in Peanuts history for introducing Charlie Brown to "Peppermint" Patty, but he never really joins the main cast. I think "5" and his sisters, the twins "3" and "4," are also in this category. (The digit kids aren't much remembered now, but are notable for appearing in the dance scenes in A Charlie Brown Christmas.)

June 30, 1953: Linus' first steps

Linked for notability.

When Rerun joins the cast much later, in a way it's almost like these early strips with Linus return. Rerun looks so much like Linus, even if his personality is a little different, that it's hard to escape the conclusion that Schulz named him as a self-referential joke.

Sunday, April 26, 1953: Lucy's skill at golf, and Peanuts' 60th Anniversary

These frames contain some of the more action-oriented Peanuts poses. Particularly frame 5. Later on the female characters' dresses sort of stiffen and flatten out, becoming like dinner plates around their waists, but Lucy's skirt in that panel is one of the most skirt-like skirts Schulz ever drew for Peanuts.

This strip is a foreshadowing of one of the weirdest sequences in the entire strip, the "Lucy in the golf tournament" sequence that played out over successive Sunday strips. That's not coming around for another year, though....

---

From the comments to yesterday's post:
Michael Jones said...
Happy 60th Anniversary! I hope you have something special planned for Oct. 2nd.

Er, why, yes! Yes I have, I, uh, I've been planning it for months, yeah, just let me for a sec--

SCRAMBLE TYPE PASTE THINK WORK WORK WORK

...well it is a special occasion. For today, the 60th anniversary of publication of the first Peanuts strip, let's break the sequential ordering and take a look at that strange sequence alluded to in the post above. What we present here is nothing less than... and this is deserving I think of the full-out giant text treatment:

THE TIME PEANUTS SHOWED ADULT FIGURES!

Oh yeah, for all you trivia quizzers this should be like gold. I'll present all four Sunday strips then discuss them afterward:

Sunday, May 9, 1954


Sunday, May 16, 1954


Sunday, May 24, 1954


Sunday, May 30, 1954


Oh, where to begin?

First, Peanuts hasn't had many sequences up to this point. To this point we haven't seen any week-long "stories" of themed strips. Yet in these strips we not only have a sequential story, we have square-bordered "CONTINUED" notes, a big promotional box at the end of the first strip, and we have very little actual humor, replaced here with straight narrative.

It's almost like... (gasp)... a continuity strip. It's a bold experiment on the part of Mr. Schulz, although not really a successful one. As far as I know Schulz never returned to the style. It's enough to make one wonder why here, three-and-a-half years in, he considered changing it up.

Was he trying to attract a new audience? Possibly. I don't think Peanuts was unpopular at the time but it had yet to hit upon its greatest popularity, possibly because, although an excellent gag strip, its characters hadn't yet achieved the depths which marked them as works of genius, which would imprint them indelibly upon our age. Here Linus is still a baby and hasn't quoted the Old Testament, Snoopy has yet to have had an imaginative leap, and while Charlie Brown's losing streak at checkers is up to an improbable 10,000 games (thanks to Lucy), at baseball it's still only a game or two.

It's also possible that he was tiring of the limits of the form. I've said before that drawing a daily comic strip is basically a creative meat-grinder; having to come up with something funny to say every day for the rest of your life. Many strips eventually resort to hiring a writing staff (as is the case with Garfield). Schulz, however, famously wrote and drew every strip himself.

Some cartoonists make it work, of course. Ernie Bushmiller, of Nancy, brought a kind of genius to it, but it was genius of a lesser gauge than Schulz's, the genius of endless invention within limited parameters. Schulz, who had wanted to become a cartoonist since childhood, now placed in the role he had long sought and performed it over a thousand times by now, must have thought at some point before now, "Is this it? A joke a day, forever?"

You haven't seen most of them yet, but in the weeks before this sequence there are several strips which have Charlie Brown drawing a comic strip (somewhat humorously on full-sized comic panel boards almost as big as he is), then showing them to his friends who fail utterly to get his joke. In cartooning, I posit, you don't have the luxury of keeping secrets from your readers; when you're forced to mine your brain for new ideas so often, the things that are on your mind will unavoidably come out onto the page. If we accept that, we have to see Schulz in these strips as poking fun as his own pretensions.

