December 20-25, 1954: Square Balloons and Christmas Day

December 20

Here's another early sequence, in which Linus confounds Charlie Brown by blowing balloons into cubes. I've joked about Linus having uncanny powers, but how else can you explain this?

December 21

At least you can stack them neatly this way.

December 22

Look at Lucy's look of horror in the second panel. This strip makes it a little more clear what Schulz is getting at with this sequence. Although blowing up balloons into squares is a marvelous skill, Charlie Brown seems to think it's something wrong somehow, and Lucy thinks it'll bring dishonor to her house. I guess people put more importance into balloon-inflating style back in 1954.

December 23

Even if he tries to blow it up into a rough sphere, it comes out square. This could be taken as a metaphor for something I suppose. Actually, multiple somethings.

December 24

What would happen if you gave Linus an innertube to blow up?

Christmas Day

"Hey! Come back with my pagan idol of music!" "Take it easy, I'm just replacing it with a good, honest Christian symbol! Er, that used to be an element of nature-worship. Merry Christmas!"

We'll have more of Charlie Brown and Schroeder and Christmas next time....

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?

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.

January 1, 1953: Shaking it dislodges the notes

Just a playful strip. The notes spelling words, of course, is a variation of the Christmas Day strip just a week before.

December 24 & Christmas Day, 1952

It's the canonical summer holiday, in the U.S. at least, so let's look at a couple of Christmas strips!



A brief touching upon the theme of the commercialization of Christmas, which of course provided the dramatic thrust of the Peanuts Christmas Special.



Schulz is moving away from bland celebrations of a holiday and towards more sophisticated jokes about it. The usual "YAY ITS CHRISTMAS" panel here is undercut by Schroeder's displeasure at being obscured. Note: no Shermy, Lucy or Linus in the last panel.

It is worth noticing that Patty and Violet are already starting to become a bit rarer. Lucy has usurped their roles, a little, as the strip's girl character.

November 27, 1952: Snoopy's Thanksgiving

Snoopy gets another thought balloon... one that contains a "sigh," oddly. He knows Charlie Brown's name in this one, a fact that he forgets in upcoming years, referring to him as "that round-headed kid."

We can put the script in the "Happy Thanksgiving" bubble down to cartoonist enthusiasm.

Christmas Day, 1951: Singing In Type

Sure it's mostly sentimental instead of funny, but imagine how long it must have taken Charles Schulz to render the typeface in the fourth panel.

Note: Snoopy runs with Shermy in the first panel. The mystery of his ownership continues!