August 21, 1953: 6,000 games now

6,000 games now.

If we accept that Lucy is by now maybe five years old, and assume that she was somehow playing from birth, that makes for 100 games a day month. Somehow I think they might have counted wrong.

August 19 is a duplicate. Anyone with access to the Fantagraphics collections able to fill us in on it?

EDIT: Joshua Probert mentions in the comments that "day" is way off. He's correct, it's more like per month. Still, considering the ostensible amount of time these kinds have been alive (which already looks silly compared to the time the strip's been running), 6,000 games is still fairly ludicrous, you must admit.

August 17, 1953: Potato chips, oh boy!

Walking over the potato chips that she's dumped onto the floor is a nice touch.

August 15, 1953: Snoopy punches the clock

This one's linked mostly for the perfect view of Snoopy from a three-quarter perspective. We don't see him in the hand puppet pose anymore, but still this is an unusual depiction of the dog if you look closely. Snoopy's face appears to be narrower when viewed from the side than from an angle. Notice, you only rarely see a character's face straight-on; they're almost always at least a little angle in there. In most of the kids' cases this is probably so their nose doesn't look funny since that C-shape best reads as a nose in profile. Although Snoopy doesn't have the nose problem, his snout is even harder to read straight on. It's like how Mickey Mouse, in cartoons, his ears are always shown in profile, and sometimes artists depicting the mouse have to be clever so they read correctly.

Sunday, August 16, 1953: Full Frontal Snoopy

More three-quarters' drawings of ol' Snoops. We also get more of his thoughts, again delivered as speech balloons. Here it is obvious that none of the kids can hear his thoughts. I think we're approaching the point soon where Schulz abandons the speech balloons for the dog's thoughts and switches over fully to thought bubbles.

August 14, 1953: Speech Balloon Typography

I think the real purpose of this strip was just to let Charles Schulz play around with drawing type. This had to have been easier to render than the gothic text he drew for Schroeder's German.

August 13, 1953: Real peppermint

It's surprising how much of the kids' (and Snoopy's) lives revolve around candy. Although we have more of it now, I think, kids today don't seem to fixate on it like the kids in the comic. And later on the kids mention it far less.

To again treat a Peanuts strip as if it is something that could happen in life, I would not think dogs would be fans of hard candy at all, let alone peppermint.

August 11, 1953: Schroeder and Snoopy

I'm at one of those points again where I feel like I need to link every strip. It's because this is such a formative period in Peanuts history. Many of the things we've seen frequently in later strips and compilations got their start in this period.

Here, it's the team of Schroeder and Snoopy. Snoopy works well with many characters, but Schroeder most teams only with him or Lucy. Up to this point we've also seen him and Charlie Brown in the strips where Charlie Brown draws a cartoon, and the two sometimes meet on the pitchers' mound.

It might be interesting to do a statistical analysis of which characters appear with which other ones, in what frequency. I'm not gonna do it, though.

I'm not sure, but this might be the first time we've seen a single 'Z' in a word balloon used to signify sleep. Later on Schulz has some fun with this convention, especially with giant, serif'd Zs.

August 10, 1953: You're a flop, Charlie Brown

In the past I've said that Violet and Patty often double-team against Charlie Brown, and we have seen a little of that. But as of yet (and in the near future) Violet tends to be rather more harsh than Patty. So it's a little surprising here to see Patty give the kid such a through dressing-down.

At least, at this point, Charlie Brown still has some bounce-back in him.

Sunday, August 9, 1953: KRINKLE

I think this is one of the funnier strips, but it's also interesting for the action poses Charlie Brown uses while hiding (although his head seems unnaturally large in the crawling pose).

August 8, 1953: Dogs playing baseball

So Snoopy is playing baseball now?

(Takes off critic's hat, puts it in box.) That's it, I'm done. I accepted Beethoven sponsoring Schroeder, but a dog playing baseball? That's too weird for me.

...

What's that you say? Snoopy has already done things far weirder than that, including moving into a doghouse hotel and erecting a TV antenna on his house. Sigh. If you insist. (Puts hat back on.)

I'm not sure if this is actually the first strip that implies or outright shows Snoopy as a player. It's possible at this point that he's just the team's mascot. In Peanuts' odd context, as Snoopy becomes weirder and more capable it makes increasing sense to use him as a player, although Schulz has fun with the idea for many years to come. (Remember "Peppermint" Patty's reaction? It took her years to figure that one out.)

I'm reminded, perversely, of those loathsome "Air Bud" movies Disney puts out, in which a Labrador Retriever proves to be freakishly capable at various sports. You know the ones, they're part of that long and hateful tradition of animal sports movies. They nearly always have a scene with a flabbergasted ref looking through a rulebook, then saying "There's no rule that says dogs can't play, guh-huck!" Yeah, and there's no rule about murdering your opponents either OMG IMA GENIUS.

Let's have a look at the Wikipedia synopsis for that movie:

After the death of his father, who has died in a plane crash, Josh moves with his family to Washington State and is too shy to try out for his middle school's basketball team and too shy to make any friends. He meets Buddy, a Golden Retriever who had escaped from his cruel owner, an alcoholic clown named Norman Snively, who had locked Buddy in a kennel after causing trouble at a birthday party and was taking him to the dog pound when the kennel fell off the truck. Josh soon learns that Buddy has the uncanny ability to play basketball....

Oh look, the dog plays baseball in the 2002 sequel called time to make the scare quotes "Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch":

Josh is off to his first year of college and Buddy has stayed behind with Josh's little sister, Andrea, and the rest of the family. Andrea, attempting to fit in with her Jr. High classmates, decides to join the baseball team and along the way discovers that Buddy also has the uncanny ability to play baseball. Just as the season is settling in, a terrible discovery is made - Buddy's puppies, have mysteriously started disappearing with the help of kidnappers' little helper, Rocky Raccoon. Turns out the kidnappers' were researchers who were kidnapping Air Bud's pups because they thought they had a special gene that would enable them to play sports.

I bring up these upsetting artifacts of popular culture to illustrate, by way of contrast, how awesome Peanuts really is.