Week of August 9-14, 1954: Things like that make my stomach hurt

August 9

As Lucy becomes more bullheaded and cantankerous, Linus would grow into the role of asking Charlie Brown science questions. In one memorable strip, he asks an angry-faced Lucy why the sky is blue. She snaps back at him "BECAUSE IT ISN'T GREEN!"

August 10

That coy smile on Pig-Pen's face in panel three is interesting, in a Mona Lisa kind of way.

August 11

This is a growing part of Lucy's personality, a refusal to acknowledge basic facts. At she isn't laughing about what a joker Charlie Brown is afterwards this time. Charlie Brown's stomachache of dismay when confronted with one of his friends' quirks is a developing part of his character, too.

August 12

It's been a little while since we've seen a fussy Lucy strip. This one fits right in with the pattern: Lucy looks a gift horse in the mouth, and the horse kicks. Charlie Brown's expression is a little different this time: it's a more introspective look of annoyance, more of a look of "why does this happen to me?" than "why do I put up with her?"

I might have to agree with Lucy, however, if there really are weeds in the lemonade.

August 13

Having trouble coming up with something to say about this one. Not the most complex joke we've seen.

August 14

This seems more like something Linus would do. Actually, Schroeder has been in a good number of non-musical strips around this time. He's catcher of the baseball team, he's Charlie Brown's cartooning audience, and he's also around as a bit character. I remember as a kind seeing Schroeder strips at the piano and wondering why I never saw him anywhere else. He seemed to exist in a piano-centered universe, with occasional visits from the Satan of his personal world, Lucy.

The first panel demonstrates a curious aspect of Peanuts' artwork from around the time. Characters wearing a neutral expression viewed front or from the diagonal are often drawn without mouths. I thought it was weird the first time I saw it, and I still think it's weird now.

Week of June 21-26, 1954: Self-love and baseball pictures

June 21

I like how the word "tickle" is drawn larger and darker to express how the force of Lucy's tickling is increasing. This is the first strip in a sequence actually; two more are coming next week.

June 22

The clever bit of this strip, I think, is how Snoopy is just sitting there up until the last panel, where it's suddenly revealed he's the umpire. A good strip I think.

June 23

1. It should be obvious that the intent of this strip is to express "Charlie Brown is a narcissist." This strip was drawn 47 years ago. So the implications of "Charlie Brown loves Charlie Brown," that is to say self-love, are rather different now, in the age of South Park, than back then.

2. Wait, Linus loves Violet? He's like one year old! We've barely seen him in a speaking role yet.

June 24

When you trade pictures with Schroeder, what do you expect you'd get?

There is something rather melancholy about this strip for me. Already we're seeing the age of baseball card collecting receding into the past. Here they're trading full-sized pictures of ballplayers, which I expect was never really popular but might have been a fad once. The day will come, and not too far from now, when this throwaway strip meant to be understood by kids and adults of 1954 will be one of the sole surviving records of baseball player picture trading. In fact, given both Peanuts' survivability and huge place in our culture, it may some day be the last record of a fad that may once have enthralled whole schoolyards.

Peanuts was not written to be a cultural artifact but to be comprehended to readers of the time. Comic strips are particularly ephemeral because of their nature, because it's too much to ask of a cartoonist tasked with producing new material daily to give thought to his work's long-term relevance. Yet so they remain, and will only increase being so in the future, vestiges of an age long dead.

But, you know, ha ha! He gave him a picture of Beethoven!

June 25

It may seem weird that Snoopy could hold so much water until you realize that he must be mostly sponge.

June 26

That's a damn frilly sandbox for Charlie Brown. And it's also a rare show of affluence for the kid. It's usually Violet who would have the frilly, expensive sandbox, and Charlie Brown who would be the observer, and it'd also be Violet who would be showing it off.

The attitude of Charlie Brown here is interesting. Who must have built this sandbox? I don't think his parents, and anyway I can't picture Charlie Brown speaking so badly of his folks. I think he must be talking about the workmen who installed it. But what could that mean, that he commissioned the thing?

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.

April 24, 1953: The Tyrant Pose

The third panel here is the first time in the strip I think the "tyrant" pose is used: a character with balled fists, one arm stretched upward at an angle, the other bent, staring into space with mouth wide open, and with angry eyebrows. Whenever this pose is used, it's usually a signal to the reader that the character is being unreasonably bossy. Sometimes it signifies comeuppance is coming. Lucy uses it a fair bit later on though, and she doesn't get comeuppance so much.

April 17, 1952: His head does make a perfect target

Here you see the only right and proper response to anyone who claims perfection for themselves. To throw a bucket at their head.

CB's personality has been progressing towards his wishy-washy destination, but there is still some of the old smart-aleck there.

October 17, 1951: Quicksandbox

I just like this one. I make no excuses.

July 25, 1951: Conversations From the Sandbox

The characters' playing in the sandbox here is one of those things it's hard to picture the later characters doing, when most things were depicted in profile. Note the three-quarter perspective on Charlie Brown's toy truck.

How big is that sandbox anyway? Are they at the beach? And is Snoopy's grassy hilltop an ancestor of CB's place of perdition, the pitcher's mound?

June 4, 1951: Man of the earth

Notice the difference in Charlie Brown's mouth when seen in three-quarters' perspective (second panel) and nearly full-on (fourth panel).  On the first we get a relief line, the second just a mouth outline.  If Charlie Brown were seen straight-on, Schulz would have had to figure something to do with his nose, as his U-shaped noses would have to pick a side to be seen from then.

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