Week of May 24-29, 1954: Lucy's soul darkens

It's another full week post. What do you guys think about this format? I don't think I'm going to do all posts like this, but it's nice for making faster time through Peanuts' run. But there are a couple of interesting strips this time out though that might more deserve their own posts.
May 24:

Sir Edmund Lucy! A key moment in her development. It's unwarranted violence against her brother, and it's willful as it is arbitrary.
May 25:

By way of contrast, this is an aspect of Lucy's character that holds over from her original personality, her ignorance about the world expressed in humorous ways. It's when that ignorance becomes willful that we get the Lucy we know from later.
May 26:

Another Snoopy power: uncanny reaction time. Similar to the "great experiment" strip from a few months back, Snoopy's affinity for candy has the ability to brush aside such petty concerns as Newtonian physics.
May 27:

Another of Lucy's evolving attempts at cruelty. Another thing this strip foreshadows is, of all the characters, Snoopy is the one that her malice has the least power over.
One can accept Charlie Brown's statement, about considering being called a "dog" an insult, in one of two ways: either that it is an insult but Snoopy is ignorant of it, or that Snoopy is secure in his place. Later strips reveal that Schulz probably intended it the second way, which is the better meaning, but I consider the fact that he leaves it open for interpretation interesting.
May 28:

For the record, Easter Sunday fell on April 18 that year. We are left to decide for ourselves if Lucy is really late or extremely early in her decision.
May 29:

Aah. Yesterday when I talked about remembering another jack-in-the-box strip I was remembering this one. It's another example of Schulz's gag-writing strategy of taking some thing and permuting it through its possibilities.
It is worth noting here that the last strip in Schulz's Sunday-only experiment with continuity and adult figures is the one after this.

Week of May 17-22, 1954: Dirges and Disappointments

May 17:

Snoopy used to do more dog-like things, like howl at the moon. Most dogs don't bother pro-rating the volume of their howling according to the amount of moon visible, though, because they don't comprehend fractions.

May 18:

The story of this strip seems at first, pretty much, to be "character does something foolish, which is rapidly undone due to its foolishness, so there."

Here's a thought experiment. If this strip involved Lucy stacking a vertical column of blocks, which eventually went too high and toppled over, causing her to say "Rats!", would it be a strip-worthy scene? What if it involved another character, like leaving out a bag of candy which Charlie Brown or Snoopy then came along and ate?

For some reason I'm very interested in this idea, to an extent that surprises me. It is my view that this strip works more for the "Rats!" at the end than the situation itself; it's about Lucy's learning that the world doesn't work the way she expects, and the disappointment she feels. This is a frequent theme of Peanuts.

May 19:

The universe never supplies just the right amount of water, Snoopy.

May 20:

This joke is deceptively complex. Lucy confuses the mood of a piece of music as being a value judgement on its quality.

You know you can tell where a dirge is on a vinyl record by looking closely at the grooves with a magnifying glass? The plastic is grayer at that point.

May 21:

Didn't we see this one before, or something like it? I can't find it in the archives though, despite my at-times-obsessive tagging.

May 22:

What kind of gas is in that balloon to be able to hold up that thick rope? What kind of strength must Lucy have to be able to hold it so casually?

Week of May 10-15, 1954: Jellybeans, Coconut, Baseball and Swings

May 10:

I really hope they aren't resting in a bowl of milk. Most breakfast cereals probably have close to that much sugar as it is.

May 11:

A nice understated last panel on this strip.

May 12:

This is similar to a certain Friz Freling-directed Sylvester and Tweety cartoon, in which, in an effort to get high enough to grab Tweety's cage, Sylvester swings back and forth in a swing, going higher and higher. Unfortunately, part of the arc happens to intersect the field of motion of a pole-driving machine, and....

May 13:

The more I think about this strip the more grossed-out I get. Maybe she should wash them off in a bowl of milk? (We already knows she likes putting her hands in milk from a previous strip.) Maybe Schulz had jelly beans on the brain at the time he wrote these.

May 14:

Every so often a character reacts with surprising self-knowledge. You don't tend to get that kind of reflection from Beetle Bailey. It's a bit unsettling when it happens, whether in the comics or in real life.

May 15:

Coconut-flavored cough medicine?

