August 1-6,1955: Boring days in Peanuts-ville

Not a lot to say about most of these strips.

August 1:

Patty and Violet have taunted Charlie Brown with party exclusion before, but now it's starting to look particularly malicious.

August 2:

Not really a lot of joke here, I guess. It does look a little more like Snoops is Charlie Brown's dog, however. I wonder, in the future post-apocalyptic culture-to-come that treats comics as holy texts, if the mystery of Snoopy's early ownership will become fiercely-contested dogma and the subject of vicious crusades?

August 3:

That's a lot of effort Charles Schulz put into that big star on the left. Remember: these panels are blacked-out, so those stars are all made out of negative space.

August 4:

It just occurred to me, we don't see an awful lot of the Peanuts kids hanging out around water throughout the strip. I remember seeing C.B. at the seashore some time back (Patty and Violet mistook his head for a beachball), and there have been several wading pools.

August 5:

I wonder... is that tree back there the same tree, earlier in life, that we would frequently see the kids laying beneath later on?



August 6:

Charlie Brown's attitude in panel 2 is largely my own opinion on riddles. Neither of us would do very well if tasked to win magic rings from slimy cave-dwellers.

 

 

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.)

June 14-19, 1954: Let's play H-Bomb Test!

June 14

No cutting and pasting here. Charles Schulz draw out every "BANG" in this strip, or I don't see any at duplicates at least.
June 15

A simple Murphy's Law type of premise. It's another look at the famous doghouse too, which implies that Snoopy must have an owner, whoever it is.
June 16
gocomics.com's image for this strip is a duplicate of June 14th's. Can anyone with access to the Fantagraphics collection fill us in as to what's supposed to be here?
June 17

The drawing of Snoopy eating the ice cream scoop is rather charming.
June 18

History: Wikipedia notes "The first fusion bomb was tested by the United States in Operation Ivy on November 1, 1952, on Elugelab Island in the Enewetak (or Eniwetok) Atoll of the Marshall Islands, code-named 'Mike.'"
This is one of my favorite early strips, it really sticks out in my memory. Lucy is extremely, panel-fillingly loud for the first time, an ominous development from the young girl. The seriousness with which Charlie Brown pushes down the plunger and Patty holds her ears is great. And of course it's a reference to the biggest damn firecrackers the human race ever made, which were new developments at the time.
As a purely random aside, the comparison, however slight, between a child and a piece of nuclear weaponry unavoidably reminded me of this.
June 19

When you have two characters talking to each other in a comic strip, and their words are the point of the strip, it becomes necessary to have them do something with their bodies during that time. Unlike as with mere text, here a comic strip's graphic nature provides extraneous information, and could actually be distracting if not handled well, but if not considered could lead to the infamous "talking heads" effect. It happens enough, in most humor strips, that a cartoonist must make plans for it. (In dramatic strips, the quality of the drawing and the "camera angles" might be enough to sustain interest.) It is a fundamental problem for most cartoonists who hope to have careers longer than a couple of years. Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes would sometimes approach talky, philosophical strips by putting the two in a wagon and sending them over a cliff; this is one of the many reasons we love Calvin and Hobbes.
Throughout Peanuts' run, characters do various things when there's a talky strip, such as walking across a field, sitting beneath a tree of standing behind The Brick Wall. There are probably thousands of such strips, and this is one of them. It is probably not the case that Schulz obsessively planned these out, but in this one at least the art serves to accentuate the conversation: the balancing in the first panel illustrates the carefree nature of the conversation, Charlie Brown hiding behind the tree shows he's anxious about his upcoming revelation, and having the characters sit at a curb in the four panel lets Schulz draw CB in an appropriately slouched pose.
One thing about this strips that has always subtly bothered me is how rapidly the characters change poses. They go from playing on the curb, to walking across a field, to a small tree, then back to a curb, over the course of a three-sentence exchange in a single conversation. Peanuts characters are not generally shown as being hyperactive, but there is a certain restlessness here.

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.

Week of May 17-22, 1954: Dirges and Disappointments

May 17:

Snoopy used to do more dog-like things, like howl at the moon. Most dogs don't bother pro-rating the volume of their howling according to the amount of moon visible, though, because they don't comprehend fractions.

May 18:

The story of this strip seems at first, pretty much, to be "character does something foolish, which is rapidly undone due to its foolishness, so there."

Here's a thought experiment. If this strip involved Lucy stacking a vertical column of blocks, which eventually went too high and toppled over, causing her to say "Rats!", would it be a strip-worthy scene? What if it involved another character, like leaving out a bag of candy which Charlie Brown or Snoopy then came along and ate?

For some reason I'm very interested in this idea, to an extent that surprises me. It is my view that this strip works more for the "Rats!" at the end than the situation itself; it's about Lucy's learning that the world doesn't work the way she expects, and the disappointment she feels. This is a frequent theme of Peanuts.

May 19:

The universe never supplies just the right amount of water, Snoopy.

May 20:

This joke is deceptively complex. Lucy confuses the mood of a piece of music as being a value judgement on its quality.

You know you can tell where a dirge is on a vinyl record by looking closely at the grooves with a magnifying glass? The plastic is grayer at that point.

May 21:

Didn't we see this one before, or something like it? I can't find it in the archives though, despite my at-times-obsessive tagging.

