April 28-30, 1954: Comics, stairs and hoops

April 28, 1954:

The latest in the "Charlie Brown, Cartoonist" sequence. This one, I think, has an uncharacteristically clunky final panel. I find it difficult to imagine how Schulz could have thought CB's statement at the end works, it's very un-Peanuts-like.

April 29, 1954:

This is more like it. After the "Big Kids" Sunday strip, I think this is the first one to have a full thought balloon from Linus. I find the stairs in the second panel a little problematic, though. It's like the stairs sort of "slope" down off the side, like a carpeted hillside or something.

April 30, 1954:

Is it any wonder Snoopy forgets the kid's name? Anyway, this strip only works because of the limited size of the panels. Presumably Snoopy can see ahead off-panel, so why doesn't he notice the hoop is only as large as his snout beforehand? Maybe it's why Schulz draws him with his eyes closed in the third panel.

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.

December 14, 1950: Upstairs, downstairs

A long-standing question for comic strip artists is, if the joke is wholly verbal, what do the characters do while they talk?  In this one, they walk up and down stairs, stairs that seem to exist to go nowhere.  Much later, Schulz will use the hang-out wall for this.  Bill Watterson, who has obviously read a lot of classic Peanuts, would adapt this into Calvin and Hobbes' wonderful sledding sequences.

November 17, 1951: Bump! Bump! Klunk! Bump!!

This gag is a prototype of one that would be used later with characters like Linus and Sally.

Someone in the Metafilter thread remarked about Snoopy's warping to the top of the stairs.  Only explanation I can come up with is that Shermy must have fallen past him.