Overthinking a plate of peanuts (which are a kind of bean)
A selective trip through all of Charles Schulz's classic comic strip. Updates daily.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
Charlie Brown started out very slightly antisocial. Now he's moved into obsessive compulsive disorder. He's shown some signs of depression, but it hasn't really set in yet. The market isn't yet large enough to support five cent psychiatrist booths, but it's coming.
Snoopy vs. the Yard: Snowflakes
This is the first sign of strife between Lucy and Linus concerning Linus' blanket. Still, Linus' holding onto a security blanket hasn't been presented in anything other than positive terms otherwise -- this seems to be more Lucy selfishly claiming Linus' property as her own than shame or anger that he's carrying it around.
Lucy might have just a touch of OCD....
It is funny when a character defines a trait so completely that it causes extraordinary things to occur. Pig-Pen seems quite pleased by his accomplishment, and even the snowman itself seems happier than average.
Lucy's mood continues to sour. Although Linus hasn't spoken much yet, we can already see their relative ages beginning to approach each other.
It's like, the snow might all melt tomorrow, so might as well get your snowman quota for the year out of the way now.
It's becoming harder to find insightful things to say about every strip, and it was never the purpose of the blog to re-publish every strip anyway, so it is probable that soon we'll go back to only notable strips, of which there are still a good number at this point.
I think this is second time a character has written things that are depicted as hanging over his head. (I forgot exactly when the first was, unfortunately -- it's possible I'm getting confused and this is the first, this post has been a few days in coming.)
The convention is odd, and I think originates with Peanuts. It is hard to come up with new conventions that are still at-a-glance comprehensible to the reader. This one is helped by the fact that Charlie Brown is obvious writing, and the words hanging in the air are hand-written. Thought balloons had to have been a harder sell.
A hint that Charlie Brown doesn't get much for Christmas. This could be taken as another hint that his family is working-class; the first such hints were from Violet snobbishly lording it over him, and Shermy's huge train set contrasted with CB's tiny loop.
Once again, an early Peanuts strip presents a scene that wouldn't have been out of place in Calvin and Hobbes.
If you ever find a discarded calendar with December 17 circled in red, you'll have a pretty good idea who owned it. Schroeder's affection for the composer is alternatingly touching and worrying. I am reminded, for some reason, of that guy who left roses and cognac on Edgar Allen Poe's grave all those years.
To reveal that Santa travels around the world on a flying sleigh pulled by reindeer would be a let down.
That's a pretty harsh response, heh. I wonder if we can consider that it's Charlie Brown's parents who sent him that rejection slip, in order to manage their son's expectations for Christmas presents?
The blog has been updating sporadically lately because the blogging client I usually use, Blogsy (basically the only worthwhile iOS blogging client I've seen), was broken first by Apple and iOS 5, second by Google and WebAUTH 2.0, which hangs if you try to upload more than three images within a limited time. I hadn't noticed how slow the Blogger web interface workflow was until I was forced to go back to it for a while. Blogsy still isn't completely fixed yet, but at least it's useable again.
In more relevant news, the writer of Sally Forth (rather an underrated strip if you ask me) keeps a webcomic called Medium Large that referenced the Great Pumpkin yesterday. (Warning: language, NSFW)
He is a dog, after all. I'm surprised that Snoopy's amazing, candy-detecting nose failed to realize Charlie Brown had no candy on him.
Here is introduced the second of Peanuts' one-joke characters, and the first character to eventually leave its cast. 'Pig-Pen' lasts until nearly the end of the strip because there have always been, and could well always be, dirty kids. Poor ol' Charlotte Braun's niche gets taken up by Lucy pretty quickly though.
How weird is it that CB's friends tend to call him "Good Ol'" Charlie Brown, and that he remarks upon it?
This is one of those strips where the setting changes from panel to panel in such a way that it implies that the conversation is longer than we're seeing on the page. Particularly, between panels two and three, Violet and Charlotte suddenly go from standing on a path to sitting at a curb, and Charlie Brown has had materialize a tree to ineffectively hide behind -- which suggests that Charlie Brown has been stalking the two to eavesdrop on their conversation.
Charlotte's mouth in the third panel is pretty funny. I think, some time later, some of Charlotte's character was used for Sally; the hair is somewhat similar, and she has a similar head shape.
