April 11-16, 1955: Phooey to you Schroeder

April 11

Charlie Brown doesn't have nearly the fixation on D. Crockett as Schroeder does on Beethoven, but his embarrassment makes the strip.

April 12

At first this seems like another joke on the size of C.B.'s head, but really any of the characters could see around that thin tree.  The angry look on Lucy's face is adorable.

April 13

There are a handful of strips that establish that Schroeder isn't simply a child prodigy, but actually has a music career.  Lucy's general apathy towards music makes her choice of crush an odd one; Schroeder doesn't actually have much personality other than his music.

April 14

The first line drive Charlie Brown ever dodged (although it looks more like it bowled him over, dodging is how it's described in later strips).

April 15

This is more of a Lucy kind of strip, but neither her right field position nor her incompetence at baseball have been firmly established yet.

April 16

 For some reason, I can easily imagine one of Thurber's dogs in Snoopy's place here.

January 10-15, 1955: Lucy is hard on toys

January 10

A disturbing insight into Lucy's attitude towards property.

January 11

For some reason this strip reminds me of that disco version of Beethoven's 5th Symphony.

January 12

That's kind of hyperbolic. Lucy didn't even know what a metronome was before Monday!

January 13

Girls in Peanuts tend to be rather more rough-and-tumble than in other strips. Lucy, of course, eventually gets to where she won't think twice about returning a slug in the jaw for an insult. "Peppermint" Patty won't even be arriving on the scene for many years yet.

January 14

When someone tells you to close your eyes, yeah, it's usually a good idea not to if you can get away with it. Anyway, why doesn't Violet just rummage through her candy bag facing the other way?

January 15

An enthusiastic speech by Schroeder, boldly staking his claim as the neighborhood artist.

Sunday, November 14, 1954: C'mon, forget about Beethoven for awhile

November 8-13, 1954 are missing from gocomics' archive.

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

We've seen Lucy and Schroeder fight over the piano before, but this one I think puts Lucy's case forth as sympathetically as we ever see. Panel seven in particular is surprisingly effective, almost pleading. The dramatic thrust of the strip seems to imply that it was the offer of hot chocolate in the next panel that caused Schroeder's rejection. How mundane! But what else could she offer -- er, that's suitable for a kid's strip, of course.

Schulz and Peanuts seems to suggest that Schulz got ideas and energy for the Lucy vs. Schroeder strips from his personal life with his first wife. Schulz's family disputes that he got as many ideas for strips from his relations with people that the book suggests. My own theory, which I've stated before, is that a cartoonist can't help but draw from his surroundings, that eventually the contents of your brain end up on the page whether you intend it or not, and that would seem to agree with the book's angle on Schulz's work.

This is also, I think, the first panel in which Lucy notes her own face as being pretty, a habit of hers that spreads to her dealings with other characters, especially Charlie Brown.

Sunday, December 13, 1953: Schroeder's ready for the big time

Read this comic at gocomics.com.

Sometimes with these I think Schulz throws in realistically-proportioned adult objects just to demonstrate that he can draw well technically.  Of course Schroeder couldn't actually play the adult piano because his arms are too short; he'd barely be able to reach the keys unless the bench were right up against it.

I notice that, in some of the Sunday strips we've seen, there's a blank spot between a couple of the panels in the bottom row.  It's really noticeable because it always seems to overlap two of the panels.  Is this the result of some problem with their source documents?

Sunday, September 13, 1953: Three shades of green

Another bit of metaphorical art in the title panel. This is one of my favorite strips, Schroeder's personality comes out very vividly here.

September 11, 1953: Turn your head, Ludwig

I'm rather fond of this one. It's a good example of an idea you simply don't see in other comic strips. What is it about it that makes it possible for Peanuts, but not other comics?

This expression is similar to a chagrimace, but it's subtly different. Charlie Brown's emotion is of amusement, not dismay.

July 27, 1953: Schroeder's On Fire

It is the summer months in the strip right now, making this feasible. I can't help but think that big hole overhead must affect the acoustics somehow.

One interesting thing about Peanuts' art style is how the characters' mouths disappear when closed. It's particularly evident on Schroeder's face here, since he doesn't speak in this strip.

When viewed from the front, the characters' mouths have generally been visible up until now, even if only as a short line. We'll see in the years to come that Schulz plays around with this a bit, that there will be times when characters seen from the front will strangely have no mouths.

May 1, 1953: This is why I like Schroeder

It's odd, isn't it? Here Schroeder decries commercialism, and in "A Charlie Brown Christmas" CB spends a lot of the time complaining about the crassness of marketing culture. And yet no strip has been merchandised and exploited even close to the extent that Peanuts has. Income from Peanuts made Charles Schulz a billionaire.

April 23, 1953: Schroeder scoffs

One thing Schulz does, it seems to me, in the early days is repeat information unnecessarily. Schroeder's words in the last two panels are practically the same.

