Sunday, September 5, 1954: Lucy, Patty and Violet

The beginning of this strip demonstrates how Patty and Violet are slowly becoming a double-act, reinforcing each other's opinions and building up the will to confront Lucy. Lucy is also true to form here, fussing and throwing a tantrum about "not playing her way." (That generic reason for the confrontation and tantrum seems kind of weak, but it serves to keep the focus on the characters and their reactions, and not whatever game it is they're playing.)

This strip also demonstrates that Lucy's behavior is, to some extent, an act she puts on to attempt to get her way. When it's evident that her ruckus is to no avail she comes around quickly.

The drawings of her tantrum are very energetic. Panels five through ten show particularly varied reactions. Schulz must have put some thought into how to illustrate characters pitching fits or otherwise expressing anger/dismay. Note, Charlie Brown hit his own head against a tree not long ago, and now Lucy is doing it too.

Week of May 10-15, 1954: Jellybeans, Coconut, Baseball and Swings

May 10:

I really hope they aren't resting in a bowl of milk. Most breakfast cereals probably have close to that much sugar as it is.

May 11:

A nice understated last panel on this strip.

May 12:

This is similar to a certain Friz Freling-directed Sylvester and Tweety cartoon, in which, in an effort to get high enough to grab Tweety's cage, Sylvester swings back and forth in a swing, going higher and higher. Unfortunately, part of the arc happens to intersect the field of motion of a pole-driving machine, and....

May 13:

The more I think about this strip the more grossed-out I get. Maybe she should wash them off in a bowl of milk? (We already knows she likes putting her hands in milk from a previous strip.) Maybe Schulz had jelly beans on the brain at the time he wrote these.

May 14:

Every so often a character reacts with surprising self-knowledge. You don't tend to get that kind of reflection from Beetle Bailey. It's a bit unsettling when it happens, whether in the comics or in real life.

May 15:

Coconut-flavored cough medicine?

This is a structure Schulz uses sometimes, where a character reacts strongly in the third panel, and another character shows up in the last panel expressly to watch and explain why the first character is reacting. Violet's wide smile here is interesting -- why is CB hating coconut funny? My interpretation is, it's the joy of watching someone you know act in an expected fashion. "Good ol' Charlie Brown. Boy, does he hate coconut!" That radio is really an innocent party in this however. Charlie Brown is just kicking the messenger.

Notice that Schulz isn't spelling it "cocoanut" anymore.

December 5, 1953: Reciprocal slobber

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

There are a few strips that notice a basic similarity between the behavior of very little kids and dogs, and by my reckoning this is the first.  I seem to remember a few strips that played this up when Sally comes on the scene, when she and Snoopy team up to steal Linus' blanket.

Why is the noise of Snoopy licking depicted as "smack," and why is it in a word balloon?

When characters stoop over, like Lucy is in panel three, it seems easy to imagine them unfolding their legs and ending up much taller than they should be.

August 6, 1953: The weirdness of Patty's dress

Lucy exhibits surprising self-awareness here.  She loses these introspective powers as she comes into her own as neighborhood terror.

It's worth noting, for a moment, the bizarre attributes of Patty's dress. All the girls typically wear skirts in this phase of Peanuts' development. Some time earlier, when a girl bent over Schulz didn't bother to wrap the skirt around the legs. In this strip, however, he cheats Patty's legs and skirt longer as she stoops down to Lucy's height.

Even more interesting, however... look at the cross-hatch pattern on her dress. Does something look odd about it? It's like the cloth is a shaped hole in the paper, revealing the pattern behind it. Due to the small size of the panels on the page, I think the pattern reads better this way than if it were more realistically drawn.

I love it when comic strips do things like this. A contemporary example, to borrow from outside the artform for a moment, is in the Monkey Island series of computer games. Most of them feature a salesman character named Stan who wears a loud checked sportcoat. The pattern on the coat is applied across the folds of cloth in much the same way as the pattern on Patty's dress. This fan drawing on Stan (taken from here) illustrates the effect:

Recently the series made the jump to polygonal, 3D graphics. The pattern on his coat is considered to be such an integral part of the character that the developers went to special trouble to preserve the effect (source page):