May 9, 16, 23 & 30, 1954: Lucy at the Golf Tournament

We've come around to that strange place in Peanuts history where Charles Schulz experimented with putting adult characters in the strip as background elements, with continuity elements, with a relatively serious storyline, with titling, and with making Lucy a golf whiz.

Thing is, we already covered these strips last year.

I'm taking the day off from the blog, feel free to go back and reread my comments on the sequence, which is among the stranger moments in Peanuts' run, right up there with the time Alfred E. Neuman appeared in the strip.

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Read this sequence at gocomics.com:
May 9 - May 16 - May 23 - May 30

October 14, 1953: The inner life of animals

Okay, stop for a moment and imagine if you didn't know Snoopy was particularly weird. Back in the day Peanuts was still a young strip and we didn't yet know that Snoopy was a dog in name only, a bizarre creature whose imagination was so rich and powerful so as to have reality-warping powers. And then you run into this:



What is going to become of that dog, indeed. Note that, despite some hints, it's still not certain who owns Snoopy. He's still just a neighborhood dog at this point. The Daisy Hill Puppy Mill Farm backstory of the later years of the strip is still some time off.

September 18, 1953: Made in Taiwan

Wait, what?! Is Snoopy wearing an ear-wig? And how does he blush through fur? WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU SNOOPY?!

January 29, 1953: GET OUT OF MY HEAD, TELEVISION

The TV has a point I guess. This is a rare strip in which the source of humor comes from outside the characters. While no adult is seen here, one can only guess that an adult wrote that sign and put it on the air.

By the way, it is not true that Peanuts has never pictured an adult figure! We'll see that for ourselves before very long.

Shermy's hair seems darker here than before.

June 30, 1952: Lucy and the balloon

The thing that confuses me about this strip? Lucy can't fill the balloon with air, right, so she drags it along the ground. But what if she had been able to blow it up, what then? She isn't breathing helium after all; the balloon would still be earthbound.