March 24, 1953: Patty Plays Marbles

Patty builds a reputation as a marbles shark in upcoming strips, especially against Charlie Brown. This is the one that first establishes her fearsomeness at the game. One might take these strips as foreshadowing the other Patty.

The use of Schroeder as the concerned friend in this strip, instead of Shermy, is a bit interesting.

Sunday, March 22, 1953: The Earth Invaders

One could take this as another Lucy-abusing-her-brother strip, except for the looks on the faces of Shermy, Patty and Charlie Brown, which make this strip more about human nature than Lucy's specific nature.

This is fairly notable for being a complex play scene with many characters, in perspective, with action poses, and with realistic living room scenery thrown in.

March 20, 1953: Lucy and the Basketball

This strip well illustrate's Schulz's emerging skill as a joke writer. Important to is he Lucy's repetition of the word "basketball," which helps illustrate the diverging things the two characters are saying. They're only on the same page in the first panel; none of them are even listening to the other in the others. Characters talk through each other a lot in Peanuts. I'm not even sure this is the first instance of it. The body language of the characters is also important here; in the last panel, Lucy's jumping rope emphasizes that she's more talking to herself than to Charlie Brown.

Psst! I'll be at DragonCon, like starting today. If this blog ends up knocking off a few days that's why, although I usually schedule several strips in advance in these instances. If by some fluke you happen to be at the con, I'll usually be in the board gaming room in a brown "Game Face" T-Shirt.

March 19, 1953: That's the Charlie Brown we remember

I think this is the first strip to really solidify Charlie Brown's emerging personality. That of the depressed everyman, who considers himself mediocre and ends up being, so partly because of his belief, and partly because everyone can't be Dave Singleman. Who even his own dog (now cemented as Charlie Brown's in three strips) finds boring.

Chagrimace!

March 18, 1953: Lucy Plays Space Gun

Usually the girls so far have engaged in stereotypical feminine pursuits when playing, but Lucy shows that (aside some some onomatopoetic problems) she is fully prepared for the coming age of high adventure in space, due to arrive some time, oh, around the 1990s.

March 21, 1953: Charlie Brown Is Not A Manipulator

Shermy's developed a fair amount since the early strips. Here's a strip with him from March 28, 1951, just two years before:



Of course Violet's changed a lot too, but we so rarely see Shermy.

The very earliest strips, to me, look like the kind of thing that might be drawn for a magazine periodical like the New Yorker, which fits Schulz's early sale to the Saturday Evening Post. The characters as we see them in today's strip up above are actually less stylized, they have proportions closer to the human norm, but they're also more obviously something of Schulz's own devising.

March 17, 1953: Mmm, cellophane

It's weird that Snoopy didn't notice the candy was wrapped until Charlie Brown told him. But this strip is most interesting for its continued cementing of the fact that Charlie Brown now seems to be Snoopy's owner, when he calls him "ol' pal." It's not been explicitly said, but it seems to be more heavily implied now.

March 16, 1953: Lucy's sense of propriety

More of Lucy's fussiness. What is interesting I think is that later on Lucy's fussy behavior is actually mostly taken for granted, it's more told than shown in later strips. (Her actual behavior is mostly Selfish-Evil.) So it's nice to see some genuine fussy behavior from her.

Sunday, March 15, 1953: Snoopy's Hopak

This is a strange and remarkable strip, and not just because Snoopy's using full thought balloons for either the first or second time now. (I think I remember a prior use of the bubble-tailed balloons, in a single strip. But up until now all of Snoopy's other thought bubbles have had tapering tails like speech bubbles.)

The hopak is a traditional Ukrainian dance. The MIGHTY PEDE says it is sometimes known as the "Cossack Dance." In the United States we tend not to have traditional national entertainments of that sort (except, of course, for terrible action movies, brainless reality shows, sports team blathering and Fox News). Anyway, Snoopy really sells this one, and other than for the folded paws this becomes what we might identify in the middle period of the strip as the Snoopy dance. I think we've seen him do it once before, but here it is identified as a dance.

Schulz probably chose a Hopak because it's entertaining to see a dog perform it, and to draw Snoopy doing it, and it's an especially nice trick for one, but it's still conceivable unlike, say, a waltz.

Most comic strips subtly change art styles through the years. The Peanuts characters change a fair bit, but most characters are recognizable in their later forms. Snoopy pushes this the most; he's much changed in these early strips and the furred, bipedal, typewriter-using, figure-skating, Sopwith-flying, moon-landing creature of the later years.

The Snoopy Dance is relevant to this because its primary identifying characteristics are the upright posture and the flapping hind legs. Both are no longer unusual in Snoopy's late bipedal stage. Perhaps recognizing that, Snoopy's dance moves become a more general, smiling prance rather than a modified Hopak, which is a shame.

Moving on to the other characters, they are quite lively in this one, with everyone clapping and shouting "Hey!" I think this is the best party atmosphere we've seen in the strip to this point. It's also another ensemble strip without Shermy, that loner.

Isn't that rather a lot of food Violet is giving to Snoopy? I don't mean for a dog, I mean for anyone.

March 13, 1953: Good luck with that, Charlie Brown

The argument concerning relative worth re: men and women sounds maybe a little more troubling today than it did back then. I usually excuse it as a childish kind of "go team!" cheering. (Thesis: sports team loyalty is taking the place of the casual chauvinism and racism of earlier decades. You have two hours. You may pick up your pencils... now!)