November 19, 1951: Does He Watch the Dog Whisperer?

This marks the point where Snoopy begins to progress beyond just being a generic dog to being something strange and wonderful but, somehow, other. Like when Schroeder turned out to be a musical prodigy and Schulz could make jokes about an infant playing in a concert hall, now we have Snoopy with a TV antenna.

Those jokes are funny because the characters, up to that point, have been represented pretty realistically. Snoopy has always been a dog foremost and Schroeder was a baby before he became a musician. More locally, in the strips immediately preceding this one (and the last one, which also focused on Snoopy's intelligence) we had several strips which were about CB and the girls, depicting fairly normal happenings that could conceivably happen in real life.

As readers became used to the characters in their new roles, to continue to get laughs from them Schulz will have to vary his approach. In Schroeder's case he reins in the unreality a bit and has him play off other characters. In Snoopy's case he goes all-out, making him weirder and weirder. And weirder.

By the way, that third panel is just marvelous. Look at it, the whole joke is contained just in that one panel. It's an excellent sight gag. The panel could really stand on its own, Far Side-like; the other panels serve to accentuate it, but they aren't really needed. (Although Patty's looking back in the fourth panel, eyebrow raised, is pretty cool.)

November 17, 1951: The Smartest Dog Alive

Snoopy hasn't been appearing for a bit lately. His design is subtly different here; he's wider, his body is thicker, he's less puppy-like, and his ears are rounder. His personality also continues to develop.

The problem, or the continuing battle I should say, of drawing a comic strip for years and years is coming up with new expressive ways to draw the characters. If you don't continue to find new ways to have them express themselves then you might as well be using clip-art. The change in the way Snoopy is drawn between the second and third panels is important, to illustrate his increasing pleasure as being complimented. His uplifted tail, his eyebrows and that aura around his head increase the perception of happiness, so the effect is so much greater in the last panel when it comes crashing down.

November 15, 1951: The Girls of Wrath

It's been less than a year since sweet little Violet was introduced, and look at how well she hates Charlie Brown now.

Funny, if Violet and Patty didn't pick up their disdain for CB, then maybe it would have seemed less cruel over time, but probably the strip wouldn't have picked up the depth with which it is remembered for today. Little kids doing funny things day after day is funny, but it's not going to be remembered.

There are plenty of comic strips out there, some as old or even older than Peanuts, where the characters just sort of bumble along amiably. Blondie, Beetle Bailey, Snuffy Smith, Garfield, which characters in those strips really hate each other? Which characters experience unrequited love? These are the aspects of Peanuts which are rarely copied. Everyone instead goes for Snoopy.

I recognize that there may be some selection bias in here. It might not be so much that people don't attempt to attain some of Peanuts' emotional depth, but more that those strips are less likely to be picked up for syndicates who care more about merchandising rights and greeting card sales than complex characters. In a way, part of Schulz's genius is that he was able to get it into papers. If Peanuts had started out the way it would become a few short years later, would Universal Features Syndicate have still bought it?

November 14, 1951: Look familiar?

Well take a look at that! It's basically the familiar pulling-away-the-football gag! Sure, it's Violet and not thunderclap Lucy who's doing it, and the football is dropped instead of yanked away, and the motive is fear rather than sheer, unbridled malice, and Charlie Brown doesn't say "AUUUUGGGHHHH!!!", and it's rendered a little less stylistically than the later annual strips.

But still, there it is.

November 12, 1951: 50 Words or Less

These kinds of essay contests used to be all over the place. There was a woman some time back who managed to support her family entirely on winning contests such as this one, and writing jingles, and the like. There was a book about her, written by a daughter, but I've forgotten the title. (Probably one of you out there remembers it....) Anyway, if such a person could exist, who could win these contests with any kind of consistency, then it implies pretty strongly that there is a certain technique to winning them, maybe a specific type of phrase that resonated with contest judges.

