Sunday, August 15, 1954: And cheap at that price

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Another chapter in the unfolding story of Lucy's mother's desperate search for peace and quiet.

This is a particular favorite strip for me. It has several funny drawings that suit the story perfectly, it reveals something about Lucy's personality, and along the way it paints a vivid picture of the dynamic between Lucy's mother (who needs Lucy to be out of the house sometimes) and father (who foots the bill).

December 14, 1953: Lucy goes that extra mile

Read this comic at gocomics.com.

In this strip, we begin to see that Schulz is becoming more careful about showing emotions.  It's not just the hilariously shaken image of Linus in the last panel, it's that we can't get a good read on why Lucy did this.  She betrays no satisfaction or joy throughout the process.  It's like she's just doing what her mother told her like a good little girl.  But why is she sneaking up on her blissful brother?  Why is she shouting at him?  Later on the thrust of whole strips turn on whether a character's mouth was drawn with a slightly upturned stroke.

This is the third strip to use the "somersault" visual shorthand for violent disruptive motion.  The first time was in the first football strip (which has still yet to become a yearly thing).  The second time was, interestingly, another instance involving Lucy shouting near Linus.

November 5, 1953: Lucy speaks under the advise of her lawyer

gocomics.com's page for this strip.

Quite knowledgeable of the little girl. Most precocious children gags are basically the same kind of joke, so just doing them repeatedly gets old without pushing the envelope. Later on Schulz would mostly drop precocious children strips except for a few long-established examples such as Schroeder at his piano.

July 30, 1953: Lucy is inappropriately happy

Lucy's being pleased at her own orneriness is interesting. Being happy that she's difficult to be around is a very Lucy attitude. This might be overthinking a joke somewhat, but it does point the way to her increasing willfulness.

In this strip, Lucy is alone but she's still talking. Her speech is more like her thoughts than things she is actually saying. This is akin to the theater trope where characters turn and address the audience, unheard by others in the scene. Overturning this, later on there will be strips in which a character actually overhears another character's internal dialogue, which could be taken to mean that either Schulz is playing around with the convention, or that his characters really do frequently talk to themselves.

Sunday, March 22, 1953: The Earth Invaders

One could take this as another Lucy-abusing-her-brother strip, except for the looks on the faces of Shermy, Patty and Charlie Brown, which make this strip more about human nature than Lucy's specific nature.

This is fairly notable for being a complex play scene with many characters, in perspective, with action poses, and with realistic living room scenery thrown in.

November 7, 1952: Fussbudget

This is the first time the word "fussbudget" has been used in the strip. Now this word is almost impossible to separate from Peanuts. It is always, or nearly always at least, connected with Lucy.

Lucy hasn't been extremely fussy up to this point, but in Peanuts, when another character makes explicit reference to some trait supposedly possessed by another character, that tends to be the point where that other character begins exhibiting that trait as a defining characteristic. In other words, when someone is labeled, the label becomes indelibly part of them.

This is how most Peanuts characters evolved over time, and especially how they gained the traits for which they became memorable.