It is my theory, and it is not one that I really have any support for except for thinking how he might have chafed at that fate, that it was dissatisfaction with running a simple gag strip, no matter how witty and clever, that caused him, before long, to attempt greater things with his characters.

Second, yes, let's talk about the adult figures. If you go back to the earliest strips and examine how the characters were drawn, it's difficult to imagine what an adult figure of that style would look like. (If you'd like to see, this page has some of his Saturday Evening Post work including one strip with adults.)

The characters have evolved considerably over the first three years, have become more realistically-proportioned, and it's not as much of a stretch to imagine an adult version of one of them.

These strips don't often make it into compilations, maybe for good reason. Peanuts' world can exist only in the absence of adults. How can we justify this rather strange inclusion of full-sized human figures in this realm of children? I do it by observing that the adults are used mostly as scenery. In the second and third strips they extend off-frame before you can see their heads, and in the fourth their heads quite conspicuously don't have faces, which makes them strangely not like real people. When confronted about these strips, Schulz has been recorded as saying the use of the adult figures was a failed experiment.

Charles Schulz draw another strip for a short time called "It's Only A Game," which more frequently featured representations of adults. Fivecentsplease has an informative page on this forgotten piece of Peanuts history, as well as the story of its partly-uncredited ghost artist Jim Sasseville.

Here are some of the more usual nitpicky things:
How on earth could Lucy, who is I think four or five years old at this point, do well in an adult golf tournament? The issue isn't her gender Charlie Brown, it's her size! I think it works, however, by playing off the wonder of her accomplishment.
Speaking of which, the characters actually seem to be smaller than usual in the second and third strips (I'm judging height from those strips where the kids have to reach for doorknobs), but seem to be more realistically-sized in the last.

Other firsts in this sequence:
This is the first time Lucy is referred to by her full first name, Lucille, long before "Peppermint" Patty arrives on the scene. This is also, if I'm remembering right, the first use of her last name, "Van Pelt." Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography reveals that Van Pelt was the name of a friend of Charles Schulz's who sometimes played bridge with him and his first wife Joyce.
It's the first mention of real-world sports stars, and it may actually be the first mention of people living contemporary with the drawing and publication of the strip. (Other "real world" figures mentioned to date have been the composers of Schroeder's musical pieces.)
This is not the first time Schulz has spoken directly to the reader in titles or captions. That was a few Sunday strips earlier, in an oddly-titled strip named "The Croquet Game." It's the first (and I believe only) use of captions, and promoting of future strips.
The sign announcing the tournament lists the current year, which is the first definite in-strip indication of the time the strip takes place.
I think this is the first time we see she characters silhouetted in the distance.
This is the first aerial shot of any characters.
The adults are not the first "extras" used in Peanuts, but they're close. We've already seen the first extras a few strips ago, additional kids added to fill out a baseball game.
The idea of the whole sequence (a character unexpectedly excels, pursues a competition to the cusp of victory, but comes to a halt at the moment before complete success) foreshadows the Peanuts movie "A Boy Named Charlie Brown," where CB goes to a national spelling bee, but at the last word fails in front of a national audience.

One last thing: chagrimace!

April 4, 1953: Of interest to trivia quizzers

Q: In the comic strip Peanuts, what is Violet's last name?



[In case the img source for this comic goes dark later: it is Gray.]

Characters with last names that we know:
Charlie (and Sally) Brown (of course)
Linus and Lucy (and Rerun) Van Pelt
and now: Violet Gray

There are a few other characters with known last names. "Peppermint" Patty has one, Reichardt.

February 19, 1953: Lucy works on her psychoanalysis degree

Lucy provides a dismissive, yet possibly accurate, diagnosis of a character from literature. It's the first time Lucy does something that could be considered psychiatry (seen practiced later from her famous booth), and the first time the strip has directly named some behavior as neurotic, an important step towards the sophistication of its classic period.

Sunday, February 15, 1953: Linus is scornful

This is the second strip in which Lucy demonstrates her great capacity for malice, after the "Don't murder me Charlie Brown" one a few months ago.

It could also be considered to be Linus' first word.

Valentine's Day, 1953: The First Time Charlie Brown Got No Valentines

The Little Red-Haired Girl is some time off, but still, this is the first time Charlie Brown is depressed from getting no valentines. It's got a "chagrimace" and everything.