Now, contests are a lot more likely to be about being the person who just happens to draw a winning game piece. A lot less vulnerable to gaming, but entirely uninteresting as "games."

200 posts!

November 9, 1951: Return of the kiddy table

Again, the tiny table and chairs. I like this strip in general actually. It's hard to imagine later Charlie Brown saying something like "Bread isn't worth it."

November 10, 1951: The claws come out

Another unexplained burst of rage from Patty and Violet, who in later strips would become almost defined by their disdain for Charlie Brown. When I was a kid reading 50s and 60s Peanuts strips in compilations, I thought the characters existed mostly to hate him.

This one implies that the two characters were reacting to something distasteful Charlie Brown did. Is it possible that the characters were always considered to be reacting to something CB said, offscreen, but in later strips the setup was just left out to save space?

November 8, 1951: Schroeder Learns the Score

Maybe the kid is annoyed with his status as Peanuts Resident Musician. I love his annoyed expression in panel 2, his patronizing "plink plink" in panel 3, and his focused, furious look and how he's thrown in the air with the effort of his playing in panel 4. I think Schroeder's fury here must somewhat mirror the effort Schulz himself put into the strip.

Let's talk a little about how the characters changed over time.

I really can't believe how much the Peanuts guys (in my opinion people who are serious should not use the word "Peanuts gang" to describe them) change in the first few years of the strip. They've already began edging towards their later appearances here. What's odd about them is that the characters move towards becoming less cute and more iconic.

Compare how the Peanuts characters evolve to the evolution of Garfield. Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, used to be an assistant artist on the bizarre-looking strip Tumbleweeds, and maybe a little of that comes out in the very earliest Garfield strips, which have markedly different-looking characters. Arguably the characters became cuter over time, and that helped the strip to gain traction with readers. But going the other direction, becoming less cute, giving his characters less-over, more circular heads, pushing their stylization beyond the point of maximum attraction and making them still more stylized, that is a strange choice to make.

Right here is, to me, about as cute as Peanuts characters would ever get. The attribute of this style that fixes it in my mind is the expressions on the characters' faces, especially Schroeder here. Eyes wide apart, and with long eyebrows almost mirroring the mouth line. I think this general style continues on later, especially on characters like Lucy, but it's not as balanced, compositionally, as it is in these strips.

Why did Schulz abandon this look? It might have to do with how much time it took to produce. Line thickness, and even the precise thickness of the eyes, is very important to the look.
The more modern versions of the characters tend to have lines that are the same width. The eyes are not just dots but little ovals, and become thick commas when the character is looking around.

And just look at how rounded the character's heads are; there's not a tremor anywhere, it's perfectly smooth every time, the same curve no matter how the characters are facing or posed. That takes skill, and probably at least a little time. (One must wonder how Schulz must have felt about it later in life when hand tremors forced wavering into the perfectly round head of Charlie Brown; even now after Schulz's death, all official depictions of the characters continue to include those tremors.) Also, the characters look very fifties in these strips. If the strip continued on in this style, the characters probably would have turned into something like Calvin and associates.

In terms of the long-term health of the strip it's probably a good thing that it changed. There is still a lingering perception that Peanuts was about cute, and trite "Happiness is a Warm Puppy" sentiment. The move towards less cute, more abstract figures would help the strip as it picked up intellectual depth as the years passed.

November 7, 1951: All Hail The Machine That Goes....

If guns actually did go "ping" instead of "bang," I get the feeling they'd be loads less popular.

November 3, 1951: Gesundheit

Not really much of a joke here, but there hasn't been a lot of Snoopy in the last few weeks.

How about Shermy's expression, with his tongue out the side of his mouth? In the strip there have been two instances when this has been used: a character is eating or wants to eat, and when a character is focusing hard on something. I'm not really sure how either usage got started. Has anyone who's hungry ever stuck his tongue out like this? People hard at work might bite their tongues, but stick it out?