Sunday, May 20, 1954: psspstpssp

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Well whatever you do don't let the audience know what you're whispering, I mean sheesh.

By keeping the information being whispered from the reader, the reader can't mistake the point to have something to do with the specific message. The message is unimportant; the joke is in the communication.

Three characters are left out of this strip. We can figure for ourselves why Snoopy and Linus aren't included. That Schulz shows preference for Schroeder over Shermy just goes to show how already poor Sherm is kind of a second-class cast member.

Odd rounded frames on the panels here.

June 14-19, 1954: Let's play H-Bomb Test!

June 14

No cutting and pasting here. Charles Schulz draw out every "BANG" in this strip, or I don't see any at duplicates at least.
June 15

A simple Murphy's Law type of premise. It's another look at the famous doghouse too, which implies that Snoopy must have an owner, whoever it is.
June 16
gocomics.com's image for this strip is a duplicate of June 14th's. Can anyone with access to the Fantagraphics collection fill us in as to what's supposed to be here?
June 17

The drawing of Snoopy eating the ice cream scoop is rather charming.
June 18

History: Wikipedia notes "The first fusion bomb was tested by the United States in Operation Ivy on November 1, 1952, on Elugelab Island in the Enewetak (or Eniwetok) Atoll of the Marshall Islands, code-named 'Mike.'"
This is one of my favorite early strips, it really sticks out in my memory. Lucy is extremely, panel-fillingly loud for the first time, an ominous development from the young girl. The seriousness with which Charlie Brown pushes down the plunger and Patty holds her ears is great. And of course it's a reference to the biggest damn firecrackers the human race ever made, which were new developments at the time.
As a purely random aside, the comparison, however slight, between a child and a piece of nuclear weaponry unavoidably reminded me of this.
June 19

When you have two characters talking to each other in a comic strip, and their words are the point of the strip, it becomes necessary to have them do something with their bodies during that time. Unlike as with mere text, here a comic strip's graphic nature provides extraneous information, and could actually be distracting if not handled well, but if not considered could lead to the infamous "talking heads" effect. It happens enough, in most humor strips, that a cartoonist must make plans for it. (In dramatic strips, the quality of the drawing and the "camera angles" might be enough to sustain interest.) It is a fundamental problem for most cartoonists who hope to have careers longer than a couple of years. Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes would sometimes approach talky, philosophical strips by putting the two in a wagon and sending them over a cliff; this is one of the many reasons we love Calvin and Hobbes.
Throughout Peanuts' run, characters do various things when there's a talky strip, such as walking across a field, sitting beneath a tree of standing behind The Brick Wall. There are probably thousands of such strips, and this is one of them. It is probably not the case that Schulz obsessively planned these out, but in this one at least the art serves to accentuate the conversation: the balancing in the first panel illustrates the carefree nature of the conversation, Charlie Brown hiding behind the tree shows he's anxious about his upcoming revelation, and having the characters sit at a curb in the four panel lets Schulz draw CB in an appropriately slouched pose.
One thing about this strips that has always subtly bothered me is how rapidly the characters change poses. They go from playing on the curb, to walking across a field, to a small tree, then back to a curb, over the course of a three-sentence exchange in a single conversation. Peanuts characters are not generally shown as being hyperactive, but there is a certain restlessness here.

Sunday, June 13, 1954: Charlie Brown and a Kite

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Last Sunday Charlie Brown's kite contributed to a more general neighborhood chaos. This time a statement is definitely being made about his kite-flying skills. We don't yet know if it's an aspect of his character that sticks or if was just intended to be a one-off joke. Probably the latter.

Week of June 7-12, 1954: Requiem for Miss Frances

June 7

Besides some cute drawings of Snoopy and the very dense hatching of early Peanuts rain, not really a lot of interest here. We do see a character involved in a paper route for the first time, I guess that's notable.

June 8

The abuse from Violet gets harsher as time goes by, but at least it's direct. Lucy is more a get-under-your-skin kind of tormentor.

