July 4-9, 1955: Getting more unpopular every day

July 4:

The "fussbudget" joke continues. Despite what Lucy says this is far from the last we'll be hearing of it.

July 5:

But here we have the beginning of another running gag, that of Lucy teaching her brother about the world. This time, broadly speaking, her lesson is accurate (if a bit depressing). Tomorrow however....

July 6:

It's funnier when Lucy, who as we've already established with Charlie Brown has a somewhat tenuous grasp of the world, spreads well-meaning disinformation to Linus. It's only a matter of time before this is giving Charlie Brown headaches too.

Notice the different backgrounds in each of the panels here. I think Schulz changes them up as a way of illustrating that the "camera" in each is pointing in a different direction.

July 7:

Well, yeah. They're called adults. They still exist, even if we almost never see them in the strip.

When I first saw this strip I assumed the bike had to be a Penny Farthing bicycle or something, which would make Linus' reaction more understandable. But that's not an old-timey bike, that's a reflector on its front, or at least I think that's what it is.

July 8:

For being a comic strip about children, parents are mentioned seldom, probably because mentioning them too often might bring up questions about why we never see them.

The drawing of Lucy walking away in panel three is also a rarity; usually characters either leave the scene to the side, or they just disappear between panels and leave us to figure out they left the scene. We also have another example of serif lettering in panel 3.

July 9:

Charlie Brown is committing an error in his reasoning, conflating "not liking," with "dislike." You don't dislike people you've never met, but neither can you like them.

Yeah, I'm a real hit at parties. Bleah!

Sunday, July 3, 1955: Serif Grief

Snoopy is back to using thought balloons here, though just one, and he's thinking in lower-case and serif letters.

The content of this strip is pretty light. This could just as easily been a daily strip. The art is worth a little examination though.

Snoopy is still getting longer and more cartoony. We get six drawings of his head in three-quarter perspective here, and like many comic characters when you view them at an angle the cartoonist has to cheat to keep the character recognizable and expressive. This is really one of the black arts of cartooning -- how to distort heavily-stylized characters so they still read as the character when viewed from angles other than straight ahead of the side. The "weirdsnoopy" image I use as my Google portrait, and the hand puppet-like drawings we saw in the very early strips, show what happened when Schulz was still working on getting Snoopy to look good at an angle.

I can only assume it took him a lot of work to find a good three-quarters look for Snoopy, because it doesn't look like an intuitive solution to me. Snoopy's nose is wider when viewed from an angle, his snout seems shorter, and his mouth, instead of wrapping around his snout as a real dog's would, is drawn on as if his face was a flat surface.

I think this is a place where the progression of the art indirectly influenced Snoopy's character development. Drawing him this way is necessary to keep Snoopy's expressions readable, which is especially important here since Snoopy still doesn't use thought balloons very much. These expressions would not work on an anatomically canine head, because a real dog's mouth wraps around his snout. So, to keep Snoopy more relatable and more of a full character, Schulz has to draw him a bit more like he was a human, distancing him from his doggy roots.

As a proportion of Peanuts' 49-year run, Snoopy takes his more recent "bloated" form much more than this look. But that's a bit of a shame I think; I like this look for Snoopy, and I like it when he behaves like more of an everyday dog, although I think the more recent versions of Snoopy have their charms too. They're just different, incompatible charms.

April 25-30, 1955: I'm Well Read

April 25

At least it wouldn't all melt before she could eat it. The word "Boy" in the third panel is both serif'd and contains lowercase letters.

April 26

Once in a while Schroeder says something that indicates there's a slight change he could end up reciprocating Lucy's crush someday. It's quite rare, but it happens once in a while.

April 27

As has been remarked in the comments before, there really aren't a lot of Pig-Pen strips when measured as a percentage of all the Peanuts strips Schulz draw. He's fairly common in this period though.

