March 15-17, 1954: Three for free

Read these strips at gocomics.com.

Three more conjoined strips, caused when whoever scanned these forgot to crop.

March 15, 1954:
A funny strip in general.  Charlie Brown is not one to let a card go to waste, even if it's not really suited for its purpose.  At least we should be glad Schroeder isn't giving out Beethoven's Birthday cards.  Yet.

March 16, 1954:
Snoopy is using thought balloons!  I think he used them one time before, but this time I think it "takes."  Good faces on Snoopy here.

March 17, 1954:
Patty is unexpectedly a marbles shark.  Not as bad as Lucy at checkers, but still.  What do marbles champs do with all their winnings?  She must have a huge collection of the things by now.  I wonder if the marbles companies engineered the whole "playing for keeps" idea, the same way Wizards of the Coast put playing "for ante" in the official rules to Magic: The Gathering?

November 24, 1953: Charlie Brown *still* has a big, round head

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Maybe I should start categorizing these.  This is a type of joke we've seen several times before, beginning with the beach ball strip.  That began as a kind of comment Schulz made about his art style.  This is Lucy's second time making a joke at the expense of Charlie Brown's head.  The "WHEE!" is new however.

This is a chase strip, but it's not a "turnabout" strip because Charlie Brown has a reaction shot in the penultimate panel.

Sunday, August 30, 1953: It looks a bit like this

There are two versions of this premise. There's the one where one of the characters directly compares CB's head to a ball (usually concluded with a chase), and there's instances such as this one where a character indirectly remarks that Charlie Brown's head is round like a ball.

The very first joke about the size and shape of CB's head was of the second type, when the kid was in the water and Patty and Violet wondered why a beachball had floated out so far.

This is far from the last joke about the poor boy's head.

July 16-17, 1953: Linus, the Baby Gravity Hates

Linus falls over a lot. Yet oddly for such a clumsy child, when he manages to stay upright he shows himself capable of great feats of dexterity. I think it's due to the relative size of his head....

March 6, 1952: Three-quarters angled down Violet head

This is a fairly ordinary strip, but it's worth posting for the view of Violet's head in the third panel, which is quite interesting. The angle works pretty well I think.