Sunday, December 5, 1954: Large-format Pig-Pen

  

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

1. "Poor ol' Pig-Pen" indicates a certain amount of resignation from Charlie Brown concerning Pig-Pen's condition.
2. The joke about raising a cloud of dust while running on a sidewalk would be reused multiple times over Peanuts' run. This is the first use.
3. This is a hilarious strip in how throughly it imagines the intersection between those two ideas, "Pig-Pen" and "candy." "I can't get it out of my pocket... IT'S STUCK!" Oh god.
4. Pig-Pen is totally ignorant of Charlie Brown's discomfort. That kid must have an amazing immune system. I'm reminded of a bit from James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small books where the Yorkshire country vet describes the amazing health of the kids of the local knacker-man, who have been brought up all their lives amid the end-products of the most amazingly deadly livestock diseases.
5. Charlie Brown's concern for Snoopy's well-being is touching in a way.  The dog helped him out, it's only right he return the favor.  (If the candy had fallen on the ground, it might not have gotten any dirtier but Pig-Pen might not recognize it as being any more sullied.  He may even have found it there.)
6. Good grief!
7. Scribble of... what, really?

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Sorry for the delay in this update.  Foolishly, I went ahead and updated to iOS 5 only to discover my blogging client crashes when uploading images on it, so I'm going to have to use Blogger's web interface to post for a while.

Sunday, November 8, 1953: Get yer dog away from the orchestra pit

Read this strip on gocomics.com.

Schroeder's the one demonstrating his imagination here.

Scribble of ire!

October 28, 1953: Creeping up on Halloween

I had no idea that Peanuts merchandising got started so early.

Surprised that Snoopy can say "Boo?" You shouldn't be. It's about the only English word he can say though.

Scribble of ire!

September 26, 1953: That's the way it goes

Second time Charlie Brown has said "That's the way it goes" in a week.

Shermy gets a taste of the lovelorn longing that CB would adopt later. One interesting thing here is the subplot, concerning Snoopy and a Scribble of Ire, which is rather rare in a four-panel strip. It serves as a commentary on the main plot, yes, but it isn't what I'd call important. For the record, dogs don't really make good arm-rests.

Snoopy goes through the Four Stages of Annoyance here: Observation, Recognition, Exasperation and Rejection.

Halloween, 1952: Do your worst!

Remarkably cocky of Patty here, but then maybe she knows her opponents.

Scribble of ire!

July 24, 1952: Lucy and Snoopy

1. Lucy's edging still-closer to the position of strip bully. That's rather a weird choice, I'd think, for a character who was introduced as one of the youngest of the cast, and a girl at that.

2. Snoopy's personality develops a bit too. That's a devious expression he's wearing in the last panel.

3. We also discover another thing he can say, and he can say it in serif lettering!

4. Scribble of ire!

November 22, 1951: Starring Patty as the Queen of Hearts

It's the Scribble of RAGE! Grrar!

This seems very much like a Lucy maneuver. This seems a somewhat misogynistic strip, doesn't it? How would we feel about this if it was, say, Shermy who was his opponent?

August 27, 1951: Baby vs. Dog

A funny strip, though a variant of the ball throwing one from a few days ago. How about Schroeder's "talk to the hand" gesture in the second panel?

Notice that, to signal the characters eating, Schulz resorted to word balloons saying "chomp chomp" and "smack smack."

Also, it's not their first appearance by any means, but check out the fancy question-marks in the second and fourth panels, which were kind of a Schulz trademark in the early days.

And: scribble of ire!

August 22, 1951: That's a mean baby

The look on Schroeder's face in the first panel is fairly unique for him. Also, behold the return of the scribble of ire!

April 16, 1951: Snoopy chases bird down stairs

That bird is back, and so is the scribble of ire.

Eventually, it's either this bird or one that looks a lot like it that builds a nest on Snoopy's stomach while he lies atop his birdhouse EDIT: dammit doghouse, and it's one of the birds to be born from that nest who would become Woodstock.

Woodstock would pine, around Mother's Day every year, for his mother. Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography notes that Charles Schulz's mother was rather cruelly taken from him within a week of his going overseas to fight in World War II (her funeral was the day before he shipped out), a blow it seems he never recovered from.

But anyway, it's weird to think that the unobtainable love and affection that Woodstock sought from his absent mother all those years may be right here, in this very bird.

February 2, 1951: The scribble of shame

Look at Patty in the distance in panel 2.  Would someone only familar with Peanuts' later days recognize her as being a Charles Schulz character?  But the design, as opposed to many other comics of the time, is unquestionably modern; you could probably find a recent illustrated children's book out there somewhere with a character that looks like Original Patty.

Also in this one, we see the cartoon shorthand of showing anger with a word balloon containing a scribble. The scribble of shame.

December 20, 1950: Don't you know, about the bird?

This rather straight-forward and pointless strip is notable for being the first appearance of a bird in Peanuts.  It looks quite different from Woodstock later on.

Woodstock originated as a hachling from a bird that built its nest on Snoopy's stomach as he lay atop his dog house.  The mother bird, if my memory holds up, looked fairly realistic, a lot like this one.