Here at Roasted Peanuts, we don't rest until we've dissected and bean-plated* each strip until all humor has been annihilated.

So, is there a way to have written this strip that could eliminate duplicating most of the text in the third panel? The obvious change, I suppose, would be to change Schroeder's words in either the third or last panel to something like "That's ridiculous!" Since the comedic point of the strip is Schroeder's lack of realization that (to spoil the joke completely) his playing Beethoven on his toy piano is just as ludicrous, it doesn't seem to me like anything is lost through this change.

This isn't meant to denigrate Charles Schulz's abilities as a writer. He was still developing at this point, but the comic itself is great. The fact that it does leave unstated the disconnect between Schroeder's statement and his actions, refusing to point to it outright and trusting the reader to make the observation himself, is a sign that he's already an excellent gag man. Most other comics would explicitly state the point of the joke and wreck the comedy almost as badly as I have, here, in explaining it.

* HI IM ON ROASTED PEANUTS AND I CAN OVERTHINK A PLATE OF BEANS

April 9, 1953: The Mystery of Schroeder's Piano

One thing about Peanuts is how it plays sometimes with the line between cartoonishness and reality. Between the two, it usually sticks pretty close to reality, at least in its physics, which makes the occasional launches into surreal logic, such as here, more effective. That's important. If crazy things happen all the time, the reader comes to expect them, and they have much less of an impact. Lots of webcomics get this wrong.

March 2, 1953: Treat Schroeder's piano with respect!

This is the first of a long-running theme of the strip, other characters not giving Schroeder's piano the respect it deserves. By the way, isn't that an evocative drawing of the ringing on Snoopy's ears? Just wide looping scribbles. Looking at them, I can practically hear it.

February 5, 1953: Schroeder the Alliterative Musician

Sometimes I think Schulz uses Schroeder as a way of subtly revealing his own artistic ambitions. It would have been funny to see Schroeder's opinion of American Idol.

January 27, 1953: The beginning of the courtship

Two days later, here's another important Schroeder strip; the first one between the familiar combatants, him and Lucy, on the familiar battlefield, at the piano, and with the familiar tone, Lucy's infatuation. The main thing missing is Schroeder's annoyance.

Schroeder could get very angry at Lucy later on, but so far no character has really gotten very angry at another. The worse we've seen is Violet throwing Charlie Brown out of her house, and so far, more times than not, they forget why she was angry before the end of the strip and invites him back in.

It's the calm before the storm.

Sunday, January 25, 1953: Schroeder at his zenith

This is a good example of a kind of Schroeder strip that never gets seen later on. It does a fine job of illustrating his personality. Schulz here presents the true Schroeder, not some dilettante doodler at the keyboard but a determined artist. In the classic age of the strip Schroeder is by far most often seen as a supporting character, setting off Lucy's monomania or Snoopy's whimsy. Here he trains alone, building himself up to be capable of performing the music he hears in his mind, determined to live up to his vision.

While we might can sympathize with the spurned Lucy's pleas for affection, and his maniacal worship of Beethoven is often played for laughs, Schroeder is generally an admirable character.

December 18-19, 1952: Now that's a sad kid

Schroeder in the third panel is rather sadder than the average. His expression is maybe a little overdone? Anyway the kid is probably four or five right now, that's rather young to be obsessed with playing the big room.



He's not sad at all here.

December 9, 1952: It's the classics for Schroeder

It is worth reminding the reader that light piano jazz would become inseparable from the animated adaptations of Peanuts, so we must assume that Schroeder's not speaking on behalf of Charles Schulz in this strip.

August 9, 1952: HE SPEAKS

The most interesting thing about this strip is that, finally, Schroeder says something more than a word or two, and in English.

August 7, 1952: Music humor

You know, I get the feeling that real musicians probably crack bad composer puns all the time.

July 23, 1952: Schroeder vs. Accordions

In case you didn't notice it before, Schroeder hates accordions. We'll see before long that, by extension, this means accordion players.

It is easy to place this opinion as part of Schroeder's character, but is it just me or does this strip also imply that Schulz himself doesn't care for the instrument? Might he be subtly letting us know about his opinion of popular art? What does that say about his own burgeoning career in cartooning? Please write your opinions down in the form of an eight-page essay and bring it to class next week.

Sunday, May 11, 1952: Schroeder in concert (with backup)

The entire joke here rests in Violet saying "let him play by himself" instead of "let Schroeder."

There are some nice touches in this one. In addition to the musical staffs that Schulz spent so much effort on, and he put a G-clef instead of an S in his name in the first panel. But best of all we have Snoopy in this strip for no story-related reason other than just being cute and funny there on his end of the couch. His reaction in panel 6 is best here, he's just rendered so winningly in that pose, exactly halfway between a dog-like and a human reaction. It's great.