Snoopy shows distress very well. And I love how Charlotte doesn't even look particularly distressed when she shouts in the last panel. The reactions of Charlie Brown and Snoopy serve to illustrate her volume.
I don't think this will be the last time we see those words spoken. Scribble of ire!
People haven't really given apples to teachers, that I'm aware of, in the years since 1954, where as Charlie Brown remarks was already an outdated notion. And yet, we get this joke, the lore of teacher-apple-giving still lives. (My guess, which could easily be wrong, is that the custom arose as a way of helping to support teachers, who were traditionally spinsters.)
Oh, how I love this strip. It's awesome. I love it so much that, over on Metafilter, I've started using "phooey" as a general term of disdain, usually against people who are trolling or spouting incredibly stupid opinions. (Them: "I don't vote, and I don't see why anyone should!" Me: "Phooey to you. Phooey all over you.")
I think why I love this, more than how funny and yet satisfying it is to read "Phooey to you Charlie Brown," is that Schroeder says it twice. The first time we don't know why he's angry; the second time reminds us of his anger. It is perfectly constructed, it reads great, the sentence has a great rhythm, just, wow. This is one of my favorite strips to date.
This is either the beginning, or close to the beginning, of Lucy's obsession with bugs, which drives a good number of strips to come.
In case you hadn't noticed, Charlie Brown embarrasses easily.
A strip like this reminds us of how relatively recent casual sexism was. I'm not sure many comic characters could get away with Charlie Brown's rude summation, although to Schulz's credit it is rare that a male character gets away with declaring superiority to females without some form of rejection, refutation or comeuppance. Calvin might declare how much better boys are than girls, but he certainly wouldn't be allowed to get away with it.
The animated adaptions of Peanuts, in addition to not showing adults, also replaced speech with muted trumpet noises. I think the later days of the comic tried to get away with not printing adult words, but in the early days at least Schulz was not above the occasional adult speech balloon.
And we're back!
Remember, one week before this Charlie Brown was heaping ridicule on Linus' blanket. At least the kid is open-minded! The thing that makes this strip for me is Schroeder's look of despair in the last panel. Oh no, I've been discovered!
Did you know that there is a complicated system of categorizing folk and fairy tales? Like, assigning letter and number codes to them, so someone can say something like "Oh, Little Red Riding Hood? That's a 73-B, juvenile travels through woods to relation, who has been replaced by wolf." Strips like this make me want to come up with such a system for jokes. This could be 13-G, kid gets tripped up by minor misunderstanding concerning meaning of word.
26-Q, part of dog takes on dual-role as inanimate object.
930-A-IV, smart kid finds clever way to remind friends they are to bring her birthday presents.
8-W, sight gag causing dog to resemble hand puppet. (Not to be confused with 8-V, dog pushed off table by irate cat. Okay, I'll stop now.)
It's easy to forget the relative sizes of the Peanuts characters compared to the world around them. The sight of the bathtub behind Patty shows just how young the kids are meant to be. Even in the early days the kids behave more like small adults than children, but the age discrepancy back in 1954 seems almost shocking to me.
This strip is almost a trope for Schulz at this time; a character gets in the way of Snoopy watching television, or vice-versa, with a sight gag showing the obstructed character restoring his view at the expense of the other.
Back then, often movies would show first in big cities, and then move into suburb theaters if they were popular enough. It's a sly and effective joke.
Good grief!
This kind of personal devaluation from both Violet and Patty will only get more common in the future.
Charlie Brown is becoming more of a straightman, someone who reacts in funny ways to the foibles and antics of the other characters. Given Schroeder's past reactions to more modern forms of music, his willingness to (I think we're supposed to assume) adapt Beethoven into a mambo seems kind of sacrilegious of him.
Actually, I think Lucy has given Charlie Brown far more than half of that piece of bread. She still calls it "bread an' butter," I notice.
You can tell what people are eating by how many decibels their chewing noises rate, although in Charlie Brown's case we might have to move up to the Richter scale.
Lucy's power to impress with a quiet word is matched only by her ability to do so by shouting, although this hasn't really been established much yet. Notice that Schulz has drawn her words a little differently than usual; they're wider and the strokes are thicker, almost like block letters. She is obvious using some of her infernal power here.
