Sunday, July 3, 1955: Serif Grief

Snoopy is back to using thought balloons here, though just one, and he's thinking in lower-case and serif letters.

The content of this strip is pretty light. This could just as easily been a daily strip. The art is worth a little examination though.

Snoopy is still getting longer and more cartoony. We get six drawings of his head in three-quarter perspective here, and like many comic characters when you view them at an angle the cartoonist has to cheat to keep the character recognizable and expressive. This is really one of the black arts of cartooning -- how to distort heavily-stylized characters so they still read as the character when viewed from angles other than straight ahead of the side. The "weirdsnoopy" image I use as my Google portrait, and the hand puppet-like drawings we saw in the very early strips, show what happened when Schulz was still working on getting Snoopy to look good at an angle.

I can only assume it took him a lot of work to find a good three-quarters look for Snoopy, because it doesn't look like an intuitive solution to me. Snoopy's nose is wider when viewed from an angle, his snout seems shorter, and his mouth, instead of wrapping around his snout as a real dog's would, is drawn on as if his face was a flat surface.

I think this is a place where the progression of the art indirectly influenced Snoopy's character development. Drawing him this way is necessary to keep Snoopy's expressions readable, which is especially important here since Snoopy still doesn't use thought balloons very much. These expressions would not work on an anatomically canine head, because a real dog's mouth wraps around his snout. So, to keep Snoopy more relatable and more of a full character, Schulz has to draw him a bit more like he was a human, distancing him from his doggy roots.

As a proportion of Peanuts' 49-year run, Snoopy takes his more recent "bloated" form much more than this look. But that's a bit of a shame I think; I like this look for Snoopy, and I like it when he behaves like more of an everyday dog, although I think the more recent versions of Snoopy have their charms too. They're just different, incompatible charms.

May 22-28, 1955: Scenes from an Illustrated Childhood

Sunday, May 22

These old Sunday strips show off just what Schulz was capable of when his drawing hand was at its best. Just look at all that. In panel 6 Charlie Brown is leaping a barbed wire fence, and those cans in panel 9 can't exactly be safe to wade through either.

These strips show us a kind of iconic, idealized version of the world of kids that largely doesn't exist anymore, one made up of unfenced backyards, vacant lots, junkyards, back alleys and broken fences.

May 23

Lucy doesn't have many weaknesses, or at least ones that she'll admit to, but rollerskates are one of them.

May 24

The Peanuts characters are accident-prone.

May 25

Shades of Calvin and his bicycle here. And a scribble of ire!

A character displaying affection, love, tolerance, pleasure, joy? These things are not funny. Conan! What is funny in life?

May 26

Lucy turns into quite the feminist later on, this attitude turns out to be fairly atypical of her.

May 27

It's possible to miss it if you just glance at the strip, but the joke here is that Lucy is missing one skate, which is the one that Snoopy's riding.

May 28

Violet and her mud pies again. Old habits die hard. Y'know, I don't remember if we've ever seen any of the Peanuts kids eat one of those mud pies. I'd assume that they're just playing, but that look of distaste on Charlie Brown's face implies that he at least has considered eating one of the things. I guess kids had stronger immune systems back then.

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 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.

Sunday, April 3, 1955: Security Snoopy

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Lucy continues her develop into the strip's primary villain.

We haven't had a huge amount of Snoopy/Linus interaction so far.  In coming strips, a major point of contention with them is Linus' blanket, so this strip kind of foreshadows that.

We get that weird look from Linus again in the second panel.  It looks a lot like he's pining for a pacifier.

In the third panel, Linus and Snoopy share a single 'Z' balloon.  I may be wrong, but when two characters are asleep near each other I believe they tend to get separate Zs.  I'm unsure whether I should look for deep meaning in their commonality of snoring, however.

March 27-April 2, 1955: The Martian Chronicles

March 27

 A fairly intriguing sequence this week, continuing the prior spaceman strips.  Schulz gets some good mileage out of halftone shading, a system which I don't think I recall him using much outside of these strips.  Maybe he got given a free sample of halftone transfer sheets or something and figured, in a thrifty midwestern sort of way, that he should at least get some use out of them.

