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.

Week of May 31-June 5, 1954: The Blanket

May 31:

I spoke too soon regarding the spelling of "coconut." Actually, it's possible this is the first time Schulz called it "cocoanut," and I misremembered. I sometimes scout ahead a few months so I know what's coming up, and I might be remembering this odd spelling from that.

Charlie Brown's distaste for coconut is one of those facts about the character that didn't really survive into the later strip.

June 1:

This is the first strip in which Linus holds a blanket, and the first one in which we're told he does it for security-related purposes, although the explicit term "security blanket" isn't in use yet.

June 2:

On the art of extracting comfort from flannel. Lucy isn't really opposed to it at this point -- in fact, I think you can probably find several strips in which Lucy is anti- and pro-blanket. Their grandmother, however, is less divided about it.

June 3:

Snoopy keeps one part of his brain awake at all time to watch for food opportunities. It's like a processor devoted to background tasks.

We get the serif-Z representing sleep here again.

June 4:

We've seen versions of this strip before. An early strip had them playing hide-and-seek, and the width of Charlie Brown's head gave him away.

In fact his head isn't that much wider than the others, it just seems to stick out more. Patty would have trouble hiding behind that tree without the sign (also because her dress extends out wider).

June 5:

Snoopy vs. The Yard: The Faucet

Even assuming the dog isn't familiar with the workings of human gardening apparatus, it's an oddly specific place to choose for a nap.

Sunday, November 23, 1952: CTHULHU RISES

Blogger sometimes takes posts I've set to publish and makes them drafts instead, which once in a while results in strips getting overlooked. Sometimes it doesn't matter much, but this strip is incredibly important, so I'm using it even though it's a couple months old by this point:



This seems to be the first act of full-on spite Lucy commits that cannot be explained by familial antipathy or mere childishness. It is an act of pure evil by her, and it's glorious. Look at that little smile on her face in panel six. It's against her favorite punching dummy, too. And Charlie Brown was so happy in the throwaway panels!

We even get that "down on his luck" slanted mouth in the last panel.

Schulz had many, many positive attributes as a cartoonist, but there are a couple of things in these early days he could have used some improvement on. One of them was in varying his phrasing; here, Lucy uses the "slaughter" line twice, which is a bit awkward. This isn't the only strip in which this defect can be seen. As Schulz gains experience writing dialogue I believe these errors eventually go away.

January 18, 1953: Linus' security ball

Linus demonstrates that he might have some security issues. He's so happy in the second panel!

Just because I thought was funny, the Peanuts strip up at comics.com today was this one from 1963:



It's nice to see Schulz, even at the height of Peanuts' popularity, not taking the strip all that seriously.