Sunday, July 31, 2012: 1,000 posts!

This strip is a solid point of development towards Snoopy's status as a foil to Charlie Brown. There's a lot of other classic elements in this strip: Charlie Brown's failures as a ball player, Schroeder's role as catcher, Snoopy kind of playing a role as a fielder and his playfulness, and CB's impotent reaction to it at the end.

Notice:

* The short distance between the pitcher's "mound" and home plate, and how Charlie Brown has to throw the ball in an arc to avoid the strip's title.

* Snoopy's cloud of "R"s in panel five.

* The tiny Patty off the field in panel six. There's another tiny figure in the background, but I can't tell who it is.

* Panel nine: "Oh good grief!"

* The vigor and looseness of the entire sequence. I think this is Peanuts art at its height right here.

* Snoopy's smug expression in the last panel. That dog!

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And that's 1,000 posts, I think! (Blogger's numbering might be counting some future posts I have scheduled that haven't appeared yet.) Posts have been slow as of late, and for that I apologize, but it's been some weird times out here. We've got some interesting strips coming up though so it should pick up for a while, hopefully I can keep up the energy through the next thousand.

July 18-23, 1955: Pig-Pen Cleaned Up

These strips might be slightly out of order or not match up with their dates due to a problem with my blogging client.

July 18:

Another strip that shows off Linus' genius. Lucy still seems mostly proud of her little brother at this point.

July 19 (?):

Snoopy vs. The Yard: Horseshoes. Not a lot to say. The last panel seems to exist mostly as a way to explain to people what's going on in panel 3, in case they couldn't piece together that a game of horseshoes was being played from the stake.



July 20:

Not an awfully kind for a kid to do to her little brother!

July 21:

This isn't that much better either, but I like Linus' reaction, and how it catches Lucy off-guard. Don't put up with it Linus! Fight the Man! Er, Girl!

Lucy pines away for Schroeder a lot, but you see very few strips, that I remember at least, that hint that Lucy might have a crush on Charlie Brown. Other than all the abuse she's heaped on him over the years, I guess. That might actually be considered a pretty solid hint, now that I think of it.

We barely recognize Pig-Pen either. He kind of looks a bit like Shermy like this.

June 13-18, 1955: "Dot" is a sound effect

June 13:

At this point the girls aren't always disgusted with, annoyed by or bored at the sight of Charlie Brown, as this strip shows. I think the thinness of the tree could be taken as a metaphor for the thinness of Violet's affections, which makes this strip poetic in a way.

June 14:

I had not heretofore suspected that "dot" was onomatopoeia. but it is a kind of appropriate noise for jabbing a piece of paper with a drawing instrument like a crayon or pencil.

June 15:

I expect that today's kids don't get messed up as much, on the average, during their summertime adventures.

June 16:

This is exactly the kind of thing a Lovecraft protagonist with unknown blood ties to fiendish creatures, ancient sorcerers or some godling's spawn would do, and it's also similar to such a being's probable reaction once he discovers the universe obeys his or her whims -- at least, if he didn't immediately faint from the shock.

June 17:

I think Charlie Brown just might not have been laughing at "Pig-Pen"'s ambitions. A bit of youthful can be good for a kid, although probably something along the line he'll probably have to clean up more. For example, I can't picture, say, Mitt Romney covered with dirt. (In fact, his skin looks stain-resistant, like maybe some kind of polymer.)

June 18:

Ah, the ease with which the winds of love turn when you're seven. The characters are seven now aren't they? Originally I think they were intended to be just before school age, but now we've seen some moments in school, they were probably aged to that point since school is a ripe source of storylines, although we haven't seen very many yet. (And when Rerun shows up and enters kindergarten both Linus and Lucy, being siblings, kind of have to age to make room for him.)

May 2-7, 1955: Lucy the Environmentalist

May 2

We could take a bad message away from here if we were to relate Lucy's silly concerns with those of the then-nascient environmental movement. Lucy's had enough weird notions in that head of hers from previous strips, however, that I find it possible to ignore that reading.