This is a structure Schulz uses sometimes, where a character reacts strongly in the third panel, and another character shows up in the last panel expressly to watch and explain why the first character is reacting. Violet's wide smile here is interesting -- why is CB hating coconut funny? My interpretation is, it's the joy of watching someone you know act in an expected fashion. "Good ol' Charlie Brown. Boy, does he hate coconut!" That radio is really an innocent party in this however. Charlie Brown is just kicking the messenger.

Notice that Schulz isn't spelling it "cocoanut" anymore.

May 9, 16, 23 & 30, 1954: Lucy at the Golf Tournament

We've come around to that strange place in Peanuts history where Charles Schulz experimented with putting adult characters in the strip as background elements, with continuity elements, with a relatively serious storyline, with titling, and with making Lucy a golf whiz.

Thing is, we already covered these strips last year.

I'm taking the day off from the blog, feel free to go back and reread my comments on the sequence, which is among the stranger moments in Peanuts' run, right up there with the time Alfred E. Neuman appeared in the strip.

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Read this sequence at gocomics.com:
May 9 - May 16 - May 23 - May 30

Week of May 3-8, 1954

May 3, 1954:

A comment remarked that the "Red Red Red" strip from a few days back was probably, actually, a reference to the Red Scare current around that time.  The current events angle of this strip is rather more obvious to a reader 57 years in the future.

May 4:

One of the most enduring gags of the strip, that of Lucy's utter ineptness as a fielder, begins here.  It's a funny example of the type, too.

May 5:

That piece of candy must be incredibly rich.

May 6:

This is partly a callback to the very first Peanuts strip.

May 7:

The fussbudget plot continues.  Lucy still doesn't seem to comprehend sarcasm when it's used at her expense.  This is classic Lucy here, the (literally) wide-eyed little girl is almost gone.  Not completely yet, but she's getting there.

May 8:

This joke isn't one of Schulz's best right here, but it does give us another glimpse of the prehensile talents of Snoopy's ears.

Sunday, May 2, 1954: I guess that black tape didn't help much

Read this strip at gocomics.com.
A simple, funny strip.  The decrepit state of the ball is particularly funny.

META: Client problems

If you're wondering about the lack of updates for a couple of days, well....

I have been making them, they just accidently went over to my game dev blog instead.  I've been trying out a blogging client and it's made it easy to accidentally crosspost.  I'm trying to move the affected posts here, stand by....

May 1, 1954: Warping a little girl's mind

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

What is Charles Schulz saying, that Lucy is interested in Charlie Brown's "Mangle Comics," "Disease Comics" and "Gory Comics," yet he's not interested in "The Little Bunnies," "Billy Bluebird," and "The Funny Foxes?"

Some possible takeaway points:
1. Boy's comics are ridiculously violent (although "Disease Comics" doesn't seem like the most marketable title).
2. Boy's comics are more universally interesting than girl's comics, which implies Lucy considers girls' comics to be lacking.
3. Lucy is brushing up on her evil skills. Although Charlie Brown presumably reads them all the time, and he's kind of fragile.

April 28-30, 1954: Comics, stairs and hoops

April 28, 1954:

The latest in the "Charlie Brown, Cartoonist" sequence. This one, I think, has an uncharacteristically clunky final panel. I find it difficult to imagine how Schulz could have thought CB's statement at the end works, it's very un-Peanuts-like.

April 29, 1954:

This is more like it. After the "Big Kids" Sunday strip, I think this is the first one to have a full thought balloon from Linus. I find the stairs in the second panel a little problematic, though. It's like the stairs sort of "slope" down off the side, like a carpeted hillside or something.

April 30, 1954:

Is it any wonder Snoopy forgets the kid's name? Anyway, this strip only works because of the limited size of the panels. Presumably Snoopy can see ahead off-panel, so why doesn't he notice the hoop is only as large as his snout beforehand? Maybe it's why Schulz draws him with his eyes closed in the third panel.

April 27, 1954: With real working truck bed!

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This is a frequently-used structure by Schulz at the moment. It goes:

1. A character does or says something silly.
2. Another character, or in the case of Snoopy vs. The Yard plain old physics, shows why the thing done is silly.

It's not much by itself, so these strips usually have something else going for them, either funny art (as here), empathy with one of the characters (such as the silly one who realizes by the end his mistake), or in some cases the silly character bullheadedly persisting in his error regardless. This happens with Lucy a lot, but Linus also becomes susceptible to it, every Halloween....