Sunday, April 3, 1955: Security Snoopy

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Lucy continues her develop into the strip's primary villain.

We haven't had a huge amount of Snoopy/Linus interaction so far.  In coming strips, a major point of contention with them is Linus' blanket, so this strip kind of foreshadows that.

We get that weird look from Linus again in the second panel.  It looks a lot like he's pining for a pacifier.

In the third panel, Linus and Snoopy share a single 'Z' balloon.  I may be wrong, but when two characters are asleep near each other I believe they tend to get separate Zs.  I'm unsure whether I should look for deep meaning in their commonality of snoring, however.

March 29-31, 1954: Three at sea

Read these strips at gocomics.com.

I'll say this much about Universal's archives having poorly-cropped strips at this point; by doing three at once, we're making fairly good time through 1954.  Although they do prevent me from skipping strips, or organizing like strips together (like the saga of Linus' block building skills).  These three strips finish out March.

March 29, 1954:
This strip implies some kind of empathy between the young Linus and Snoopy.  Snoopy is running towards Linus at full speed, so Linus knows to build a wall for Snoopy to jump over, and he knows that Snoopy will see this as a fun thing to hurdle, and not an effort to get him to crash.

It doesn't look like Linus is building quickly here, but he can't have had more than a few seconds to construct that wall.

March 30, 1954:
This is one of the earliest indications of Charlie Brown's poor baseball skills.

March 31, 1954:
Charlie Brown lecturing Snoopy?  Another point of evidence that he is Snoopy's owner, at least legally -- Snoopy isn't exactly reverential here.

Serif Z!

January 11 & 12, 1954: The Van Pelt kids with blocks

January 11, 1954:

January 12, 1954:

The first one is more an observational strip about human nature than Lucy's personality specifically, although we might conclude that she's been somewhat spoiled by her tremendous winning streak at Checkers against Charlie Brown.  The second is a more typical strip about sisterly concern, but it does give three more of those great serif'd sleeping Zs.

(I should note that, despite what the title of this post might lead you to conclude, Lucy and Linus' last names have not been revealed in the strip yet.  Or if they have, I certainly don't remember it happening.)

Christmas Day and New Year's Eve, 1953

December 25, 1953:

December 31, 1953:

The Christmas strip is another message to the reader, which I don't think generally work for Peanuts, but at least there's a joke to it this time. It's funny that, if you give him enough space, Charlie Brown draws his letters with serifs.

The New Year's Eve strip isn't holiday-specific, but is funny. It's something of a follow-up. I love Schulz's giant serif Zs, which we can take to indicate the sound, and loudness, of Snoopy's snoring. Schulz returns to this particular gag later.

The motion lines make it look like Snoopy is being thrown out of a basement.

November 23 & 28, December 31 1953: Sleepy Snoopy

November 23, 1953:

 November 28, 1953:

December 31, 1953:

I'm taking a couple of these out of order to collect some thematically similar strips.  All have to do with a sleeping Snoopy and all have to do with sight gags.

The first strip is another early thought balloon strip, and one that uses the standard tail on the balloon, too!  Schulz seems like he's finally decided to settle on this convention.

In the second strip, is that an indoor bed for Snoopy?  It would seem that would fix him as Charlie Brown's dog, but I don't think we can absolutely say that until a character states it explicitly.

The third strip is one that Schulz would come back to later, and is visually inventive in how it uses the size of the 'Z' to represent the loudness of Snoopy's snoring.  (It's also one of the earliest, though not the first I think, of a large serif 'Z' to represent sleep, which is a very Peanuts convention.)

September 9, 1953: Hearing marshmallows

Part of the fun of the character is that Snoopy is both a person and not, and Schulz can decide for himself which he is more like. When one is expected and the other provided, there is humor in that moment.

This is a weird place in the development of Snoopy's visual development. He's thicker here than in the years to come. He gets longer and leaner for a while, but afterwards seems to pull back a bit into the "balloon animal" shape of the later years of the strip.

I might have missed one or two, but this is the first time I can recall seeing a single, serif Z representing sleep. Such Zs become an important part of the strip's comic language.

August 11, 1953: Schroeder and Snoopy

I'm at one of those points again where I feel like I need to link every strip. It's because this is such a formative period in Peanuts history. Many of the things we've seen frequently in later strips and compilations got their start in this period.

Here, it's the team of Schroeder and Snoopy. Snoopy works well with many characters, but Schroeder most teams only with him or Lucy. Up to this point we've also seen him and Charlie Brown in the strips where Charlie Brown draws a cartoon, and the two sometimes meet on the pitchers' mound.

It might be interesting to do a statistical analysis of which characters appear with which other ones, in what frequency. I'm not gonna do it, though.

I'm not sure, but this might be the first time we've seen a single 'Z' in a word balloon used to signify sleep. Later on Schulz has some fun with this convention, especially with giant, serif'd Zs.