May 3

This is Peanuts' first "full" story, consuming every weekday strip for the week. The whole thing is her imposing her concerns upon her friends. I note that the only value judgement made by any of the cast members on her concerns is made here, by Charlie Brown. All of the other reacting characters wear Peanuts Expression #24, "blank observation." Her face in the first panel is vividly rendered. ("Good grief" sighting.)

May 4

It's easy not to notice that Pig-Pen is in this strip, but without his trademark dust cloud, perhaps because it would confuse the gag of the strip.

May 5

This strip and the previous this one are the same general joke, and they have exactly the same punchline. It feels like Schulz is padding out the story here.

May 6

It's not just that Lucy believes her friends are eroding the Earth, it's that she's vividly imagined it as becoming the size of a basketball, an image worthy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

May 7

This isn't the first time Lucy has responded to a direct refutation of her beliefs with a non-sequitur counterattack. Lucy's not the sort to waste too much time on introspection.

Comic images from gocomics.com.

 

April 25-30, 1955: I'm Well Read

April 25

At least it wouldn't all melt before she could eat it. The word "Boy" in the third panel is both serif'd and contains lowercase letters.

April 26

Once in a while Schroeder says something that indicates there's a slight change he could end up reciprocating Lucy's crush someday. It's quite rare, but it happens once in a while.

April 27

As has been remarked in the comments before, there really aren't a lot of Pig-Pen strips when measured as a percentage of all the Peanuts strips Schulz draw. He's fairly common in this period though.

April 28

Somewhat uncharacteristically, Pig-Pen gets angry at the way people refer to him here. It's a bit difficult, through all the grime, to read his expressions of ire. I'm not quite sure I get this strip though -- I sense there's something about it, maybe some context from the time, that I'm missing. I'm not actually sure the girls are judging his appearance, although if they're not then why would Schulz use Pig-Pen here?

April 29

I think Schulz spelled it "SKWEEK" in the third panel just to mix things up a bit. We get another funny drawing of Snoopy here, who is already the most plastic of the Peanuts characters.

April 30

My favorite thing about this strip is the slight irregularity in Snoopy's jaw in the third panel, indicating Snoopy chewing. Lucy's mouth seems to be missing in the first panel.

 

April 18-23, 1955: Watson come here, I need groceries

April 18 

More of Pig-Pen's philosophy, which could be regarded either as kind of profund or as indicative of the lengths he'll go through to excuse his willful messiness.

April 19

Fun with halftone!  It definitely is possible to get mad at someone who's really neat, if they're still marking up the wall, although I suppose the Van Pelt folks could just tell people it's wallpaper.  Really freaky wallpaper.

April 20

Lucy believe, if you're losing on one front, just open up another.

April 21

Snoopy has the advantage of having a flatter head.  It'd be a lot harder for Charlie Brown to balance like that.  By the way, this strip demonstrates well how much Snoopy's body shape has changed.  He still has a little ways to go before he starts to balloon out.

April 22

You can't please all the people all the time.  There's kind of a Betty-and-Veronica thing going on between Patty and Violet here.

Charlie Brown's rather pleased with himself in the second panel.

April 23

I never got much use out of tin can telephones as a kid, beans or not.  I figured out much later that they really depend on the string between cans to be pulled tight, which it obviously isn't here.  Anyway the matter is moot, as the first panel makes it clear that whoever it is Charlie Brown is talking to is standing right off panel, well within earshot.

Tin can telephones have passed into the lore of kid life, as something that children make to amuse themselves, even though I imagine in this age of cell phones and casual texting that this type of playground technology is hardly ever put into practice anymore.  This hasn't stopped the things from soaking into our culture -- an episode of the My Little Pony cartoon (don't laugh) used one in a scene, and that "Kids Next Door" cartoon from some years back used them as an essential communications tool for its weird kind of tree fort tech.

