December 13, 1951: Dogcicle

Another strip to fuel the who-owns-Snoopy fires. Mostly I just think this one's funny.

December 12, 1951: Sleeping In The Snow

Snowman shenanigans is another thing Peanuts has that Calvin and Hobbes appropriated. Although to be fair, Watterson took it to lengths that approach the sublime. Peanuts could get quite dark, but Charlie Brown never did anything like the uproarious Snow Goons sequence, or any of the one-off snowman chamber of horrors strips.

EDIT: Argh, forgot the embed code. Fixed now. Thanks Eric J for pointing this out.

December 11, 1951: Snoopy Lives His Dream

Snoopy can't talk. He hasn't even gotten thought balloons yet. So, how does Charlie Brown know that Snoopy always wanted to live in a trailer? At least the barely-verbal Schroeder can play Beethoven.

December 10, 1951: Revolutionary

This one seems kind of pointless until you recognize it as a U.S. Revolutionary War slogan.

(If you were confused about the comment on yesterday's post, the wrong strip got linked. It's been fixed now.)

December 7, 1951: That's going to make a mess

It's the first time anyone in the strip has played hockey, which is one of those pasttimes Snoopy and Woodstock engage in later on.

EDIT: The strip from the day before was showing up. Fixed.

December 4, 1951: Dog At The Wheel

This one's funny too.

December 3, 1951: Beware the Wrath of the Irate Prodigy

This is just a funny cartoon. Go, Schroeder!

The marks in the last panel used to show dazedness are interesting. A question mark, two stars, a dizzy spiral and motion lines. It actually seems a little overstated, now that I look closely at it.

December 1, 1951: Pork Chops vs. Stew

Not really a lot to talk about here, except for the ground in the third panel which is, unusually, blocked in solid black. Notice that you can only tell the outlines of Charlie Brown's pants there because of the incomplete shading applied to them at the edges.

November 30, 1951: However....

This strip is a kind of mirror of the first Peanuts strip, in which Shermy, in panel 3, said "Good ol' Charlie Brown" right before adding "Oh, how I hate him!"

Funny, lots of later retrospectives of Peanuts make it a point to show that first strip, but then skip over the first couple of years, the ones we're going through now. That first strip, though in the original art style,

If you pay attention, this strip marks a slight change to the characters. They've been changing slowly this whole time of course, but they're subtly taller here than before, or so it seems to my eye anyway. It might just be because they're sitting down in all the panels; usually Schulz has to cheat a little when characters are shown sitting, since the lengths of their arms and legs make it difficult to show them bending cleanly.

Noveber 29, 1951: Comic books!

The kids' love of comic books is a staple of the early years of the strip. Part of this may be due to the fact that Universal Features Syndicate published comic books in those days, in which many of their newspaper strip characters, including the kids of Peanuts, would feature. I saw an issue of their classic title Tip Top on a dealer's shelf while at DragonCon a couple of weeks ago. It was selling for around $200 dollars, if I remember correctly.

Noteworthy is the fact that, as the decades rolled by and comic books lost their prominent place in kid culture, that nothing really moved in to replace them, except perhaps television. (As we've seen, in the earliest Peanuts strips the kids listened to radio instead of sitting watching TV.) Since then there's been rock music, action movies and video games, but the kids never really caught on to those things. One can only speculate what Schulz thought about those strange advents.