Overthinking a plate of peanuts (which are a kind of bean)
A selective trip through all of Charles Schulz's classic comic strip. Updates daily.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
I find the huge 'X' at the end of Lucy's aborted count to be starkly evocative. Those tally marks could be raindrops, or stars, or maybe lives.
Charlie Brown remembers Lucy counting the stars in previous strips. The spectre of continuity rears its head here, and with it, unavoidably, the characters move closer towards being individuals more than interchangeable placeholder images for jokes.
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.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
Another chapter in the unfolding story of Lucy's mother's desperate search for peace and quiet.
This is a particular favorite strip for me. It has several funny drawings that suit the story perfectly, it reveals something about Lucy's personality, and along the way it paints a vivid picture of the dynamic between Lucy's mother (who needs Lucy to be out of the house sometimes) and father (who foots the bill).
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
This isn't the first time Lucy's played baseball, but it confirms her position in right field. This is the first bona-fide joke about how bad Lucy is as a fielder. Charlie Brown's comment in the first panel implies that Lucy already has a negative reputation as a ball player.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
Sometimes the heavy stylization of Peanuts works in the service of a gag. In this strip, it isn't clear what exactly it is that Snoopy is doing until he tells us in the last panel. Although "whoops!" is kind of a weird thing to say in response to something cold pressed against your back.
Snoopy isn't as long in these panels as he was a few weeks back, he looks to be of a more reasonable size compared to when he's sitting down. But we do have a few panels where we see his face in three-quarters' perspective and get that weird broad face. Snoopy's snout really only exists in profile.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
This is one of Snoopy's earliest moments of pure anarchy.
The lead-in panels on this strip, the two at the top that newspapers had the option of leaving off, are important this time. Without those panels, this strip is about Snoopy the crazy dog. With them, it's about how Charlie Brown doesn't take good care of his records. Even without the lead panels the second interpretation makes more sense than the first, but it doesn't have the necessary narrative weight behind it without seeing Charlie Brown sailing that record through the air.
When I first saw this strip in a compilation it was without the lead panels, and I was confused that Charlie Brown didn't see it was plainly Snoopy' fault the record was scratched up. (The reprint did have Charlie Brown rolling the record on its edge, but as a kid I just assumed, rather confusedly, that was a way people transported records back then.)
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
From the Wikipedia article on Virgil Thomson:
"[...] Thomson was famous for his revival of the rare technique of composing "musical portraits" of living subjects, often spending hours in a room with them before rushing off to finish the piece on his own. Many subjects reported feeling that the pieces did capture something unique about their identities even thought nearly all the portraits were absent of any clearly representational content."
A sly strip. Schroeder's looks of concentration, followed by his throwing his hands up, are important for understanding that he's giving up. I think it works better this way, allowing us to see him throwing in the towel, than being told directly that he's got nothing, which would seem a bit harder on Charlie Brown's feelings.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
Good grief! Is this the first time this trademark phrase has been used by a Peanuts cast member? I don't see it in my previous tags.
Lucy's personality isn't just a festering ball of evil, she has some rather weird quirks. (Fuzz? Really?) This strip helps to solidify Charlie Brown's developing role as long-suffering straight man. Schulz doesn't let him off the hook completely though; his fear of bugs at the end serves to unify his and Lucy's perspectives, showing they really aren't different.
Oh, one more thing...
WHY NOT WALK AROUND THE FUZZ?
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
This strip sets a couple of precedents all by itself.
First, for a while now, there have been kind of two designs for Snoopy. One is when he's sitting down, where he is a cute, compact little dog. Then other is when he's doing anything else, in which case he'll stretch out into an animal more than twice the size of the other one.
This strip doesn't have any drawings of Snoopy sitting dog-style, which become less frequent as Peanuts continues. The other one, the one depicted here, eventually becomes predominant. It is difficult to think of a beagle so large as a puppy, which is probably why this part of Snoopy's character is allowed to be forgotten. This is a much looser style for the character, which in turn allows Snoopy to become much more expressive and energetic, which fuels the growth in his personality.
Second, this is the first strip in which Snoopy's energetic personality annoys Charlie Brown. Once it's conclusively stated that Snoopy is his, he'll say things about wishing he had a normal dog, but until then it's more like being annoyed at a weird friend (a "Kramer") than a family member. Notable is that Charlie Brown refers to Snoopy as a "person."
The drawings of Snoopy here are very attractive generally. I especially like the ones in the first two panels. The first one is iconic, the second shows him running dog-style, which we don't often see.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
Well whatever you do don't let the audience know what you're whispering, I mean sheesh.
By keeping the information being whispered from the reader, the reader can't mistake the point to have something to do with the specific message. The message is unimportant; the joke is in the communication.
Three characters are left out of this strip. We can figure for ourselves why Snoopy and Linus aren't included. That Schulz shows preference for Schroeder over Shermy just goes to show how already poor Sherm is kind of a second-class cast member.
Odd rounded frames on the panels here.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
This isn't the first time Charlie Brown has flown a kite, I think. It doesn't count as the beginning of the kite-flying-failure aspect of his character either, since all of the characters are holding (or jumping, or are tied to) some piece of string, and two are actually running with them.
Also different are the character's attitudes at the end. All of them are wearing a "dumbfounded" expression, including Charlie Brown. More frequently after causing a kite crash, Charlie Brown's expression is more like dismay, or disgust.
One thing I wonder about... in the last panel, three of the characters are sticking their tongues out. This is a bit of graphic shorthand sometimes used in comics (especially older ones) to represent dumbfoundedness or annoyance. But where did this convention get started? It doesn't seem like a particularly obvious connection to make, to stick out your tongue in the face of a blameless accident. How did this get invented? (While we're at it, when did "Z" become the universal signifying letter for sleep?)
Notice that Shermy is walking Snoopy here, making the dog's owner more doubtful again.
All of the current characters are represented in this strip except Linus.
