November 13, 1953: Excitable, isn't he?

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Patty doesn't mean to drive Charlie Brown to hysterics, but it is kind of frightening to think about.  The space-filling overtelling of one of the characters here is acceptable, as it improves the joke.

It struck me just now that gender relations in Peanuts are already surprisingly equalized.  This is far from stereotypical girl behavior.  Patty gets used more as being a foil for Charlie Brown than for being female.  Maybe girls are considered to be more impish, and that explains why Patty is happy to point out C.B.'s mistake in the first panel; it's hard to imagine Shermy being happy there.

Look at that expression of fear in panel 3.  It's really a kindness that Charlie Brown doesn't realize that he'll actually be in school for 46 more years.

November 12, 1953

Read this strip at gocomics.com.


This is the second instance of the "Snoopy dance" that I count, and it's livelier and more Snoopy-like here.  We can probably add this to his list of powers:
7. Ability to dance (polka, hopak)

More shockingly, it features Schroeder saying something positive about polka!

Snoopy's tongue in panel 2 is strange because it's of realistic length for a dog, that is to say, it's loooong.  Also, the way that his front legs flap about is unusually realistic.  These are very entertaining drawings of early Snoopy.

November 11, 1953: Schroeder conducts in front of Snoopy, Take 2

Read this strip at gocomics.com

The previous Sunday strip had mostly the same idea, but with a different payoff.

I think this could be taken to show how careful Schulz is to mine his premises well. As I've said before, drawing a daily comic strip is one of the most creatively demanding occupations one could hope to find. Imagine the pressure of having to come up with one joke a day for the rest of your life. Schulz is showing good sense by getting additional gags out of his premises.

November 9, 1953: Get yer dog off the football field

Read this strip on gocomics.com

I think this one may be a bit too abrupt. It'd probably be more entertaining to watch Snoopy get tackled in the third panel, rather than obscuring the collision behind that huge POW splash.

I am putting this strip down as containing Charlie Brown, Schroeder and Shermy, but only because those are the only three human male characters old enough to play football.

Sunday, November 8, 1953: Get yer dog away from the orchestra pit

Read this strip on gocomics.com.

Schroeder's the one demonstrating his imagination here.

Scribble of ire!

November 7, 1953: More on the mobile ears

Read this strip on gocomics.com.

Snoopy's powers:
1. Human thought.
2. Ability to say "Boo!"
3. Ability to blush through fur.
4. Ability to move his ears around like limbs.
5. Ability to understand English.
6. Bizarre "true form." (Also, ability to say a scribble of ire.)

Well-known powers not yet displayed:
Surreal imagination.
Surreal imagination that sometimes leaks out into reality. (Demonstrated by his ability to get Marcie to play along with him.)
Ability to stand on hind legs.
Ability to operate human machinery like typewriters.
Ability to play sports.
Ability to communicate with birds.
Transcendentally-spacious doghouse.

November 6, 1953: Two sick kids

Read this strip on gocomics.com.

I seem to remember this strip concept before, of someone walking up to Charlie Brown and making some remark about themselves, which causes Charlie Brown to launch into a self-centered examination of his own life, eventually causing the original kid to walk away. I want to say we've seen it with Schroeder before, and I think we've also seen it with Violet. Don't have the time to search through the archives right now though.

Final sigh!

----------

Concerning the images on the site, there remains the problem with the archives, which continue to point to the strips hosted on comics.com and will probably go dark any moment now. Uploading all those strips, over 700 to date, using Blogger's interface is not something I relish doing. I might just end up letting those images be broken for a while. Maybe I could figure out a way, similar to the last fix, of hacking a blog archive so at least those pages will point to gocomics' pages for the strips? I will look into it.

November 5, 1953: Lucy speaks under the advise of her lawyer

gocomics.com's page for this strip.

Quite knowledgeable of the little girl. Most precocious children gags are basically the same kind of joke, so just doing them repeatedly gets old without pushing the envelope. Later on Schulz would mostly drop precocious children strips except for a few long-established examples such as Schroeder at his piano.

November 4, 1953: He went that way

See this strip on gocomics.com!

Snoopy's versatile ears again prove their agility. Also, I like to speculate as to why Patty and Charlie Brown are so happy here. I assume they're playing Hide & Seek.

----------

So, we're going to try just uploading the strips and hoping for the best, which at least seems to be the usual case out in webland. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when the archive images break, as this seems to be something beyond the power of a simple Python hack to fix.

Hey Universal! If you're seeing this, know that I'm not trying to exploit the strip. We love Peanuts! We're presenting them here as an aid to discussion. We don't link to every strip, just the most interesting ones. He're hoping you won't mind.

November 3, 1953: Snoopy vs. the yard: Attacked by leaves

Click through (opens in new window): http://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1953/11/03/

That's a nice drawing of Snoopy lying down, which is a pose that modern Snoopy could never hope to assume. It does make him seem a bit larger than usual.

----------

So I'm currently supplying a link to the gocomics page of the strip in question. I'm including a target="_blank" attribute on the link that causes it to open in a new window by default, so at least you won't leave the blog each time you want to look at a strip.

But this causes me to think: shouldn't it be possible to do this automatically? And maybe not have it open in a new window, but inside another HTML element, or something? Didn't there used to be, long ago, an ancient website entity, something called a frame, that this page could be opened in?

But I'm not thrilled with the idea of making a site with frames in 2011. If we assume that gocomics is going to persist in their no-inlining policy until the end of time, though, then I think it's evident that we're going to have to do something to make seeing the individual strips easier. At least loading their site in a side frame would count as a page view on their site, wouldn't it, giving them the opportunity to make ad revenue off the load.

Still trying to puzzle this one through. I'm open to suggestions.