March 4-6, 1954: Three more glued together

Read these strips at gocomics.com.

Second verse same as the first.

February 4, 1954:
Linus: kid of impossibility!  This is what I was talking about, some time back, about the Van Pelt children being kind of... uncanny.  While Lucy grows into her powers and becomes a supervillainess, Linus, taking Jesus Christ as his model, chooses the role of teacher.  Well, eventually.

February 5, 1954:
Poor ol' Charlie Brown.  Poor ol' frustrated Charlie Brown.

February 6, 1954:
This is a great strip!  I love the third panel especially:

We know these characters so well now that, even without the other three panels, we're pretty sure which of the two kids is saying YES and which was saying NO.  But even by their postures, Violet seems just that much more adamant.

A points of note in the art:
In the zoomed-in panel, notice that the characters don't look as angry in the other panels; their emotion is diluted by the energy they're putting into shouting.

P.S. There is a They Might Be Giants song for every occasion.

March 1-3, 1954: Three by necessity

Read these strips at gocomics.com.

Er, I think someone messed up.  These three strips are presented like this on gocomics' page.  Remember when some strips turned up missing a couple of weeks ago?  I think they were gone in order to fix another situation like this one, where multiple strips are glued together in a single image.  This probably happened when the strips were scanned out of a book; whoever did the scanning neglected to crop the other strips out of the one for March 1 (which is the one with Schroeder and Snoopy here).  The other strips are also in their respective places in gocomics' procession, but we might as well do all three now.

March 1: Not too interesting, although it is a Schroeder strip with nothing to do with music.  I do wonder how the car managed to make it up Snoopy's head; it's not a smooth trip between panels three and four.

March 2: This one's pretty funny.  The boys and girls in Peanuts, physically at least, are on equal standing, but it's still embarrassing for a young boy to be outmatched by a girl.  Notice the wavy lines around the feet; they're there to draw the eye and so confirm to the reader that they're standing on tip-toe.

March 3: Chase strip.  Also pretty funny.  In a way this one works as a joke on the size of Charlie Brown's head, which needs a large object like a stop sign to cover it up.  Oh, and isn't it very short for a stop sign?

Sunday, February 28, 1954: Willful Little Lucy

Read this strip on gocomics.com.

How much of this is meant to depict Lucy herself being stubborn, and how much just a very young kid rebelling against her parents?  I think often, in Peanuts, cases of the latter evolve over time into cases of the former.  That is, strips intended as general observations end up getting sorted by character, and so the kids accrete characteristics over time and in this way become complex.

In the lead-in panels, Schulz shows Lucy being contented with a word balloon containing a musical note.  I suppose it's meant to represent her humming.  It's not the first time he's done this.

February 27, 1954: Eleven?

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Counting stars again?  We've had four strips so far on the subject:
Charlie Brown gets her started
Lucy isn't keeping track
Standing on one chair
What about it?

There's just something marvelously quixotic about it, in a profound sense.  What could be a more hopeless endeavor than to count all the stars?

NOTE: I'm not sure where my mind was yesterday whenb I wrote this, but I just noticed it doesn't actually have to do with counting stars, although it does involve touching one. Have been a little distracted over last few days.

February 26, 1954: Charlie Brown Cartoons Again

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Another "Charlie Brown, Cartoonist" strip.  Schulz used these a lot both to poke fun at himself and, perhaps, at other cartoonists.  At the time, I think he was still working at Art Instruction, Inc.

This strip is interesting for other reasons though.  The look on Schroeder's face the whole time is fascinating.  He isn't upset in the last panels; it's more like he thinks Charlie Brown has rejected him.  Or maybe he's just sad that his criticism didn't find reception in CB's round head.

February 25, 1953: The Peanut Butter Sandwich That Broke the Camel's Back

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I love this one.

How is Peanuts unlike other comic strips?  Look here.  It's not that Charlie Brown ripped the sandwich apart.  It's Lucy's expression of dismay, and her horrified observation, "He tore it to pieces with his bare hands...."

February 24, 1954: In sync, no less

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Do they mean to be insulting?  They said it at exactly the same time, and with wide smiles.  I'm guessing they rehearsed this.

February 23, 1953: At the Writin' Fence

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I think we can safely assume that the upper graffiti is Patty's doing.  It is important to the joke here that Lucy is depicted as very young, so as to provide an explanation for the illegible scrawl on the bottom of the fence.  In fact, I think Schulz is actually cheating Lucy slightly shorter than she usually is, so the joke is clearer.

The strip for February 12, 1954 (presented here, fourth down) has Shermy writing on a similar wall.  On that strip, njguy54 commented that Shermy's use of cursive was "interesting."  It was, there, since who writes in cursive on large, vertical surfaces?  But the use of cursive here is much more important, since it provides important visual similarity between the two writings.

Did Schulz plan the two strips at the same time?  Probably; there are many examples of similar strips separated by a small number of days, enough to suggest part of his creation strategy: to hit upon some idea, to mine it for joke potential, then to draw some or all of the ideas, ideally seperated by a few days to keep things mixed up.

At some point, I conjecture, Schulz realizes that he doesn't always have to spread the strips apart like this, and he takes to running "theme weeks," where a number of consecutive strips feature a similar premise.  That eventually leads to sequences of linear storytelling, such as Charlie Brown progressively leading his baseball team to failure.  (Another sequence leading to that is the upcoming Lucy in the Golf Tournament story that plays over consecutive Sundays.)

February 22, 1954: The sun is a mass of incandescent gas

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

We're here on the ground floor of another emerging Peanuts story theme, Lucy's willful ignorance.  She's come a long way from her doll-like, third-person-referring, self-pitying ("Poor Lucy") early personality.  Her mistaken knowledge of the universe, and her spreading that knowledge to Linus, is an upcoming cause of Charlie Brown's stomachaches.

The way the path behind Charlie Brown, in the first panel, curves up only to disappear is strange when you notice it.  I think it's being represented as disappearing over a hill and Schulz didn't draw the horizon.  My guess is, drawing the horizon line would connect the two characters visually, subconsciously connecting them when the whole theme of the strip is disconnection.

Lucy's pose in the second panel is great.  She puts a lot of energy into her mockery.

Ho ho ho!

February 18, 1954: Lucy's quest

Read this strip over at gocomics.com.

Charlie Brown's patience with Lucy over her misguided project begins to wear down here.