April 4-6 & Sunday April 10, 1955

April 4

A bit of simple wordplay, but one could take it to provide a lesson on the difficulty in living up to the divine. If one was disposed that way, that is."Pig-Pen" was the first minor character introduced into Peanuts, and is by far the longest-lived. Although present only in a very small proportion of strips, Schulz obviously found the character more compelling even than later "major" characters like Frieda and Eudora. Unlike the rather bland Eudora however (about the most I can remember about her is that she wore a hat and was a girl), Pig-Pen still has a strong personality, and is almost unique among the Peanuts kids in that he doesn't really seem to have any hangups. Linus is the closest to that blissful state, but even he had the blanket for a while, and the Great Pumpkin too.

 
April 5

A weird hanging question ends this strip. The point is clear -- there is nothing to say what we believe now won't be seen as similarly bizarre to people hundreds of years from now.

 
April 6

I think the Neighborhood League, if such an organization actually exists, should probably reconsider their retaping regulations.This is probably a joke on kids playing with laughably decrepit baseballs, but not having had what one might call a sporting childhood I am unfamiliar with the lore in that area.

 
gocomic's archive is missing strips for the 7th through the 9th of April, 1955. Can anyone tell us what the Fantagraphics collections have for those days?

 
Sunday, April 10

Oh, what a tremendously formative strip. It's not the first time Charlie Brown has expressed a mania for baseball (I think we've had one other strip so far where he's wanted to play while everyone else has gone inside), but this one seems rather more Charlie Browny, especially his expression in panel 7, that's pretty iconic right there.

January 3-8, 1955: It snow problem

January 3

Snoopy vs. the Yard: Snowflakes

January 4

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.

January 5

Lucy might have just a touch of OCD....

January 6

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.

January 7

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.

January 8

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.

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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.

Sunday, December 5, 1954: Large-format Pig-Pen

  

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

1. "Poor ol' Pig-Pen" indicates a certain amount of resignation from Charlie Brown concerning Pig-Pen's condition.
2. The joke about raising a cloud of dust while running on a sidewalk would be reused multiple times over Peanuts' run. This is the first use.
3. This is a hilarious strip in how throughly it imagines the intersection between those two ideas, "Pig-Pen" and "candy." "I can't get it out of my pocket... IT'S STUCK!" Oh god.
4. Pig-Pen is totally ignorant of Charlie Brown's discomfort. That kid must have an amazing immune system. I'm reminded of a bit from James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small books where the Yorkshire country vet describes the amazing health of the kids of the local knacker-man, who have been brought up all their lives amid the end-products of the most amazingly deadly livestock diseases.
5. Charlie Brown's concern for Snoopy's well-being is touching in a way.  The dog helped him out, it's only right he return the favor.  (If the candy had fallen on the ground, it might not have gotten any dirtier but Pig-Pen might not recognize it as being any more sullied.  He may even have found it there.)
6. Good grief!
7. Scribble of... what, really?

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Sorry for the delay in this update.  Foolishly, I went ahead and updated to iOS 5 only to discover my blogging client crashes when uploading images on it, so I'm going to have to use Blogger's web interface to post for a while.

November 1-6, 1954: Leaves can be surprisingly vindictive

November 1

This strip reminds me of later strips in which characters try to figure out what to do with jack-o-lanterns after Halloween. I seem to remember "Peppermint" Patty trying to make a pie.
November 2

Oh they look harmless, but don't make them mad!
November 3

More of Lucy's off-kilter way of looking at the world. She's old enough now that she knows a bit of the world, but isn't old enough that she has all the concepts right in her head, which I expect made her a fun character to write for. Which might explain why we've had a lot of her lately.
November 4

Why is Pig-Pen so happy in the third panel? The rest of it is easily understandable, but why is he so amused there? Is it because he knows Snoopy standing there and he sees the hole Charlie Brown is digging for himself? Is it just that he doesn't care how he is perceived?
November 5

Oh, to be delivered unto Lucy's tender mercies! Linus is right to be afraid. "AAGH" doesn't seem to be nearly frightened enough by my reckoning.
November 6

Well, getting a picture is a lot easier than taking a whole bath.

October 18-23: Towards a classification system of comic jokes

October 18

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.

October 19

26-Q, part of dog takes on dual-role as inanimate object.

October 20

930-A-IV, smart kid finds clever way to remind friends they are to bring her birthday presents.

October 21

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.)

October 22

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.

October 23

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.