Sunday, July 11, 1954: Cheese it, it's the fuzz

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?

January 13-15, 1954: Snoopy's ears creep me out

January 13, 1954:

January 14, 1954:

January 15, 1954:

Snoopy's ears demonstrate once more how they can be held rigid in place in weird poses at will.  They're almost like additional limbs.  Of course they have their limits: they don't seem capable of supporting much weight, and they don't seem capable of supporting Violet's ire, that killjoy.

The third strip gives us a lot more Snoopy drawings than the standard daily strip.  I love the one at the top-left of the third panel, where you only see his feet peeking into the frame.  But there's a three-quarter "puppet head" view of Snoopy smiling in that one too, which we haven't seen for quite a while.

Charlie Brown is the one giving Snoopy his walk, which points the "owner" needle more firmly towards him again.  But we've still gotten no concrete indication of whose dog Snoopy is.  This may be the first time, however, that Snoopy's relentless enthusiasm has gotten on the kid's nerves, which is an oft-used gag over Peanuts' run.

October 22, 1953: Linus nearly kills himself three times

Stylistically this is interesting for being composed of eight panels. It also ends with that frequent (although at this point still rarely-seen) concluding word "*sigh*".

Linus is physically uncoordinated enough that he can't safely step on or off a curb, but he's psychologically adept enough to feel despair for his inability.

March 16, 1953: Lucy's sense of propriety

More of Lucy's fussiness. What is interesting I think is that later on Lucy's fussy behavior is actually mostly taken for granted, it's more told than shown in later strips. (Her actual behavior is mostly Selfish-Evil.) So it's nice to see some genuine fussy behavior from her.

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.