April 9, 1951: Maybe he IS a blockhead

One of my favorite early strips, in this one Schulz mocks his own art style.

I've mentioned the repetition of gags we've had up to this point.  There comes a point somewhere during the career of any good cartoonist where he must realize the enormity of the task he's undertaken for himself: to say something funny, every day, for the rest of his career, a task even more challenging than drawing them.  By this point, Charles Schulz had already done a comic strip for over a year and a half, Li'l Folks for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, so he has been through the crunch before.

The first defense a cartoonist has against brain drain is by building a backlog.  Cartoonists usually work weeks in advance of their publication date, and stockpile ideas to use.  The nature of writing is that there are sometimes "on" times, and sometimes "off."  The idea is to save up the good ideas during the on times and use them to cover the dry spells.  It's easy to speculate that the Patty chase strips, and the Violet mud pie jokes, may all have originated from a single brainstorming session.

April 6, 1951: Why does he EAT them?

The day after one of Schulz's most recognizable early formulas, we get another one, Violet and her mud pies again.  The challenge here each time is to present a variation upon the theme, some aspect of the situation that has yet to be mined.  When a situation is mined out, it must be discarded.  You might not believe this, but it's not even finished yet.

April 5, 1951: Who's on first?

Turnabout, chase, bad joke, etc.  Charlie Brown's quip this time, "Someday I'll probably drive this poor girl crazy," shows Schulz's recognition of the pattern.  It's pretty funny this time anyway.

Whose house is Patty and Charlie Brown in in this one, Patty's?  Which is it usually?  Does Charlie Brown ever go home?

EDIT: Somehow I didn't get the embed code into this one the first time. Shame, as this is one of the funnier strips I've seen yet.

April 2, 1951: The day after April Fool's Day

Charlie Brown's early versitile powers of expression are given a workout here.  The character would evolve away from that over time.

Reading through Peanuts: A Golden Celebration reveals a later strip involving confusion over April Fool's Day, a cruel joke, and perhaps predictably, Lucy.

March 31, 1951: The sugar and buttermilk won't help

More of Violet's mud pies here.  This is another strip with what amounts to two jokes, the one about eating "de luxe" mudpies and Charlie Brown not being able to taste them anyway.

Again on the poses, Violet's post in the third panel is appealingly and cartoony. It's funny, but as Peanuts progresses, character poses become much less cartoony and more understated. I like the direction it goes, but will miss this earlier style.

March 28, 1951: The artistic challenges inherent in jumping rope

Schulz continues to work out the problem of how to handle character arm lengths when doing things like jumping rope.  This one's a little better than Patty's early jump rope session, but her head still seems to shrink in size in the forward-facing frame.

Another thing that's difficult with these jump rope strips is what to do with character legs when facing forward while jumping. The first panel here is good, but the second, the legs don't seem to be in the same places.

It's possible to see some simularities between Schulz's art style and the later Japanese manga/anime style called "super-deformed," and I think there may be something to that. However, I can't help but thinking if it had been a stereotypical manga artist who had rendered the second panel here, regardless of appropriateness, he wouldn't have been able to resist giving little Violet an upskirt shot.

March 24, 1951: Latest in canine eyewear

Slowly, surely, Snoopy's personality continues to develop.

March 22, 1951: A lot of hope

Some good gags around this time.  Schulz's attention to detail should be noted here; in the first two panels the lock on the chest is plainly visible, and Patty is leaning against it, keeping Charlie Brown inside, in the third. Patty's leaning would be an unusual pose for Charles Schulz later on, but earlier the characters were a lot more dynamic in their posing, probably due to their increasingly-stylized designs. While the strip would unquestionably become much better in a few years, there's a part of me that wishes it could have kept some of the dynamism of the early days.

March 21, 1951: Snoopy is irate

A surprisingly angry Snoopy chases Charlie Brown around the place while Patty and Violet look on.

When I was a kid, I had opportunity once to leaf through a kids' book called something like A Charlie Brown Dictionary, which was a list of words and definitions punctuated with Peanuts strips.  There was a spot where, in explaining one of the strips, the book took pains to communicate to my prepubescent mind that, despite what was seen in the comic, Snoopy would never bite anyone.

Yeah, right.

March 20, 1951: Death by Beethoven

Another reference to Beethoven, the Peanuts characters' go-to guy for classical composer names.  It's a fairly funny joke, too.

This is a fairly dark thing, if you think about it, for Charlie Brown to say. We'll see one of the darkest things ever to appear in Peanuts in a bit, inside of one of Snoopy's very first thought balloons....