May 22:

What kind of gas is in that balloon to be able to hold up that thick rope? What kind of strength must Lucy have to be able to hold it so casually?

April 22, 1954: So, it's his umbrella?

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This is a silly strip, it doesn't really have a strong gag but it's visually appealing.  One has to wonder about the practicality of a dog owning an umbrella though.  How does Snoopy close it?

Sunday, April 11, 1954: I'm getting worried about Charlie Brown

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

I think this is a very important strip.  It establishes that Charlie Brown doesn't just play baseball but is kind of obsessed with it.  Of course it could well have been a transitory aspect of the character at this point, valid just for one strip, but already Charlie Brown is really the only character of Peanuts' cast who works here.  Linus is too young, Schroeder isn't so serious about anything that isn't music, and Shermy is kind of a non-entity.  Snoopy is still too dog-like, and anyway can't talk.  While Peanuts' girls aren't very girly overall, it would take a tomboy type to be this obsesses over sports, and "Peppermint" Patty is still many years away.

At the end of it we kind of feel sorry for Charlie Brown, standing alone in the driving rain, even as we recognize his predicament is his own making and continuing.  Part of that comes from Schulz's art, which is top-notch here.  One of the most effective techniques in his cartoonist's bag of tricks is the way he depicts rain, which requires great attention to line thickness and patience in just rendering all those lines.

It's very easy to mess up, but the effect is wonderful.  The way the lines blend in with each other in the last panel, how they get darker above the horizon to provide the illusion of a blurred backdrop, the care he takes to make sure that the important parts of the panels aren't too broken up by the crosshatching, it all demonstrates the immense care Charles Schulz took in rendering the strip.

Notice where a character has a dark portion of his clothes or hair, that he changes how he shades it in.  He's also careful to make sure the rain doesn't make it difficult to read a character's identity of expression.  Character faces are mostly unobscured.  This strip must have taken Schulz some serious time to put together, and all for one day's output.  Whether you think Peanuts has yet attained the status of art, it's certainly got the chops when it comes to craft.

Here's a question for you: who is the kid in the next-to-last panel?  Shermy is the character is most fits, but he ran away in the previous panel.  He is carrying a baseball glove in panel six and is holding it overhead in panel seven, so I guess there is some continuity there.  But looking closely at panel six, it's not entirely convincing the way he holds his glove there.  It looks huge there in any case.

March 22-24, 1954: Three don't you see

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

More badly-framed strips from that odd place in the internet Peanuts archives, probably caused by an oversight when these were scanned in from print compilations.

March 22, 1954:
At this point in the strip, examples like yesterday notwithstanding, Patty is kind of like the female Charlie Brown.  Not in the sense of being defeated by the world, but in the sense of being an every-person suitable for use in general.  She is rather more competent than Charlie Brown though, and clearer-headed.

Again, the difference between Peanuts and other strips?  Poorer strips would probably end with a sarcastic comment from Patty and make that the punchline.  Competent strips would end with Charlie Brown pointing at Snoopy, and letting the reader laugh at that dumb kid himself.  Peanuts gives us that last panel, which sympathizes with Charlie Brown.  It recognizes that, hey, we're all stupid like this sometime, and when we realize that we are we should be embarrassed about it.  But we should also get out of the weather.

March 23, 1954:
MUDPIEZZZZZ

Violet's fixation on the preparation of mud pies is one of the earliest recognizable traits exhibited by a specific Peanuts character.  We haven't seen it for a while though.  As I've said previously, when you're sentenced to come up with a joke a day for the rest of your life, you use what you think of.  Schulz attacked this somewhat dismal craft without complaint, and frequently with genius.

March 24, 1954:
Charlie Brown's insecure personality is developing clearly now, but Schulz still gives him an out sometimes, with the kids calling for him. 

March 18-21, 1954: Three in a tree

Read these strips at gocomics.com.

Another triple.

March 18, 1954:
If you're as small as Linus, a bag of blocks is in fact a very useful thing to have.  Of course most little kids don't have the block-stacking skill or the utilitarian frame of mind to make the proper use of them.

March 19, 1954:
Linus' block-stacking powers have met their match.

March 20, 1954:
This is sort of a response to Charlie Brown giving Violet chocolates for Income Tax Day back on Monday.  Charlie Brown's "Wow!" in the first panel is mighty fancy, like a small version of the looping letters Schulz sometimes draws large.

April 27, 1953: Dig that crazy rain

The sketchiness and wavering line of later Peanuts has a charm that goes well with the personality of the strip, but let’s never forget that early Peanuts showed great technical ability.  We saw that back in the golf strips a couple of days ago, and we see it again here in this wonderful depiction of a rain storm.

The thing that makes it really appealing to me is the darker hatching used to represent obscured scenery in the background.  It’s wonderfully suggestive without being too precise.  It actually looks better to me this way than the backgrounds that would usually be back there.  It must have taken a long time to draw.

Here's some more rain from a few days later, just because I probably wouldn't link to the strip otherwise:
May 2, 1953:

September 29, 1951: Shermy's dog?

In this strip, it seems that Shermy is Snoopy's owner.

I like this one for the cross-hatching work on the rain in the second and third panels. It's just a really cool effect!