January 24-29, 1955: Snoopy unmoors from reality

January 24

Another early Linus/Snoopy interaction. That's a rather overstated frown in the last panel there.

January 25

A simple gag about a kid not understanding an idiom. Yeah yeah, let's get to the real reason we're here:

January 26

THIS. One of the most important strips in Peanuts' entire run. The first strip in which Snoopy fantasizes about being something else. In these four panels we see the origin of the World War I Flying Ace, Joe Cool, and a hundred World Famous things. They are cute strips of course, but there are strange depths buried there.

This strip is a bit problematic mechanically though. Schulz uses a thought balloon for Snoopy's thoughts in the first panel, but in the second the balloon does double-duty as a thought and speech balloon, which makes it seem like Snoopy is speaking in English.

Charlie Brown's wide, amused smile is, in its way, as funny as Snoopy's snarl.

January 27

Lucy is willfully wrong about something else. Some notes here:
1. The subplot about Charlie Brown's paddleball is a nice touch.
2. The letters asked about and responded with are written with serifs and with little single-quotes around them.
3. Charlie Brown's annoyance that Lucy refuses to believe 'F' follows 'E' in the alphabet is interesting. He seems to care that Lucy get her facts straight, and takes it personally when she refuses to see reality. That's admirable in a way, but will probably cause him problems later in life, for there is no shortage of Lucys in the world.

January 28

When I was a kid, I would read these strips where Lucy is referred to calmly as a fussbudget, and the sarcasm flew roughly two miles over my head. It didn't help that Lucy would then respond without a trace of irony. The humor of Peanuts could be really dry sometimes.

January 29

Violet's smile throughout this strip is vaguely infuriating.

Sunday, July 4, 1954: Snoopy vs. The Bird

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Independence Day, 1954. Nothing patriotic or so here, but we do have the return of the Realistic Bird.

This is uncharacteristically violent of Snoopy. If he had caught that bird what would he have done with it? The thing's smaller than his mouth.

It is making a bit of an assumption, but it is possible that this is THE bird, Woodstock's mother. Woodstock came into the strip as one of a number of birds who were born there in a nest on Snoopy's stomach in a well-remembered sequence. She disappeared from the strip and was never seen again, although Schulz made a big thing about Woodstock's pining for her.

April 28-30, 1954: Comics, stairs and hoops

April 28, 1954:

The latest in the "Charlie Brown, Cartoonist" sequence. This one, I think, has an uncharacteristically clunky final panel. I find it difficult to imagine how Schulz could have thought CB's statement at the end works, it's very un-Peanuts-like.

April 29, 1954:

This is more like it. After the "Big Kids" Sunday strip, I think this is the first one to have a full thought balloon from Linus. I find the stairs in the second panel a little problematic, though. It's like the stairs sort of "slope" down off the side, like a carpeted hillside or something.

April 30, 1954:

Is it any wonder Snoopy forgets the kid's name? Anyway, this strip only works because of the limited size of the panels. Presumably Snoopy can see ahead off-panel, so why doesn't he notice the hoop is only as large as his snout beforehand? Maybe it's why Schulz draws him with his eyes closed in the third panel.

Sunday, April 18, 1954: Who needs peppermint?

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Here we have one of the more interesting questions about the Peanuts strip.  Schulz and Peanuts makes the claim, if I remember it correctly, that the two Pattys, the original and the "Peppermint" variety, were based on the same person.  At first that assumption seems laughable, despite the two sharing the same name, but think.  Besides this strip, every physical contest we've seen Patty in (marbles, mostly, and mostly against Charlie Brown), she's won.  And their times in the strip don't intersect very much; one wanes right when the other waxes.

Oh well.  Idle speculation aside, I think this strip has a hilarious final panel.  I don't know of any other strip that would think to end it so understatedly, or half as effectively.

One weird thing though: look at the backgrounds of the last two panels.  They're completely different!

Sunday, October 11, 1953: The CROQUET GAME

This is quite an interesting strip. In addition to carrying an extra title other than just "Peanuts," there are several different jokes competing for space in these eight complex panels.

- Every character appears except for Linus. However, Schroeder's only in the first three (in the third he hiding behind the tree), Shermy's only in two of them, and Snoopy's relegated to one.
- Although the major gag of the strip is Lucy's trying to bounce a croquet ball, the most interesting exchange is between Patty and Charlie Brown, which is a fairly good depiction of the direction Schulz is taking the round-headed kid. Patty's blunt statement is rather shocking; one can imagine her intent is to reassure Charlie Brown that it's not personal, but when put that way how could one take it as anything but?
- Lucy shows greater appreciation for experimental evidence here than she does in many later strips.

Sunday, September 27, 1953: Snoopy vs. The Yard: The Slide

There's not an awful lot in this neighborhood that doesn't have it in for Snoopy.

That's a good question mark in the second panel. Schulz had a kind of ornate style to his type-inspired iconography: serif Zs, fancy question marks, tapered exclamation points. It's one of the little tells that the simplicity of the rendering is an artistic choice and not a cheat.

I've mentioned before that the top row in a Sunday strip are designed to be removed at an editor's option, say to make more room on a crowded comics page. Usually Peanuts will use these in a throwaway joke or just to lengthen the buildup a little, but here I think it actually harms readability a smidge to excise them. Without the top three panels here, we don't have it established that this is Snoopy's first slide, and without that knowledge his Slide Malfunction seems more like an accident than an element of his lack of slidal* experience.

* Not really a word.

August 28, 1953: Lucy fusses, again

We've seen this setup several times by now. Whether Lucy's asking for a glass of water, or for sandwiches with the crusts cut off, she just doesn't seem satisfied. CB's reaction this time is the same as the previous instances. Lucy doesn't yet have the muscle to back up her demands.

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, September 14, 1952: I'm a success!

This is one of the best early strips I think, it's just really funny and original IMO, despite a couple of pretty weird quirks. Its action can occur only because Lucy never looks down. The really weird thing about it is how Charlie Brown doesn't tell Lucy the cause of her "success," that she was being held up by Snoopy. The whole thing has an air of allegory about it.

Lucy's phrasing "I'm a success!" is very odd. It's funny partly because of its oddness, but it is oddly specific, like it might be a reference to something in Schulz's life.

March 12, 1952: Lucy is top-heavy

Lucy's third strip here. She looks fairly different with those huge eyes, doesn't she? Probably added to make her more visually distinct from Violet, they don't last very long.

August 22, 1951: That's a mean baby

The look on Schroeder's face in the first panel is fairly unique for him. Also, behold the return of the scribble of ire!