January 18, 1953: Linus' security ball

Linus demonstrates that he might have some security issues. He's so happy in the second panel!

Just because I thought was funny, the Peanuts strip up at comics.com today was this one from 1963:



It's nice to see Schulz, even at the height of Peanuts' popularity, not taking the strip all that seriously.

January 15, 1953: Modern Snowman Art

This is another of those posts that Blogger shuffled off to the Drafts folder without telling me:



Another snowman strip. Peanuts is becoming a bit more topical. But more interesting than that is the way Charlie Brown is drawn in side-view, especially in the third panel, which is closer to the classic (as opposed to early) Peanuts look than ever before. When viewed from the front it's less obvious, since his eyes are still pretty far apart from that angle.

January 17, 1953: The unnamed expression

We already did this one, on December 20, 1952:


A strip I passed up, from December 30, 1952:


Another strip I passed up, from January 8, 1953:


Now today's strip:


I think we need a name for that expression Charlie Brown has in the first strip, second panel, and Linus, Lucy and Charlie Brown wear in the last panel of the other strips. It definitely isn't a full "smile." "Smirk" doesn't work because it implies derisiveness. I guess it's a kind of grimace, but

It's a rueful expression. Schulz uses it when a character's plans haven't worked out as he or she wants, or he suffers some reverse. It's not an angry expression, and it doesn't seem to represent straight frustration. One could almost always tie the word "sigh" to it, which hasn't been used an awful lot so far.

I think it needs to be named because it's going to crop up again and again. And ideas?

January 13, 1953: Schroeder has standards

This is a rather funny strip; the turnabout in the last panel is pretty sharp. Again, for this one to work you have to know about Schroeder's music snobbery, which isn't information you can glean from this strip by itself. Of course now we all know about Schroeder and his peccadilloes, but Peanuts wasn't in a huge number of papers in those days.

January 9 & 10, 1953: Onceuponatimetherewerethreebears...

Not to pile on the Calvin and Hobbes comparisons, but I seem to remember Calvin's Dad doing the same thing to get through a loathed reading of Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie.

Lucy's response here demonstrates her developing personality; she is becoming less reluctant to express displeasure.



Another story-reading strip makes a Schroeder & Beethoven joke without actually showing Schroeder. A strip like this doesn't work unless the reader brings into it knowledge from other strips, a type of gag that doesn't work unless the characters have strongly defined personalities. (Or, in Schroeder's case, a strongly-defined personality quirk.)

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.