March 28

More halftone language gags.  What sound is Charlie Brown actually producing in these strips?  I like to think it's like radio static, but that's difficult to shout like in the third panel here. 

March 29

 Whatever sounds C.B. is actually making, Lucy seems to be learning to understand it.

March 30

And to translate it!  But this all is simply a throwaway joke for CMS, something to use one week then never refer to ever again.

April 1

 This strip proves that the halftone speech effect is not a representation of distortion provided by the helmet but some sound Charlie Brown was actually making.  Lucy takes the opportunity to rag on C.B.'s round head again.

April 2

 Hey kids, don't try this with a cat!  I love how Schulz leaves the actual rubbing undepicted -- you can tell what happened just from context, Snoopy's fur, and the look on Snoopy's face.

February 28-March 5, 1955: Everybody look down, it's all in your mind

February 28

The phrase "Good Ol' Charlie Brown" was used in the very first Peanuts strip, and continues to show up from time to time.  For a long while it shared the lead panel with the title.

March 1

This is the beginning of a sequence in which Charlie Brown pretends to be a spaceman.  I like the retro-look of the helmet, I might have to use that somewhere.

March 2

An often under-noticed problem with wearing glass space helmets on planets with both atmospheres and mischievous little girls.

March 3

One of my favorite things about the spaceman sequence is the straight face Charlie Brown keeps through most of it.  We have another example here of a character looking slightly silly when they look directly up.

March 4

Well, almost all of it.  Charlie Brown takes a lot of guff all because his head is styled a little differently from the others.

March 5

This repeated strip is probably a problem with gocomics.com's archive.

Sunday, February 27, 1955: Phooey to you, Beethoven

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This is one of my favorite Peanuts strips of all time.  I actually didn't know that it showed up so early in Peanuts' run; I thought it was an early 60s strip.

Lucy is rapidly developing into her full horrific powers.  She just smashed up Schroeder's bust with a <i>baseball bat</i> in his <i>own house</i>.  And yet, Schroeder was fully prepared for it.  Wow.  And Lucy still hasn't really had many strips in which she's been infatuated with Schroeder -- in fact, I think this strip does a lot to solidify that crush as strip "canon."

It's interesting to note the contrast between Lucy's anger, violence and triumph to Schroeder's plain-faced endurance.  The kid doesn't break expression the whole strip, except in panel 8, which is quite a weird look for the kid indeed.  It's not quite anger and it's not quite sadness.  There is almost something <i>pacifistic</i> about the way Schroeder handles Lucy here. It's really something.

Oh, and the strip is hilarious too.

February 6-13, 1955: Square Balloons and Valentine's Day

We have a fairly uninteresting Sunday strip to lead off, so I included the following week with it. And then just to go that little bit farther, I included the next Sunday strip in with it.

Sunday, February 6

Well, they can't all be winners. Although the sight of a snowman with extremely long arms is kind of amusing. Next!

February 7

More of Linus' square balloons. This does make it a lot easier to store them. By the way, I like how the cartoon convention that blown-up balloons automatically float upward is ignored here. People don't typically exhale helium dammit.

February 8

I wonder if Charles Schulz drew this one in response to letters asking Violet's question.

February 9

This is a good example of something Schulz is good at, taking an absurd premise and elaborating upon it entertainingly. I believe it's not impossible to create a balloon that would blow up into a cube, but I don't know if you could do it with just latex.

February 10

We've seen Lucy at the piano before, and we've seen Schroeder cut her down, but this, I think, is the first time when the setting retreats into the background and it's really settled into the Schroeder/Lucy formula. This strip could just as well shown up ten years later.

February 11

Chagrimace. More willful ignorance from Lucy. I guess some skepticism is healthy, but what a thing to be skeptical of.

February 12

Every year, thousands ones of children accidentally construct cages around themselves using building sets. Won't you please give today to the cause of outlawing these horrible toys?

