Sunday, May 15, 1955: Linus takes out his frustrations

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This calls forward to Charlie Brown's dismayed reaction at the end of A Charlie Brown Christmas. BTW, if when you watch that cartoon, after Charlie Brown walks off-screen, you immediately change the channel and pretend the show ended there, the outcome is a lot more realistic and also more in keeping with the general tone of Peanuts.

I think this strip is slightly stronger with the lead panels, as then there's a nice rule-of-threes progression up to the toy's deflation.

Cute determined expressions on Linus' face throughout here.

Sunday, April 25, 1954: Patty tags out

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Patty's only kicked CB's sandcastle once in the strip so far, but this implies a regular reign of terror has been going on.  It's a funny strip all together though, and is another step closer to the Patty/Violet team act some of us remember from the early compilations.

Sunday, April 18, 1954: Who needs peppermint?

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Here we have one of the more interesting questions about the Peanuts strip.  Schulz and Peanuts makes the claim, if I remember it correctly, that the two Pattys, the original and the "Peppermint" variety, were based on the same person.  At first that assumption seems laughable, despite the two sharing the same name, but think.  Besides this strip, every physical contest we've seen Patty in (marbles, mostly, and mostly against Charlie Brown), she's won.  And their times in the strip don't intersect very much; one wanes right when the other waxes.

Oh well.  Idle speculation aside, I think this strip has a hilarious final panel.  I don't know of any other strip that would think to end it so understatedly, or half as effectively.

One weird thing though: look at the backgrounds of the last two panels.  They're completely different!

Sunday, March 21, 1954: Eight stages of grief

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Beginning with panel eight:

1. Shock
2. Disbelief
3. Confirmation
4. Anger
5. Blankness
6. Taking off your shirt(?)
7. Wide-mouthed frowning
8. Sighing

They might not be the official stages, but they work for Charlie Brown.

This is possibly the most directly hostile act so far seen in Peanuts.  It would be worthy of Lucy.  There are no extenuating circumstances, and nothing sets Patty off, yet she accomplishes her self-appointed task with relish.  It's kind of out of character.  Even when she's part of the team act with Violet against CB, their methods are less overt.

Switch the gender roles here and the strip would turn out quite different.  Even this early, it doesn't seem to be in Charlie Brown's nature to do something this mean.  It's the kind of thing Calvin might do to Susie, but not without some form of judgmental comeuppance from the cartoonist.

February 18, 1954: Baby Linus has a lot of energy

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Schulz uses a few different styles of large-form lettering, and we can see them all here in close proximity.  We find outlined and filled in examples of:

serif:

serif-ed

sharp-cornered (in the M)

square-cornered

rounded simulated pen strokes 1

rounded simulated pen strokes2

November 9, 1953: Get yer dog off the football field

Read this strip on gocomics.com

I think this one may be a bit too abrupt. It'd probably be more entertaining to watch Snoopy get tackled in the third panel, rather than obscuring the collision behind that huge POW splash.

I am putting this strip down as containing Charlie Brown, Schroeder and Shermy, but only because those are the only three human male characters old enough to play football.

July 9, 1953: An innocent question

This is another version of the "Can I put my hand in your glass of milk" strip from some time back. There are a number of jokes that are repeated enough to take on the status of running gags, but this one isn't repeated too often.

April 4, 1953: Of interest to trivia quizzers

Q: In the comic strip Peanuts, what is Violet's last name?



[In case the img source for this comic goes dark later: it is Gray.]

Characters with last names that we know:
Charlie (and Sally) Brown (of course)
Linus and Lucy (and Rerun) Van Pelt
and now: Violet Gray

There are a few other characters with known last names. "Peppermint" Patty has one, Reichardt.

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.

March 12, 1953: Head-over-heels

This is the first strip in which a character is thrown head-over-heels just from the force of some other action, usually a loud noise. We have had a case sort of like this back in the first Lucy football strip, but it didn't happen in the iconic Peanuts fashion. This is the first time in which it's mere noise that causes the tumble.

The head-over-heels motion will become one of the most distinctive elements of Charles Schulz's visual comic language. It looks natural on the page, but it doesn't animate very well; the implied force is away from the noise, so the subject can't stay on-screen long enough to read the motion well. Also, is the victim spinning, or just being thrown back? And what kind of sound should the somersault itself make?

January 28, 1953: Ah, here we go

This is upping the ante a bit in terms of the violence level of the strip.

June 21, 1952: Further development of the monster

Charlie Brown handles this a lot better than he does all those footballs later on. This is also the first "POW!" I remember seeing in the strip. POW is a word often connected with Lucy....

I've looked ahead a few months, and I have to say there are some excellent strips coming up. Linus makes the scene before long!