October 2, 1953: Three Years

It's nice to see a kid who cares about effective word usage, but Charlie Brown probably lets it get to him a little too much.

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This strip marks the third anniversary of Peanuts debut.

Here is the strip from that day the year before:


Here is the strip from October 2, 1954, one year after this one:


Over the past year, Linus grew out of diapers. Snoopy thinks a little more often, but is still usually used mute. Lucy's growing, in slow stages, into her tyrant persona. Charlie Brown's cockiness is fading a bit, replaced by insecurity. And we've seen the beginnings of Lucy's crush on Schroeder and her star counting bit.

In the next year, we'll see the first mention of the kids going to actual school, as opposed to nursery or picnic school. We'll also get the first in-school strip, which would become a staple of the later years. We'll get the first strip where Schroeder gets upset with Lucy's attentions. We'll see Linus' first real dialogue. Lucy's rancorous personality settles in a little further. And later on we meet the first of Peanut's many secondary characters, who's also the one who lasts the longest, pretty much surviving the entire run of the strip.

September 30, 1953: You won't know for sure until you count them

This strip marks the beginning of one of Schulz's longer-running jokes in the days of early Peanuts: Lucy counting the number of stars in the sky. She keeps that up for years.

September 29, 1953: Snoopy vs. The Yard: The leafpile

At least Snoopy isn't being splashed, tumbled, knocked about or chased this time. Just confused.

September 28, 1953: Things haven't changed that much since then

People ridiculing things they don't understandd! If you want the modern-day version of this, just turn on Fox News.

Charlie Brown shows strange insight into the motivation behind his own behavior. That's kind of creepy.

Sunday, September 27, 1953: Snoopy vs. The Yard: The Slide

There's not an awful lot in this neighborhood that doesn't have it in for Snoopy.

That's a good question mark in the second panel. Schulz had a kind of ornate style to his type-inspired iconography: serif Zs, fancy question marks, tapered exclamation points. It's one of the little tells that the simplicity of the rendering is an artistic choice and not a cheat.

I've mentioned before that the top row in a Sunday strip are designed to be removed at an editor's option, say to make more room on a crowded comics page. Usually Peanuts will use these in a throwaway joke or just to lengthen the buildup a little, but here I think it actually harms readability a smidge to excise them. Without the top three panels here, we don't have it established that this is Snoopy's first slide, and without that knowledge his Slide Malfunction seems more like an accident than an element of his lack of slidal* experience.

* Not really a word.

September 26, 1953: That's the way it goes

Second time Charlie Brown has said "That's the way it goes" in a week.

Shermy gets a taste of the lovelorn longing that CB would adopt later. One interesting thing here is the subplot, concerning Snoopy and a Scribble of Ire, which is rather rare in a four-panel strip. It serves as a commentary on the main plot, yes, but it isn't what I'd call important. For the record, dogs don't really make good arm-rests.

Snoopy goes through the Four Stages of Annoyance here: Observation, Recognition, Exasperation and Rejection.

September 25, 1953: Lucy, behind the davenport, with the pop gun

This is one of the few pre-crush strips which deal with both Lucy and Schroeder, and the piano kid isn't even in this one.

September 23 & 24, 1953: Charlie Brown and Violet, the slow decay of a friendship

September 23:


September 24:


The cracks are showing. In that second strip BTW it's kind of jarring how cocky Charlie Brown is. Look at his posture throughout it; from sleeping, to yarning, to that propped-leg pose. Scribble of ire, indeed.

CB's expression in the last panel is not a chagrimace, but it's a similar expression.

The MIGHTY PEDE informs us that "Cocoanut" is an old-fashioned spelling of the word.

September 22, 1953: Hey, goodnight kid!

Schroeder's awesome. (Although it does look a bit like his piano has an oversized hood ornament.)

September 21, 1953: NOT FOR ONE MOMENT!

When I was a kid I checked out every Peanuts compilation in our elementary school's library. Some of the jokes I got; almost anything having to do with Snoopy is written pretty broadly. Sometimes I was left scratching my head.

One of the things I didn't get had to do with Lucy's proud claims to be a "fussbudget." Not having ever heard of the term (in fact I wasn't even sure if I was pronouncing it right), I had no way of knowing that Lucy was taking inadvertent pride in an insult. None of the compilations I had read published a strip in which it's revealed that Lucy's mother had called her that, or with a comment from Charlie Brown like the one here tipping off the word's meaning, so I had insufficient context for understanding the strip.

While reading strips like this one makes clear to me the point of these strips, it remains that I have never heard the term "fussbudget" applied in a non-Peanuts context.