Particularly noteworthy: this is the first time Linus makes an utterance that isn't obviously either baby talk or an internal monologue. From here, it's only a matter of time before he starts quoting the Old Testament.

Sunday, February 13

That car in the first two panels is entirely a throwaway, but it helps to underscore just how much the world has changed in the years since 1955.

That's an uncharacteristically mocking attitude from Schroeder in panel 2.

This is the first strip that focuses on Charlie Brown's problems with Valentine's Day, I think. Although the object of his affections isn't the Little Red-Haired Girl, this is definitely the kind of silly mistake he'd make with her later.

Sunday, January 30, 1933: Tum De Tum Te Da Te Dum ♫

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Put a crayon in Lucy's hand and the world is her kitty.  Comic characters are susceptible to manias that would get real people committed.  Can't you just imagine a Batman villain whose schtick was drawing lines between dots?  "The Connector."  It can't be any less silly than the Riddler, whose gimmick is providing clues by which he can be caught.

Every once in a while Schulz allows himself a metajoke.  The strips in which people make fun of the size and shape of Charlie Brown's head are among these ("Is that a beach ball?"), as are the ones where Charlie Brown can't hide behind a tree because his head is too wide.  One strip Schroeder even threatened to put in a transfer to a different comic strip.  The last panel here is another such joke.

Some time later, Lucy will ask Charlie Brown if he thinks she has beautiful eyes, and, perhaps risking a pounding, Charlie Brown says they look just like little dots of india ink.

The first frame here is one of Schulz's more abstract lead panel designs.

Sunday, January 23, 1955: Charlie Brown's deep attachment to an ephemeral thing

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This is one of those strip concepts Schulz returns to later. I remember there being a similar strip involving Snoopy, who befriends a snowman, and is heartbroken when it melts away. Cut to Charlie Brown and Linus, who have been watching. Linus: "Poor Snoopy, he's too sensitive." CB: "I notice he's not too sensitive to eat the carrot." I'm paraphrasing, but it happened more or less like that. Even the carrot eating is here, which makes me wonder if that later strip weren't a conscious callback on the part of Schulz.

Anyway, this strip provides a good example of Charlie Brown's developing depression. He really takes this too seriously. I mean, going so far as to beg the sun to stop shining? Wow. A futile statement of man protesting against the universe! I smell a thesis coming on....

As the first panel indicates, snowman building is an artistic statement with Charlie Brown. He's a sculptor who works in the medium of snow, and he's at least got Schroeder's admiration for it.

I wonder if this isn't some kind of statement, conscious or not, by Charles Schulz about the ephemeralness of his own medium? Peanuts will probably be around much longer than other concluded strips, mind you. There are a lot of forgotten newspaper comics out there.

January 17-22, 1955: It Snow Trouble

Another snow pun for a title! Get used to them, it's far from the last....

January 17

We had another strip like this not long ago, where Charlie Brown didn't seem to come out of it too badly, but poor Snoopy was overwhelmed. Like in that strip, the funniest thing to me is how effortlessly Charlotte Braun belts out her words. There's a good set of lungs on the girl.

January 18

Oh no. Oh, no no no no no. What character in comicdom can get something as willfully wrong as can Lucy Van Pelt? Other than Mallard Fillmore, of course. Lucy actually knows she's wrong unconsciously, I think, which is why she sets herself against Charlie Brown's disagreement before she even hears his opinion. She's so happy with her discovery.

January 19

Notice... both here and in the previous strip, Schulz draws forward-facing characters with neutral expressions without a mouth, possibly for parity with the way he draws his characters when they face the side. He experimented with this a time or two before. He abandons it eventually.

January 20

I've had conversations with people that have gone exactly like this, right down to my depressed skulking away at the end.

January 21

Another mouthless face. And Lucy called Charlie Brown's face funny-looking.

Charlie Brown has some standard ways of expressing displeasure, which are already beginning to get set in. 1. "Good grief." 2. "I can't stand it." 3. "My stomach hurts."

January 22

Schroeder is practicing his scowl for the role.