November 6, 1953: Two sick kids

Read this strip on gocomics.com.

I seem to remember this strip concept before, of someone walking up to Charlie Brown and making some remark about themselves, which causes Charlie Brown to launch into a self-centered examination of his own life, eventually causing the original kid to walk away. I want to say we've seen it with Schroeder before, and I think we've also seen it with Violet. Don't have the time to search through the archives right now though.

Final sigh!

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Concerning the images on the site, there remains the problem with the archives, which continue to point to the strips hosted on comics.com and will probably go dark any moment now. Uploading all those strips, over 700 to date, using Blogger's interface is not something I relish doing. I might just end up letting those images be broken for a while. Maybe I could figure out a way, similar to the last fix, of hacking a blog archive so at least those pages will point to gocomics' pages for the strips? I will look into it.

October 22, 1953: Linus nearly kills himself three times

Stylistically this is interesting for being composed of eight panels. It also ends with that frequent (although at this point still rarely-seen) concluding word "*sigh*".

Linus is physically uncoordinated enough that he can't safely step on or off a curb, but he's psychologically adept enough to feel despair for his inability.

October 4, 1953: Snooopy vs The Yard: Another Realistic Bird

Unlike previous bits of suburban malice directed at the poor beagle, this one has the mental capacity to actually be contemptuous.

Those are some very good bird drawings, and Snoopy himself looks great in the second frame. Isn't that branch awfully low to the ground though?

August 26, 1953: Charlie Brown the killjoy

Most of the characters in your standard comic strip have what might be charitably termed "quirks." Usually, comics don't intend you to emphasize with them. The humor comes from laughing at rather than with. One of Peanuts' great innovations is in making all of its characters, at one time or another, truly relatable. Even the terrible Lucy, at the height of her fell power, had strips in which she was a more-or-less normal little girl.

But of all these characters, Charlie Brown, the one Schulz himself described as the Everyman of the cast, is the one who is obviously the one intended to be empathized with the most. That's why I like these strips in which the focus is on another character reacting to CB, instead of the reverse.

July 2, 1953: Lucy and Linus, sister and brother

This is the first time the two have actually seemed to be "together" in anything. Fellow-feeling is a remarkably uncommon trait for the Peanuts characters to have; most of them are loners at heart. Exceptions: Snoopy and Woodstock, "Peppermint" Patty and Marcie. Maybe Patty and Violet, although we haven't seen much of that yet.

Sunday, June 21, 1953: Linus thinks

Being thoughts, this doesn't count as Linus' first words. I'm not even sure this counts as Linus' first thought balloons, but I can't find the strip in the archives in which he complains about "big kids," which is the prior use I remember so maybe that comes later. But I think it is the first example of Linus' voice really coming through clearly to the reader, even if it isn't audible to other characters.

Linus is interesting because we first get a few strips with him thinking before he actually starts talking. Sally also does this when she shows up. I think Rerun gets it too.

October 13, 1952: Snoopy the Musician

This is one of the first strips in which a character actually shouts at another one, in larger letters. We've yet to see our first AUGH, though.

July 4, 1952: Snoopy and Schroeder

The two wordless wonders, together for the first time.

One thing about Peanuts that is right there in the open but is mentioned surprisingly rarely is how some characters never seem to interact with other ones. Schroeder and Linus don't have a lot of interactions. Neither do Lucy and Peppermint Patty (who calls her "Lucille"). Schroeder and Snoopy do have some interactions, but not as many as Schroeder and Lucy, who interact so often in the strip's heyday you could be forgiven for thinking Schroeder must be an imaginary friend of Lucy's.

Hey, is this the first "sigh?"

February 21, 1952: *sigh*

I think this is the first "sigh" in Peanuts, but I could have missed one. It is another step along the way for Snoopy's personality though, growing out of the state in which something as simple as fetch could occupy him.

December 22, 1951: And A Bite For Beethoven

The teddy bear in panel two is only there to make sense out of his inclusion in Patty's words in panel three.

Although this is a baby joke strip, Schulz still slipped in that Beethoven reference in there.

Charlie Brown gets no respect.