April 28

Somewhat uncharacteristically, Pig-Pen gets angry at the way people refer to him here. It's a bit difficult, through all the grime, to read his expressions of ire. I'm not quite sure I get this strip though -- I sense there's something about it, maybe some context from the time, that I'm missing. I'm not actually sure the girls are judging his appearance, although if they're not then why would Schulz use Pig-Pen here?

April 29

I think Schulz spelled it "SKWEEK" in the third panel just to mix things up a bit. We get another funny drawing of Snoopy here, who is already the most plastic of the Peanuts characters.

April 30

My favorite thing about this strip is the slight irregularity in Snoopy's jaw in the third panel, indicating Snoopy chewing. Lucy's mouth seems to be missing in the first panel.

 

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.

Sunday, March 20, 1955: STOMP STOMP STOMP

1. As Lucy gets angrier, she shifts from speaking in normal letters, to serif'd letters, to thick letters.  That's some temper she's developing there.

2. Schroeder has picked up some additional disdain for Lucy since the occasions around his piano.

3. I think this one is slightly stronger without the two lead-in panels.

4. Scribble of ire!

September 28-October 3, 1954: Beethoven, Forget it, Serif hey, I'M NOT, Fancy signals, Fancy signals and Dog explosions

September 27

September 28

As someone who's often guilty of just the thing Charlie Brown is doing here, I have to say I find this hilarious.

September 29

September 30

Lucy seems to have the ability to exclaim, not just in serif lettering, but with lowercase letters too! This isn't even the fanciest writing we'll see this week.

Charlie Brown's spirit hasn't been beaten down quite so much yet.

October 1

How do the girls hear those fancy signals? Does Charlie Brown adapt a different tone of voice? Those typefaces are very well-rendered. Schulz was a true artist, but he was a great craftsman too. All of this done for a throwaway joke one Friday in 1954. I wonder if he worked from reference typefaces when he drew this one.

October 2

(This strip is a copy of the previous one in gocomics' browse order. I don't know what's supposed to go here.)

Sunday, October 3

Those are some great backgrounds in panels one and three. They must have taken Charles Schulz a long time to do! The juxtaposition of the deceptively simple characters and the elaborate, realistic backgrounds is one of the many little joys of classic Peanuts.

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.

February 18, 1954: Baby Linus has a lot of energy

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Schulz uses a few different styles of large-form lettering, and we can see them all here in close proximity.  We find outlined and filled in examples of:

serif:

serif-ed

sharp-cornered (in the M)

square-cornered

rounded simulated pen strokes 1

rounded simulated pen strokes2

January 11 & 12, 1954: The Van Pelt kids with blocks

January 11, 1954:

January 12, 1954:

The first one is more an observational strip about human nature than Lucy's personality specifically, although we might conclude that she's been somewhat spoiled by her tremendous winning streak at Checkers against Charlie Brown.  The second is a more typical strip about sisterly concern, but it does give three more of those great serif'd sleeping Zs.

(I should note that, despite what the title of this post might lead you to conclude, Lucy and Linus' last names have not been revealed in the strip yet.  Or if they have, I certainly don't remember it happening.)

November 23 & 28, December 31 1953: Sleepy Snoopy

November 23, 1953:

 November 28, 1953:

December 31, 1953:

I'm taking a couple of these out of order to collect some thematically similar strips.  All have to do with a sleeping Snoopy and all have to do with sight gags.

The first strip is another early thought balloon strip, and one that uses the standard tail on the balloon, too!  Schulz seems like he's finally decided to settle on this convention.

In the second strip, is that an indoor bed for Snoopy?  It would seem that would fix him as Charlie Brown's dog, but I don't think we can absolutely say that until a character states it explicitly.

The third strip is one that Schulz would come back to later, and is visually inventive in how it uses the size of the 'Z' to represent the loudness of Snoopy's snoring.  (It's also one of the earliest, though not the first I think, of a large serif 'Z' to represent sleep, which is a very Peanuts convention.)

May 19, 1952: Snoopy chews out Charlie Brown

A very cute strip. I like that one "ARF!" that's rendered with serif letters.

Charlie Brown takes it so hard that he reflexively holds his hat in his hands in defense!