January 7, 1953: That's kind of harsh

Say what you want about Calvin, but at least he never got expelled from school. What must have Lucy done?

January 6, 1953: Stadium boots?

I'm not familiar with this phenomenon. Girls used to wear clompy boots in the winter?

January 5, 1953: Bread an budder, bread an budder...

This strip serves two purposes. It sets up the premise that Lucy absolutely must, for whatever reason, have her sandwiches with the crusts cut off. And it continues to establish her fussiness, which has been alluded to before when her mother called her a "fussbudget" but hasn't yet been seen far beyond the ordinary. Both will be referred to in future strips.

Sunday, January 4, 1953: The Cookie-Hound

Snoopy at his cutest harasses the hapless Linus for his cookies. Eating a whole box of the things probably isn't very good for either of them.

Question for you. If Linus weren't on the scene yet, would it be suitable to use this same strip, all other things being equal, with Lucy when she was an infant? Even with her put-upon early personality, it doesn't quite seem like it would be a suitable strip for her, which indicates that the characters' do have a developed personality at this point.

January 1, 1953: Shaking it dislodges the notes

Just a playful strip. The notes spelling words, of course, is a variation of the Christmas Day strip just a week before.

December 30, 1952: The Disdain of a Dog

Linus is the most recent character to bear that weird, slanted frown, which turns up frequently around this time.

More interesting perhaps is that this strip clearly shows how Snoopy's design has progressed. His snout is thicker, his ears clearly rise up off his head a little, he sets a better pose standing, and he seems to definitely be a larger animal than the early form of the character. He seems a bit more like a real dog here.

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Sunday, December 28, 1952: Forgetting something

Lucy's expressions and poses here seem somehow unLucylike. Especially with that dopey grin she wears in panel four.

The foolish one here actually turns out to be Patty for suggesting it in the first place.

December 24 & Christmas Day, 1952

It's the canonical summer holiday, in the U.S. at least, so let's look at a couple of Christmas strips!



A brief touching upon the theme of the commercialization of Christmas, which of course provided the dramatic thrust of the Peanuts Christmas Special.



Schulz is moving away from bland celebrations of a holiday and towards more sophisticated jokes about it. The usual "YAY ITS CHRISTMAS" panel here is undercut by Schroeder's displeasure at being obscured. Note: no Shermy, Lucy or Linus in the last panel.

It is worth noticing that Patty and Violet are already starting to become a bit rarer. Lucy has usurped their roles, a little, as the strip's girl character.

December 23: The Fullness of Glasses

This is a well-constructed, if a bit over-written, strip, that illustrates the difference between two characters' outlooks. As such it more clearly defines their personalities, although in Lucy's case it's still looking at her larval phase.

December 22, 1952: Musical Fake-out

Well at least Charlie Brown has been studying classical composers in preparation for his little talks with Schroeder.

What we are seeing here is the mining of a situation, slowly, of all its obvious jokes. This is what cartoonists, and indeed sitcom writers, primarily do, they pick a situation and think of ways it is funny, or can be made funny. But the soul of humor is novelty, and a situation can only provide so many jokes.

What happens when all the obvious jokes have been made? In the case of Garfield the strip just continued to mine, reformulating the old jokes as best they could, the characters never evolving beyond their simple personalities. This is actually what happens to most comic strips, and it's why most of them become much less interesting 20 years after their creation. 20 years is 7,305 strips, 7,305 separate, supposedly individual, jokes. By way of contrast, stand-up comedians never come up with all new material for every performance.

Cartooning is a difficult-enough business to get into that most young hopefuls focus on the short term, impressing the syndicate gatekeepers enough to get into the business, and not with how they're going to maintain their work for decades. The great Bill Watterson, perhaps recognizing how hard it is to keep it up until your keel over at the drawing table, wisely stopped Calvin and Hobbes just over ten years in. But ten years in Peanuts was in its prime.

This is worth mentioning now because jokes about knowledge of classical composers are already approaching the limits of how far they can go. What Schulz is doing, slowly, is segueing from jokes about situations (composer knowledge) to jokes about character types (musicians), and eventually to jokes about specific characters (Schroeder).