December 13-18, 1954: Obsessing over Santa

December 13

I think this is second time a character has written things that are depicted as hanging over his head. (I forgot exactly when the first was, unfortunately -- it's possible I'm getting confused and this is the first, this post has been a few days in coming.)

The convention is odd, and I think originates with Peanuts. It is hard to come up with new conventions that are still at-a-glance comprehensible to the reader. This one is helped by the fact that Charlie Brown is obvious writing, and the words hanging in the air are hand-written. Thought balloons had to have been a harder sell.

December 14

A hint that Charlie Brown doesn't get much for Christmas. This could be taken as another hint that his family is working-class; the first such hints were from Violet snobbishly lording it over him, and Shermy's huge train set contrasted with CB's tiny loop.

December 15

Once again, an early Peanuts strip presents a scene that wouldn't have been out of place in Calvin and Hobbes.

December 16

If you ever find a discarded calendar with December 17 circled in red, you'll have a pretty good idea who owned it. Schroeder's affection for the composer is alternatingly touching and worrying. I am reminded, for some reason, of that guy who left roses and cognac on Edgar Allen Poe's grave all those years.

December 17

To reveal that Santa travels around the world on a flying sleigh pulled by reindeer would be a let down.

December 18

That's a pretty harsh response, heh. I wonder if we can consider that it's Charlie Brown's parents who sent him that rejection slip, in order to manage their son's expectations for Christmas presents?

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The blog has been updating sporadically lately because the blogging client I usually use, Blogsy (basically the only worthwhile iOS blogging client I've seen), was broken first by Apple and iOS 5, second by Google and WebAUTH 2.0, which hangs if you try to upload more than three images within a limited time. I hadn't noticed how slow the Blogger web interface workflow was until I was forced to go back to it for a while. Blogsy still isn't completely fixed yet, but at least it's useable again.

In more relevant news, the writer of Sally Forth (rather an underrated strip if you ask me) keeps a webcomic called Medium Large that referenced the Great Pumpkin yesterday. (Warning: language, NSFW)

February 23, 1953: At the Writin' Fence

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

I think we can safely assume that the upper graffiti is Patty's doing.  It is important to the joke here that Lucy is depicted as very young, so as to provide an explanation for the illegible scrawl on the bottom of the fence.  In fact, I think Schulz is actually cheating Lucy slightly shorter than she usually is, so the joke is clearer.

The strip for February 12, 1954 (presented here, fourth down) has Shermy writing on a similar wall.  On that strip, njguy54 commented that Shermy's use of cursive was "interesting."  It was, there, since who writes in cursive on large, vertical surfaces?  But the use of cursive here is much more important, since it provides important visual similarity between the two writings.

Did Schulz plan the two strips at the same time?  Probably; there are many examples of similar strips separated by a small number of days, enough to suggest part of his creation strategy: to hit upon some idea, to mine it for joke potential, then to draw some or all of the ideas, ideally seperated by a few days to keep things mixed up.

At some point, I conjecture, Schulz realizes that he doesn't always have to spread the strips apart like this, and he takes to running "theme weeks," where a number of consecutive strips feature a similar premise.  That eventually leads to sequences of linear storytelling, such as Charlie Brown progressively leading his baseball team to failure.  (Another sequence leading to that is the upcoming Lucy in the Golf Tournament story that plays over consecutive Sundays.)

April 18, 1953: Stylish Snoopy

The construction of the punchline of this joke is pure comedy 101. For some reason, I consider, it is important that the reader sees the punch of this kind of joke, that it's a sight gag, instead of reads it out of a word balloon. This lets the humor value of the drawing of Snoopy with a haircut assist the main joke (that of a dog, an unlikely competitor, beating Shermy to getting the first haircut of the summer).

It is important, I think, that the payoff be a sight gag, but I'm not exactly sure why. It might be because the rest of the strip is primarily verbal, so it needs the sight gag for variety. Or it might be because Shermy's reaction is spoken, and having two characters speak at the essential moment of comedy would be unwieldly. It might just have to do with that nebulous comedic concept, timing. Or maybe, if the punch moment of the strip were told instead shown, it'd seem arbitrary and forced.

January 22, 1953: Schroeder signs the fence

These days, the ubiquity of computers has give us the cut-and-paste comic strip. That is why we still have (although we really don't need it) B.C., although Johnny Hart died years ago now, the syndicate has a database of all the characters in a variety of poses, and can now just throw together a strip in a paint program. It's just another way that newspaper comics have come to suck as of late.

Peanuts, although its streamlined, iconic look might make one think it to be one of the few strips that could be conceivably improved by such a process, to my knowledge never used it. Thus, when you see a complex bit of art in multiple panels, such as Charlie Brown's signature here, you can be pretty sure Charles Schulz drew it the same way multiple times. It is fun to play spot the differences in those cases: the 'r' in Charlie is a little wider in the second panel and extents further below the 'l', the 'e' at the end has a slightly larger loop, the 'o' is crossed by the board seam at the right place, but the second dip of the 'w' in Brown is smaller....

October 4, 1951: Editorial judgement

How does crossing the message out in panel three result in its seamless alteration in panel four?

Oh, and happy birthday Dad!