May 1, 1955: Silly Snoopy, rope-jumping is for kids

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

A wonderful strip, mostly for the expressions on Snoopy's face. It's a difficult strip to visualize in motion though. Schulz is depicting the dog jumping rope as a (soon to be) standard Snoopydance, but it looks like he's skipping in a lot of little hops, if his hind feet are technically leaving the ground at all.

I think the strip works a little better with the lead-up panels giving Snoopy's enthusiams a little time to warm up, rather than just having him jump in after watching Lucy for a single frame.

 

Sunday, August 22, 1954: The aliens have arrived

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

I think this strip is more effect without the lead-in panels, which means our first glimpse of the floating wading pool will be the same as Charlie Brown's. Lucy's final comment also works better in that case; it's unnecessary with the first two panels included.

This is a very funny strip (especially "He pointed his flame thrower right at me!"), but it's a kind of humor that seems out of place in Peanuts, heavily reliant on sight gags. At least it's Charlie Brown who's the silly one here.

That's gotta be a pretty strong wind.

April 27, 1954: With real working truck bed!

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This is a frequently-used structure by Schulz at the moment. It goes:

1. A character does or says something silly.
2. Another character, or in the case of Snoopy vs. The Yard plain old physics, shows why the thing done is silly.

It's not much by itself, so these strips usually have something else going for them, either funny art (as here), empathy with one of the characters (such as the silly one who realizes by the end his mistake), or in some cases the silly character bullheadedly persisting in his error regardless. This happens with Lucy a lot, but Linus also becomes susceptible to it, every Halloween....

April 6, 1954: So that's what radio static looks like

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Some nice, although strangely un-Peanuts-like, abstract art here brought to field in the cause of drawing white noise.  Charlie Brown is still kind of silly/naive sometimes; Linus would be more the type to listen to static later.  Of course it has to be Schroeder who offers to fix C.B.'s radio, because he cares enough about music to help people experience it better.

December 19, 1953: Really really really really....

This is just about Patty at her most charming.  Before she became half of the soul-destroying tag-team of Patty & Violet.  Peanuts & Schulz: A Biography implies that most of the strip's characters were based, at least originally, on real people.  I don't think it's necessarily useful or accurate to make this claim beyond the level of inspiration, but still.  I wouldn't like to think that happened between Charles Schulz and whoever Patty and Violet were based on.

(It's also possible, now that I think about it, that I'm conflating Patty and Violet's later roles.  Well, getting these things straightened out is part of the reason I'm going through the whole course of the strip.)

In the last panel there is an odd space in Patty's word balloon, like a word got whitened-out between Schulz and print.  (Also, for some reason I feel like there should be an exclamation point after her statement there, but that's not really a big deal.)

August 7, 1953: This strip blows my mind, Beethoven edition

How is that even possible?

I'll tell you what though. Twisting your brain around so that this strip somehow makes sense in an ordinary way is a fun intellectual exercise in self-derangement.

Maybe Schroeder is sponsored by a local bakery called, for some reason, the "Beeth Oven." Or maybe it's renowned for the cooking of pastry. Pastry that contains beets. Beets, and extraneous H's.

Or maybe Beethoven was foresighted enough to leave a provision in his estate to support the sporting life of young enthusiasts of his work? And the representatives of that estate, to promote their own firm perhaps, decided to demand that the name of their long-deceased sponsor be put upon the jerseys of the beneficiaries.

Or maybe a local music store uses the composer's name as a trademark. Yeah, that seems plausible. And boring.

Has anyone tried saying "Beethoven" three times in a row, to summon his spirit?

There is still more interesting about this strip... apparently, Charlie Brown's barber Dad's shop is called "Family Barber Shop." This (and tomorrow's strip) may be the only time this is mentioned.

Finally, it is possible sometimes to believe that Beethoven Schroeder is a different character than Baseball Schroeder, since the two don't often express the interests of the other. Sometimes Schulz has Schroeder whistle something while walking up to talk to Charlie Brown, but that's infrequent. Here, at least, we have a solid (if silly) point of connection.

May 23, 1952: Snoopy is not weighed down by life

This is a great strip. It has a theme I heartily agree with, it's cute, and shows a hint of Snoopy's developing personality. It could pass for a strip a few years later all except for the art style, which looks even better, I think, with old-style Snoopy doing it.

Notice that word balloons with music notes do not count against Snoopy's no-talking prohibition.

November 20, 1951: And They Disapprove of Baby Bottles In The Orchestra Pit

Speaking of Schroeder....

Many strips these days aspire to just the crazy stuff from Peanuts, without copying the normal strips in-between. Those strips reset the norm, regrounding the strip's world in reality, which makes it more effective when the strip takes another flight of fancy a few weeks later.

November 19, 1951: Does He Watch the Dog Whisperer?

This marks the point where Snoopy begins to progress beyond just being a generic dog to being something strange and wonderful but, somehow, other. Like when Schroeder turned out to be a musical prodigy and Schulz could make jokes about an infant playing in a concert hall, now we have Snoopy with a TV antenna.

Those jokes are funny because the characters, up to that point, have been represented pretty realistically. Snoopy has always been a dog foremost and Schroeder was a baby before he became a musician. More locally, in the strips immediately preceding this one (and the last one, which also focused on Snoopy's intelligence) we had several strips which were about CB and the girls, depicting fairly normal happenings that could conceivably happen in real life.

As readers became used to the characters in their new roles, to continue to get laughs from them Schulz will have to vary his approach. In Schroeder's case he reins in the unreality a bit and has him play off other characters. In Snoopy's case he goes all-out, making him weirder and weirder. And weirder.

By the way, that third panel is just marvelous. Look at it, the whole joke is contained just in that one panel. It's an excellent sight gag. The panel could really stand on its own, Far Side-like; the other panels serve to accentuate it, but they aren't really needed. (Although Patty's looking back in the fourth panel, eyebrow raised, is pretty cool.)

October 22, 1951: You dig?

I find this one to be pretty funny. It's just the image of Charlie Brown digging furiously right behind Patty in order to evade her finding him in Hide-And-Seek. It's a well-constructed punchline too, with CB's words playing off of the traditional H&S line.