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.

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?

Sunday, April 4, 1954: Lucy sees the night-time sky as a challenge

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

There are multiple ways one could interpret this strip.

The least charitable is that's it's twee and annoying.  A cute little girl doing a cute little thing.  The kind of place "Happiness is a warm puppy" comes from.  Bleah.

If Peanuts never became anything more than that, then this would probably be the way we would look at the strip now.  But because we know that more complex things were going on inside of Schulz's head, things that were demonstrated by later strips, we can get a better sense of what he was trying to do, and I think that saves this strip.

The point of the strip isn't to look at Lucy and go "awww," the point is to empathize with her.  I think the third panel is the one that proves this, and it's a shame it's one of the ones that was removed from some newspaper printings.  She's been told that it's hopeless, but she is confident in her abilities.  The strip is about her disillusionment when faced with the vastness of the universe, which is a lot bigger than she is.  At the most charitable, we could possibly interpret Lucy's "SLOW DOWN" in panel 11 as Man's rejection of his station, but that might actually be too far for this one.

Schulz does a pretty good job of drawing stars here.  On normal paper, it's a lot easier to depict black dots on a white field than white dots on a black one.

Notice his signature in the first panel, where it intersects the black.  Snazzy!

Sunday, May 10, 1953: Lucy and the Balloon

Here we get a glimpse at the struggle that roils just beneath Lucy's exterior. Notice how she alternates between pleading and threatening? Speaking in terms of the development of her personality, the threatening would eventually win out. Later Lucy would probably pop the balloon just from the dire intensity of her incredible wrath.

The lead panels, not printed by some papers and thus optional, are interesting here. What do put put in those panels so that it's still understandable from their absence, but still in some way contributes to the story? Schulz had yet to hit upon his trick of putting an abstract drawing in the first panel. Here, they're used to underline the point that Lucy has anthropomorphized the balloon.

This is also the first strip I've noticed in which Peanut's catch-all expletive "Rats" is used.

Sunday, December 14, 1952: Sandwich histrionics

Lucy remarks about Charlie Brown's annoyance with her asking him to do something. This is another case of a character's personality becoming defined from another character's verbal recognition of it.

That happens because comics use exaggerated behavior as a way to communicating effectively to the reader. To show anger, you show a character actually kicking the thing he's angry at, even though a real person would not usually do such a thing. It illustrates anger effectively however, and I think readers subconsciously recognize this and adjust their expectations. But it also means that, to actually establish a character's personality, you have to describe it explicitly somewhere, and in a strip that doesn't (generally) use narration like Peanuts you have to do that by putting that description in the mouth of another character.

Schulz would become quite masterful about adjusting reader expectations. His characters are able to act out theatrically when necessary, but can also play it very far down at times.

I also like the serif lettering on "RATS!" in panel 7.

November 19-21, 1952: Lucy's winning streak

Lucy's winning streak continues. If you think that's an unlikely number of wins, wait until you see what it gets up to.

October 14 and 15, 1952: Patty and Violet's Party

I mostly remember Patty and Violet for the times they double-teamed Charlie Brown in the classic age of the strip. If one interprets Charlie Brown as a stand-in for Charles Schulz himself, a view that may have some merit, that may indicate problems with female figures. I think it is possible to read too much into this, however; mostly it just serves to develop Charlie Brown's pessimistic personality a little more.

Also: rats!