Sunday, August 1, 1954: Whoops!

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.

Week of May 17-22, 1954: Dirges and Disappointments

May 17:

Snoopy used to do more dog-like things, like howl at the moon. Most dogs don't bother pro-rating the volume of their howling according to the amount of moon visible, though, because they don't comprehend fractions.

May 18:

The story of this strip seems at first, pretty much, to be "character does something foolish, which is rapidly undone due to its foolishness, so there."

Here's a thought experiment. If this strip involved Lucy stacking a vertical column of blocks, which eventually went too high and toppled over, causing her to say "Rats!", would it be a strip-worthy scene? What if it involved another character, like leaving out a bag of candy which Charlie Brown or Snoopy then came along and ate?

For some reason I'm very interested in this idea, to an extent that surprises me. It is my view that this strip works more for the "Rats!" at the end than the situation itself; it's about Lucy's learning that the world doesn't work the way she expects, and the disappointment she feels. This is a frequent theme of Peanuts.

May 19:

The universe never supplies just the right amount of water, Snoopy.

May 20:

This joke is deceptively complex. Lucy confuses the mood of a piece of music as being a value judgement on its quality.

You know you can tell where a dirge is on a vinyl record by looking closely at the grooves with a magnifying glass? The plastic is grayer at that point.

May 21:

Didn't we see this one before, or something like it? I can't find it in the archives though, despite my at-times-obsessive tagging.

May 22:

What kind of gas is in that balloon to be able to hold up that thick rope? What kind of strength must Lucy have to be able to hold it so casually?

May 8, 1953: Mania, meet mania

For those of you too young to remember those strange things called "ree-cords," they were fragile platters of vinyl on which were engraved grooves which, when used in the proper player, could reproduce sound.

The shockwave coming off of Schroeder's head in the last panel, is one of those comic conventions, here as a depiction of surprise or dismay, that is mostly just accepted. But what is it supposed to represent? What is it a visual metaphor for? What's to stop us from creating our own such visual metaphors? (I think it'd be fun to do this but make them crazy and nonsensical.) How do these things get invented and agreed upon?

Sunday, July 6, 1952: Group picture

Lucy still has her round eyes (which look even weirder than usual in the second panel). Snoopy says "Shh!" And it's another turnabout/chase strip, demonstrating that, while Charlie Brown has been seeming depressed lately, he's still got a lot of his old self in there.

June 21, 1952: Further development of the monster

Charlie Brown handles this a lot better than he does all those footballs later on. This is also the first "POW!" I remember seeing in the strip. POW is a word often connected with Lucy....

I've looked ahead a few months, and I have to say there are some excellent strips coming up. Linus makes the scene before long!

May 17, 1952: Blocks have many uses

Lucy gets a lot of use out of her blocks.

The premise of this strip relies on Charlie Brown not noticing Lucy as she constructs her staircase. If he had looked over and Lucy making her ramp he probably wouldn't be scared. So, a subtext of this strip is that Charlie Brown gets deeply involved in books, and Lucy knows this well enough to rely upon it for her prank.