May 16-17, 19-20, 1955: Lucy and the Clover

(Skipped this time out are a couple of minor baseball gags. My blogging client seems to be displaying these locally at low resolution, so I don't know if they'll turn out unreadable when published.)

May 16

Charlie Brown and Lucy make a good team act. Charlie Brown tends to know things, but isn't strong-willed enough to express them with certainty. Lucy is headstrong but ignorant.

May 17

Shades of the much-anthologized instance where Lucy hands Charlie Brown a list of his faults.

May 19

Back to that four-leaf clover. How would one tell if one was luckier, really? One doesn't get killed in a car crash? Wouldn't it be luckier not to have crashed to begin with?

May 20

Charlie Brown's pose in the last panel is not the kind of thing he'd be seen doing in later years of the strip. There's still something of the old, more confident Charlie Brown still around.

 

December 23: The Fullness of Glasses

This is a well-constructed, if a bit over-written, strip, that illustrates the difference between two characters' outlooks. As such it more clearly defines their personalities, although in Lucy's case it's still looking at her larval phase.

October 30, 1952: Punkin

Compared to other comics, Peanuts characters are unusually poker-faced. The only hint of the kid's slow burn leading up to the last panel, perhaps, is that Charlie Brown is a little too happy in repeating Lucy's mispronounced line.

It's difficult to imagine him getting away with this later on.

Sunday, June 29, 1952: Patty, Marbles Champion

It is interesting, and somewhat heartening, to see the girls in Peanuts take part in the same kinds of activities as the boys. Patty has played Cowboys and Indians with Charlie Brown and Shermy before, and here she slaughters him in marbles, and not for the last time. It is enough to bring one to mind the other Patty, although she won't turn up for years yet. And of course, Lucy eventually becomes the terror of the neighborhood.

How goes the plight of the little girl these days? Is it just me, or is gender norming as strong as ever now?

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....)