February 9, 1953: Spite Candy

This is a great strip! I'm going to try to work "spite candy," or other spite things, into conversations.

Sunday, February 8, 1953: J'ACCUSE

This is an excellent strip.

I love Lucy's direct, indignant accusation of Snoopy: "You took TWO!" Although nowhere in her counting panels does she say the word "two," which makes me wonder if the spoken-aloud counting is a sham.

If the counting is taken to be real, my explanation is that Lucy has developer her own, personal representation of the number system, which she uses internally and translates when speaking to others. When she's speaking out loud as an aid to counting however, she uses her own symbols.

The question marks (excusing the fact that there are three of them) in the last panel are a bit weird, like he's questioning now Lucy's counting system but his own inability to comprehend it.

Oh, and Snoopy has thought balloons with word balloon tails here again.

February 7, 1953: Lucy's Fussiness

At this point we've heard Lucy described as a "fussbudget" once, but the only times she's really been fussy are with Charlie Brown, and even then not much.

In the second panel it's unclear that Charlie Brown is actually holding two glasses. The shading makes it look strangely like he has arm hair.

February 6, 1953: Snoopy's Thought Bubbles Return

It's been a few months since Snoopy had thought balloons. They still have the speech balloon tail. (If I remember correctly, one strip so far has had the standard "thought balloon" tail, with all the others having a tapering speech balloon tail.)

The contents of the bubble is more typically Snoopy this time, dissatisfied with the world of dogness.

February 5, 1953: Schroeder the Alliterative Musician

Sometimes I think Schulz uses Schroeder as a way of subtly revealing his own artistic ambitions. It would have been funny to see Schroeder's opinion of American Idol.

February 4, 1953: Schroeder the Ordinary Kid

Nothing to do with music at all! Even at this early date a high percentage of the Schroeder strips concern music in some way, so it's nice to see the kid have normal childhood experiences.

February 10, 1953: Why, you're just dragging a mechanical duck

Another great strip, Schulz is on a roll.

(ACK, didn't mean to post this one right away, it's kind of out of order and my comment doesn't make sense without the other ones right before it. Still, I love the strip!)

February 3, 1953: Charlie Brown Learns the Hard Way

Lucy's arm, and the fist at the end of it, becomes quite a terror in the years to come.

Sunday, November 23, 1952: CTHULHU RISES

Blogger sometimes takes posts I've set to publish and makes them drafts instead, which once in a while results in strips getting overlooked. Sometimes it doesn't matter much, but this strip is incredibly important, so I'm using it even though it's a couple months old by this point:



This seems to be the first act of full-on spite Lucy commits that cannot be explained by familial antipathy or mere childishness. It is an act of pure evil by her, and it's glorious. Look at that little smile on her face in panel six. It's against her favorite punching dummy, too. And Charlie Brown was so happy in the throwaway panels!

We even get that "down on his luck" slanted mouth in the last panel.

Schulz had many, many positive attributes as a cartoonist, but there are a couple of things in these early days he could have used some improvement on. One of them was in varying his phrasing; here, Lucy uses the "slaughter" line twice, which is a bit awkward. This isn't the only strip in which this defect can be seen. As Schulz gains experience writing dialogue I believe these errors eventually go away.

Sunday, February 1, 1953: Lucy is sarcastic

I love Lucy's deadpan remarks in this one.