April 5, 1954: Snoopy will not be deterred

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Another Snoopy power! This makes sense once you realize that Snoopy's open mouth is magnetically attracted to treats. (Oh if you want to be boring you could say he just smelled it.)

Snoopy is slowly becoming looser in design, and it has been good for the character. He was almost like a piece of clip-art at first, but now he's slowly growing larger (more obvious when he's walking -- note how large he is in the last panel compared to the rest of the strip) and his mouth is capable of opening wider, in the second panel here particularly. He's slowly turning into the outgoing, wildly imaginative werewolf we all know.

December 17 & 18, 1953: Two with Linus

December 17, 1953

 December 18, 1953

Both of these strips show off Linus' overalls, which would much later be seen on Rerun.  Whether they are hand-me-downs is unknown to me.

The first strip is another of the "Snoopy and Linus annoy each other watching TV" series.  The second has an unusual "Oh, my!" pose from Charlie Brown in the first panel.

November 24, 1952: Linus' shirt

This strip is a continuation of the gag of Snoopy's hypersensitivity towards potential sources of treats, but it's also the first strip in which Linus wears his familiar striped shirt, or indeed a shirt of any kind. He's also out of diapers.

It's another strip, too, where Snoopy gets a thought balloon, and one with a thought-tail instead of a word-tail. Schulz still hasn't gotten the convention down entirely though, and in upcoming strips both kinds of tails are seen on Snoopy's thought bubbles.

May 22, 1952: Lucy requires a lot of supervision

Lucy and her long-suffering father again. It'll be nice when she loses those huge eyes.

Two strips seem to be missing from Comics.com's archive, May 20 and 21. Anyone know what we missed?

April 30, 1952: Smaller characters

This strip seems a little under-depicted. Watching Snoopy sliding to a halt in the third panel seems abrupt without seeing him run in the second panel.

Look at the first panel here. The characters viewed from a distance are rendered a little more simply to simulate the increased distance from the reader. Particularly, Lucy's eyes are simple dots instead of circles, making her look a bit more like modern Lucy.

Sunday, March 30, 1952: Lucy's developing taste in music

Lucy is especially baby-like in this one. Since the strip has a new resident infant, it frees Schroeder up to solely be the musician. Weirdly, in this strip Lucy has probably said more than Schroeder has in the entire run up to this point.

This is the first strip to exhibit Lucy's early tendency to refer to herself in the third person. Of all the Peanuts characters, I think Lucy might be the one to change the most. Even more than Snoopy.

There are weirder things still here. Lucy looks extra creepy in the first panel up there, and her words in the next-to-last panel seem oddly chosen, if explainable by her lack of skill in the language. In the last panel Schulz finds a good compromise between the circled-eyes look and general character appeal. It is a prototype of the parenthesis eyes that Lucy would adapt for the majority of Peanuts' run, the same type that Linus has out the gate.

February 23, 1954: Hey, guess what it's made of!

IT'S MUD MUD MUD I TELL YOU MMUUUDD HEAP IT ON MY LAST PLATE DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH WORM

At least now she sees that it's not edible.

December 22, 1951: And A Bite For Beethoven

The teddy bear in panel two is only there to make sense out of his inclusion in Patty's words in panel three.

Although this is a baby joke strip, Schulz still slipped in that Beethoven reference in there.

Charlie Brown gets no respect.

November 9, 1951: Return of the kiddy table

Again, the tiny table and chairs. I like this strip in general actually. It's hard to imagine later Charlie Brown saying something like "Bread isn't worth it."

August 27, 1951: Baby vs. Dog

A funny strip, though a variant of the ball throwing one from a few days ago. How about Schroeder's "talk to the hand" gesture in the second panel?

Notice that, to signal the characters eating, Schulz resorted to word balloons saying "chomp chomp" and "smack smack."

Also, it's not their first appearance by any means, but check out the fancy question-marks in the second and fourth panels, which were kind of a Schulz trademark in the early days.

And: scribble of ire!

May 16, 1951: Beware of dog

Snoopy's a nice touch here, although is it just me or does he look like was added as an afterthought?  It has to do with his mouth overlapping the ice cream in the last panel.

One of the more pernicious influences of Peanuts is a number of cartoonists who think it's acceptable to make clip art of their characters in all their poses and just paste them into the document. Schulz was far too much of a craftsman to resort to this, but he did admit that he had a number of stock poses he'd most often draw the characters in.

Snoopy's appearance in the last panel here looks like it was just overlaid upon the frame, but I think it's more likely that Charles Schulz just lightly inked the overlaying portion of the cone. If the cone were drawn to the point where Snoopy's snout directly overlaid it it'd be harder to read. You can occasionally see the light inking idea in other strips in the early era, when a character is standing in front of another, for example.

May 3, 1951: Before "sugar rush" entered the vocabulary

The Snoopy-hears-food pattern is formula; the varition is that Charlie Brown's already eaten all the candy.  Snoopy would even do this much later.

Note Charlie Brown's round eyes in frame 3.  Lucy starts out with those as standard equipment but they don't last long.  The parenthesis around her and Linus' eyes (I call them "Binkley eyes," after the Bloom County/Outland/Opus character) are a remaining vestige of that.

May 2, 1951: Snoopy likes bananas

This is not actually the first Snoopy-hears-food strip.  In the first, Charlie Brown was eating an ice cream cone.  It's another running gag.

November 27, 1950: Everything is food, food, food

Snoopy's gluttony is established here for pretty much the first time.  Notice the "smile with tongue" he wears in the last frame.  This will often be used for Snoopy when he's looking at food, or is actually eating, in upcoming strips, almost to the point of cliche.