I looked up Miss Frances; she was the host of a then-famous TV program for children called Ding Dong School. The Wikipedia page for her says that she was mentioned in exactly four Peanuts strips, this being the first. It is something of a shame that she's so obscure today, a relic from the early days of TV. She died in 2003. You can watch an episode of her show if you have access to that relic of the early days of the Web, RealPlayer. Or, here's an episode from YouTube, in three parts, starting here. Part 2. Part 3. There seems to be at least one more episode on YouTube. Dig that organ music!

It's a bit shocking how short-lived memory of TV programming can be. Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo, both deceased shows that date back to the early days of TV, are also receding into obscurity, and I've actually seen those while they were airing.

June 9

Being right means more to Charlie Brown than being in pain. Notice the use of the parenthesis around his eyes. This is evolving into a standard way to express focus. Of course Lucy and Linus have those parenthesis as part of their neutral expression.

June 10

Snoopy has the advantage of having a lot more face over which to stretch his mouth. (His smile may not look too much bigger than Charlie Brown's here, but you're forgetting he has a whole other side to his head over which to pull that grin.)

June 11

Most of the time (eventually) Charlie Brown reacts to Lucy's naive approach to astronomy with a sigh, a headache, or a weary "I can't stand it." Here, he participates.

June 12

A fairly clever strip, and one that relies on the visual nature of the medium. I suppose kids today would wonder why he spells "for" here as "four" instead of the obviously correct rendering, "4". Ha ha, but I kid kids today.

Sunday, June 6, 1954: String and rope

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This isn't the first time Charlie Brown has flown a kite, I think. It doesn't count as the beginning of the kite-flying-failure aspect of his character either, since all of the characters are holding (or jumping, or are tied to) some piece of string, and two are actually running with them.

Also different are the character's attitudes at the end. All of them are wearing a "dumbfounded" expression, including Charlie Brown. More frequently after causing a kite crash, Charlie Brown's expression is more like dismay, or disgust.

One thing I wonder about... in the last panel, three of the characters are sticking their tongues out. This is a bit of graphic shorthand sometimes used in comics (especially older ones) to represent dumbfoundedness or annoyance. But where did this convention get started? It doesn't seem like a particularly obvious connection to make, to stick out your tongue in the face of a blameless accident. How did this get invented? (While we're at it, when did "Z" become the universal signifying letter for sleep?)

Notice that Shermy is walking Snoopy here, making the dog's owner more doubtful again.

All of the current characters are represented in this strip except Linus.

Week of May 31-June 5, 1954: The Blanket

May 31:

I spoke too soon regarding the spelling of "coconut." Actually, it's possible this is the first time Schulz called it "cocoanut," and I misremembered. I sometimes scout ahead a few months so I know what's coming up, and I might be remembering this odd spelling from that.

Charlie Brown's distaste for coconut is one of those facts about the character that didn't really survive into the later strip.

June 1:

This is the first strip in which Linus holds a blanket, and the first one in which we're told he does it for security-related purposes, although the explicit term "security blanket" isn't in use yet.

June 2:

On the art of extracting comfort from flannel. Lucy isn't really opposed to it at this point -- in fact, I think you can probably find several strips in which Lucy is anti- and pro-blanket. Their grandmother, however, is less divided about it.

June 3:

Snoopy keeps one part of his brain awake at all time to watch for food opportunities. It's like a processor devoted to background tasks.

We get the serif-Z representing sleep here again.

June 4:

We've seen versions of this strip before. An early strip had them playing hide-and-seek, and the width of Charlie Brown's head gave him away.

In fact his head isn't that much wider than the others, it just seems to stick out more. Patty would have trouble hiding behind that tree without the sign (also because her dress extends out wider).

June 5:

Snoopy vs. The Yard: The Faucet

Even assuming the dog isn't familiar with the workings of human gardening apparatus, it's an oddly specific place to choose for a nap.

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