Aren't school valentines a shamefully artificial thing these days anyway? In order to prevent kids from feeling rejected, I seem to remember that we were encouraged to just give one to everyone in class, regardless of gender.

Sunday, November 23, 1952: CTHULHU RISES

Blogger sometimes takes posts I've set to publish and makes them drafts instead, which once in a while results in strips getting overlooked. Sometimes it doesn't matter much, but this strip is incredibly important, so I'm using it even though it's a couple months old by this point:



This seems to be the first act of full-on spite Lucy commits that cannot be explained by familial antipathy or mere childishness. It is an act of pure evil by her, and it's glorious. Look at that little smile on her face in panel six. It's against her favorite punching dummy, too. And Charlie Brown was so happy in the throwaway panels!

We even get that "down on his luck" slanted mouth in the last panel.

Schulz had many, many positive attributes as a cartoonist, but there are a couple of things in these early days he could have used some improvement on. One of them was in varying his phrasing; here, Lucy uses the "slaughter" line twice, which is a bit awkward. This isn't the only strip in which this defect can be seen. As Schulz gains experience writing dialogue I believe these errors eventually go away.

December 3, 1952: WISHY-WASHY

This is the first time the term "wishy-washy" has been used in Peanuts, and the first time it is used to describe Charlie Brown.

As a kid, I wondered what it was about the term that made it so bad to be that. I'd say it has less of a negative connotation now, which may be why the later decades of the strip stopped using it.

Sunday, November 16, 1952: THE FOOTBALL

It's the first of the (eventually) yearly strips where Lucy holds the football and Charlie Brown, for whatever reason, fails to kick it. The WHOMP in the last panel echos throughout the decades; through it, we hear history.

The first time it happens, as we see, there was no malice in Lucy's act, and there's no iconic AUUGGHH either. Charlie Brown's rueful reaction in the last panel certainly seems familiar though.

I've looked ahead a bit recently, and I'm pretty certain that the next year doesn't have another football strip. We might consider it compensation that Charlie Brown ends up on his back twice in this one.

To think, Lucy doesn't consider it a good idea....

November 7, 1952: Fussbudget

This is the first time the word "fussbudget" has been used in the strip. Now this word is almost impossible to separate from Peanuts. It is always, or nearly always at least, connected with Lucy.

Lucy hasn't been extremely fussy up to this point, but in Peanuts, when another character makes explicit reference to some trait supposedly possessed by another character, that tends to be the point where that other character begins exhibiting that trait as a defining characteristic. In other words, when someone is labeled, the label becomes indelibly part of them.

This is how most Peanuts characters evolved over time, and especially how they gained the traits for which they became memorable.

Sunday, October 19, 1952: Snoopy dance!

It's Snoopy's first time doing the "Happiness" dance, here with forelegs folded in a Russian style. It's also Snoopy's first time as the life of the party.

It's not his first time with a thought balloon. If I'm remembering right, it is the third legitimate time his thoughts have been represented. One of the two times was with the now-familiar thought bubble (with small circles replacing a tail), and the other time was like it is here, with a tail on the balloon. It is also the second time Snoopy's doghouse has been depicted with a TV antenna.

This is an important strip along Snoopy's development. Except for the way it is drawn, it could easily be a strip from ten years later. It is solidly Classic, as opposed to Early, Peanuts.

As far as the question of Snoopy's ownership, this is another step away from his being owned by Charlie Brown or another kid, back towards his being a neighborhood dog who's just "around," although he does seem to own his own house. (And a TV set and electrical power.)

September 19, 1952: Linus' first strip

And here's Linus. This puts the breaks on the introduction of new characters for a little while I think. So far that makes, in order of introduction: Shermy, Patty, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Violet, Schroeder, Lucy and Linus.

Linus is a little rancorous at the beginning, but settles soon into his Wise Soul persona, which pares nicely with Lucy's developing belligerence. Notice he doesn't start out with his blanket.

Linus doesn't undergo the drastic redesigns the other characters have, and are still having, but he still has some developing to do. Notice his hair, while unruly, has more structure here that it does later on.

September 8, 1952: God of the moving image

(For some reason this one didn't go up when it was scheduled....)



We've seen plenty of radios in prior strips, but this is the first TV set.

July 8, 1952: HE SPEAKS

Schroeder utters complete sentences!

Also, he can somehow whistle chords!

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....)