Showing posts with label telephone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label telephone. Show all posts

Sunday, August 14, 2011

September 6-11, 1954: The first weekday story

What do I mean by a "story?" It's a sequence of consecutive strips that tell a story that builds between them. They may stand alone, but you get something extra out of the strips if you've remembered the prior strips in the sequence. This is what separates stories from the sequences we've had before, which were not sequential and thus Schulz could not expect a reader to remember prior strips in order to get a joke in the current one. There might be continuity, such as with Schroeder's musical talents, Charlie Brown's checkers losing streak, Violet's mud pies or Patty's ability at marbles, but Schulz sets each strip up as if the prior strips didn't exist. These strips work alone too actually, but there is obviously a thread that connects them, they are meant to be read together.

We had one prior sequence that could count as a story, the "Lucy in the Golf Tournament" Sunday strips, which are atypical Peanuts strips in many ways. To my memory, this is the first story-related sequence to stretch over four consecutive non-Sunday strips. (One could consider all Sunday strips to be in their own sequence, since Schulz probably drew them on a different schedule and some newspapers only carried Peanuts on weekdays or Sundays.)

September 6

This is the first time we've seen a drawing of Pig-Pen clean, which is a different enough design to almost count as a separate character. He looks like a cross between Shermy and Linus, in overalls.)

September 7

Violet is talking about career; one could interpret Charlie Brown as talking about something more profound.

September 8

This is the first strip in the story I mentioned above. We had Pig-Pen drawn clean on Monday. Now we can imagine Schulz amusing himself by drawing some of the other characters dirty in Pig-Pen's usual style. Pig-Pen's messiness extends virally to several other characters. First, Schroeder.

The question of people admiring Pig-Pen is interesting. I think there is something admirable about him, but it's not specifically his messiness.

September 9

Next, Snoopy. Although a dog is kind of expected to be dirtier than people, here they seem to consider him of the same status as the other kids.

September 10

Charlie Brown speaks in bold, but he doesn't look angry. It looks to me more like he's dismayed that he's gotten messy like the other kids, only to find out it might not hold the advantages he was expecting. (Whatever those might possibly be.)

If the kids allow themselves to be "influenced" by Pig-Pen so easily, I can only say that they're unusually vulnerable to peer pressure.

September 11

The pay-off strip. This isn't the first strip in which we've seen Patty dirty -- there was an earlier one in which she and Violet were making mud pies. I don't know what it is, but I always thought Patty looked quite charming messed up like this.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

January 13, 1953: Schroeder has standards

Peanuts

This is a rather funny strip; the turnabout in the last panel is pretty sharp. Again, for this one to work you have to know about Schroeder's music snobbery, which isn't information you can glean from this strip by itself. Of course now we all know about Schroeder and his peccadilloes, but Peanuts wasn't in a huge number of papers in those days.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

November 15, 1952: Head of the household

Peanuts

1. Did Schulz chafe at the apparently simplistic art style of Peanuts? Did he throw in the realistic closeup of the telephone in the first panel to show he could draw in a more detailed style?

2. Lucy's expression in the last panel is very interesting. Comic strips so often come down to the same basic faces over and over again. People don't tend to think about it, but it's harder to come up with non-standard face expressions than you'd think. Here I think Lucy's expression might be a little overdone, but you can still get the point of the joke from her words combined with the expression, so it's okay.

Monday, April 5, 2010

August 11, 1952: Comic strip logic

Peanuts

Well, it makes a kind of sense. Presumably it wouldn't have worked if it hadn't been a toy telephone, or if Lucy had been talking to a person.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

July 17, 1952: Lucy answers the phone

Peanuts

This is one of those strips that relies on a character being very young and not quite grasping how the world works. These strips gradually lessen in number as Peanuts switches from being mostly about situations to which generic characters are exposed, to being more about characters with definite personalities and the ways they exhibit them.

At the moment, Schroeder is the character that leads the way in that direction. There are not very many generic musical prodigies in the world. Charlie Brown is also developing a definite personality, but there are still few strips using him that couldn't also be changed to feature some other character. Shermy is still (and would ever be) fairly generic. Patty's role as foil to Charlie Brown seems to be subsiding, and other than the occasional mud pie episode Violet doesn't tend to show a lot of individualistic behavior. Lucy, on the other hand, is a real hit and will only become more willful in the months to come.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

July 31, 1951: Party to Insecurity

Peanuts

Back in the day, Charlie Brown's later insecurity was spread more evenly across the cast (except, oddly, for Shermy). I wouldn't doubt that some socialites use this same reasoning when planning their soirées. The expression on Patty's face in panel four is adorable.

Check out the size of the telephone in the last panel compared to Patty. It's huge! It's easy to forget how small the characters are relative to their surroundings until they interact with objects from the adult world.

For any kids reading this: that thing Patty is using is called a telephone. It's like a cell phone, only it's plugged into the wall. Also, it doesn't have push buttons on the front, but a dial that must be spun in order to connect to someone. If it doesn't connect directly to a human operator. Oh, and it's probably owned by the phone company.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

October 25, 1950: Dogs are indiscreet

Peanuts
Snoopy is just too adorable in these panels.  A few months later Schulz will make pretty much the opposite joke in relation to Charlie Brown's diary.