META: "This comic is currently unavailable"

Dammit gocomics and Google.




Concerning gocomics:

It seems that a number of strips, including the ones I was just coming up on, currently display graphics stating "This comic is currently unavailable check back soon."  At this time this includes comics for Fabruary 9-12, 1954, as well as the 14th, the 18th, the 20th and the 22nd.  There may be others too.


In fact, the paragraph I just gave you us slightly out of date.  That was yesterday, which I couldn't post because Blogger was down.  Now the strips in question don't even show the error image.  Just navigation elements.  See for yourself.

I think I know why.  When I was looking through these strips before, I noticed that a few of them had been poorly cropped.  Specifically, there were three or four strips in the same image,  I seem to remember noticing they were like that back at comics.com.

I was all set to remark upon the problem when I got up to it, but what do you know, they seem to have found it just about the moment I got up to them.  I wonder if anyone at Universal reads this blog?  A pleasing, and yet unsettling, thought.

I'm going to hold off on discussing those strips to see how quickly gocomics fixes the problem.  (I could get them from Other Sources, but let's give them a week to fix it themselves, it's not like it should be a particularly hard thing to correct.)  There are some interesting strips affected so I'm loathe to skip them for long.

Concerning Blogger:

You'd think that Google themselves would know something about site reliability, but geez.  Blogger was down all of yesterday, and there was a worry that some posts would be lost.  That doesn't seem to have happened, at least in my case, but the outtage is the reason there was no post yesterday.

February 8, 1954: Lucy is Loud

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Lucy's not been an overly loud character so far, but the sheer size of her voice becomes a distinctive feature in the coming years.  (But not before another character becomes known for it....)

This strip depicts Lucy in four different sizes.  One of the interesting things about comic strip art, I think, is that it is almost always depicted in set sizes.  Considering how fluid is the medium, it seems weird that characters are always produced at the same sizes each week.

There is at least one good reason for this.  Comic characters are drawn using pen lines, and those have set thicknesses.  If you reproduce a comic character, especially a black-and-white one, at a larger size but without using a thicker line, they tend to look a little funny, like they're "lighter" than they should be.  The opposite happens if you draw a character smaller but use the same size line.  And comic artists, who must be able to precisely reproduce characters, probably have concerns about their ability to do that with different thicknesses of pen.

If you draw the character at its usual size and just resize it using printing equipment, however, it will stick out if it shares a frame with other objects drawn at normal size.

The solution, as Schulz demonstrates here, is to redesign the character at different sizes, simplifying it the smaller it's drawn.  Lucy gets less detailed the further away she gets from the viewer.

Sunday, February 7, 1954: The nerve-wracking sled ride

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

In an unusual inversion from the norm in later strips, here it's Charlie Brown's imagination that's active and Snoopy is the realist.  I can't help but think Charlie Brown realizes his little sled ride's kind of pathetic; otherwise why would he talk it up with exclamations like "Down! Down! Down!" or "Racing like the wind..."

The chain he's using to hang onto the sled is a nice touch, as is the care Schulz uses to draw the sled.  It's very well-rendered!

The lead panels, which can be kept or left off of a strip at the newspaper's option, are a continual problem with Peanuts' storytelling.  Schulz has to write each strip so that it works either with or without those panels, which sometimes messes with his timing.  Here he presents what is probably a little too much lead-in, which slightly damages the joke.

EDIT: As Sarah Loyd rightly noticed, Snoopy is sporting a chagrimace in the next-to-last panel.

February 6, 1954: You know the thing I like best in the world? CAUSTIC SODA

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

There is spite, and there is this.  There's something almost affectionate about holding an entire party specifically to focus on something a particular, pointedly-uninvited person likes, although it's rather a lot of trouble to go through.  I can't help but think that the result would be rather a slapdash affair.  Why would you do otherwise, when the "guest of honor" won't even be there?

February 5, 1954: Charlie Brown has to be honest

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This strip is a counterpart to earlier strips about the disparity in musical knowledge between Schroeder and Charlie Brown.

The action lines of Charlie Brown pumping the top handle are a little more detailed than is usual.  The arc of musical notes over the top in the second frame is nice.

February 2, 1954: Grape is the lightest of the flavors

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

We've returned to the subject of Snoopy's amazing ears.  Lucy's reaction is interesting.  Increasingly we're getting a sense that the Van Pelt kids, for whatever reason, have their own ways of seeing the world that is different from the other kids.  Linus is able to stack blocks in strange and physics-defying ways, and Lucy seems to have secret knowledge about the gravity-defying properties of grape (or, more likely, artificial grape flavoring).

One could attribute this to their youth.  And indeed the other young member of the cast, Schroeder, also exhibits a unique psychological property -- he's a musical prodigy.  Youth, in Peanuts, seems like it may be a quality tied with genius.  This doesn't last forever however; to my memory, Sally doesn't really seem to ever exhibit these kinds of abilities.

Snoopy seems to be really pleased with himself concerning his trick now.

February 1, 1954: Status in Charlie Brown's neighborhood

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

There was a recent comment about Violet's family likely being wealthier than Charlie Brown's, which seems likely.  This strip is evidence that Shermy's might be too -- or at least he might be more of a train freak.

Shermy's train set is obviously set up in his family's living room, or some sort of sitting room.  How long must that have taken to set up, and how many times would his family have stepped on it by accident?

Sunday, January 31, 1954: Snoopy, Time Lord

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This is the first strip that implies that Snoopy's doghouse has some extra-dimensional property, that it's bigger inside than outside, although one can take Schroeder's comment to suggest that the rec room is in a basement, and thus underground.  Dog houses don't usually have basements, true, but....

This strip is also evidence that Snoopy is not yet considered to be Charlie Brown's dog.  If Snoopy really were his, wouldn't he already know all this?  As a kid I stumbled upon this strip and wondered why the neighborhood kids were invited into Snoopy's doghouse while Charlie Brown was not, even though he was Snoopy's owner.  It seemed to project upon the kid a sense of being a social pariah that I think stuck with him when I read other, later strips.  Viewed in context with the Peanuts strips up to this point, he doesn't seem to be quite so excluded.

Does Snoopy's rec room have as low a clearance as his entrance?   That could be considered to be something of a flaw if the people he usually has over are all kids.

January 30, 1954: Not a scale model

Read this strip at gocomics.com.
When I was in first grade, the library at the elementary school I attended had a number of Fawcett Peanuts collections.  Of course Peanuts is a lot more than just a kids' strip, and I think this may be why I gravitated towards it.  But because of this, some things about it were confusing, and one of the bigger things is illustrated well in this strip.

Notice Snoopy's reactions here.  They are played very far down.  He provides no dismissive thought bubbles signalling annoyance.  He develops no frown or gaping mouth of dismay.  The only clues to Snoopy's internal state here is how he looks at the camera in the second panel, and his overall actions.  He just leaves.  That's rather cold.

Charles Schulz would become a master at depicting the understated reaction.

Note: Argh, Blogger sometimes marks posts as draft when it's supposed to be publishing them.  This should have gone up yesterday.

January 29, 1954:

 

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Charlie Brown is still something more of a smart aleck than a whipping boy here, but it is an early example of Patty and Violet teaming up against the kid.  Later on he loses this ability to reflect feelings of inadequacy back upon assailants.

Look at Patty's satisfied arms-crossing in the first panel.  Man, that's some serious smug.  Also in the first panel, that's quite a lot of detail on the background there.