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.

 

February 14-19, 1955: Snoopy hates that balloon

February 14

Sight gag.  Did kids of Charlie Brown's age play hockey?  I think he's around seven at this time.

The splash lines around Charlie Brown's head are very effective.  If I have occasion to draw a splash, I find I do it the same way.  I probably picked that up from Peanuts.

February 15

Modern times.  If this strip were updated for the present day Charlie Brown's farm would probably be industrial agribusiness.

February 16

Brutal honesty.  More cartooning banter between Charlie Brown and Schroeder.  What is it about Schroeder that makes him a good test audience for C.B.'s work?  It might have to do with him being the mot artistically-developed of Schulz's personalities.

February 17

Turnabout.  That is a very angry Snoopy there in panel three.  On panel two though, in my experience deflating balloons don't go swish.  Instead they make a noise that is charitably referred to as a raspberry.  I wonder if this has to do with a change in balloon construction in the fifty-five years since this strip.

February 18

Unexpected honestly mixed with ignorance.  This is the first time any of Schulz's characters has really engaged in writing. While the  intellectual development of the characters is fluid depending on the needs of the strip, there does seem to be a sort of consistency to it.  To my knowledge Schulz doesn't use Lucy for jokes about school reports, like he does for Peppermint Patty or Sally, which sort of implies the character is a good writer just from the absence of examples of her being bad at it.

And can't you just imagine Lucy writing a newspaper column?  Probably "Diary of a Fussbudget" can be found on the Opinion page.

February 19

Another sight gag.  More lines like the surprise lines in the first strip.  Sometimes Snoopy is disdainful of being expected to perform dog-like activities, but sometimes he goes along with it.

Week of June 7-12, 1954: Requiem for Miss Frances

June 7

Besides some cute drawings of Snoopy and the very dense hatching of early Peanuts rain, not really a lot of interest here. We do see a character involved in a paper route for the first time, I guess that's notable.

June 8

The abuse from Violet gets harsher as time goes by, but at least it's direct. Lucy is more a get-under-your-skin kind of tormentor.

I looked up Miss Frances; she was the host of a then-famous TV program for children called Ding Dong School. The Wikipedia page for her says that she was mentioned in exactly four Peanuts strips, this being the first. It is something of a shame that she's so obscure today, a relic from the early days of TV. She died in 2003. You can watch an episode of her show if you have access to that relic of the early days of the Web, RealPlayer. Or, here's an episode from YouTube, in three parts, starting here. Part 2. Part 3. There seems to be at least one more episode on YouTube. Dig that organ music!

It's a bit shocking how short-lived memory of TV programming can be. Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo, both deceased shows that date back to the early days of TV, are also receding into obscurity, and I've actually seen those while they were airing.

June 9

Being right means more to Charlie Brown than being in pain. Notice the use of the parenthesis around his eyes. This is evolving into a standard way to express focus. Of course Lucy and Linus have those parenthesis as part of their neutral expression.

June 10

Snoopy has the advantage of having a lot more face over which to stretch his mouth. (His smile may not look too much bigger than Charlie Brown's here, but you're forgetting he has a whole other side to his head over which to pull that grin.)

June 11

Most of the time (eventually) Charlie Brown reacts to Lucy's naive approach to astronomy with a sigh, a headache, or a weary "I can't stand it." Here, he participates.

June 12

A fairly clever strip, and one that relies on the visual nature of the medium. I suppose kids today would wonder why he spells "for" here as "four" instead of the obviously correct rendering, "4". Ha ha, but I kid kids today.

January 23, 1953: Snoopy vs. The Yard: The Newspaper

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Another strip showing the dog getting stymied by some artifact of human civilization.  These are kind of boring I think, except for panel two, which is the closest I think we've gotten to this point to the "classic" look for Snoopy, that is to say the late 50s-to-60s look where Snoopy was long, lean and drawn loosely.

By the way, sorry for being a little slow with posts, shepherding the Kickstarter project has consumed a lot of my time over the past two weeks.

September 28, 1953: Things haven't changed that much since then

People ridiculing things they don't understandd! If you want the modern-day version of this, just turn on Fox News.

Charlie Brown shows strange insight into the motivation behind his own behavior. That's kind of creepy.

October 23, 1952: Snoopy fails to get the paper

The first panel contains an excellent drawing of Snoopy walking. You can plainly see here that he's changed a lot since his original appearance:



Although, looking at Patty there, he's not changed nearly as much as the other characters. If Peanuts' art style remained like that throughout the strip's run, would it be as popular? It does look very fifties.

April 9, 1952: Someone get the kid some rubber bands

Just a funny strip. The third panel seems to be a little closer to the familiar Peanuts style than before. The thing that sticks out about it, to me, is the mouth, that little line denoting how the skin of the cheek draws back as the mouth grimaces with the effort of the throw. I haven't pinned it down to anything yet, though. It just surprised me a little.

August 6, 1951: Snoopy's evolution

Look at Snoopy in the first panel. He's bigger, and his smile here seems more middle-era Snoopy than before. He's come some way from his origins.