Overthinking a plate of peanuts (which are a kind of bean)
A selective trip through all of Charles Schulz's classic comic strip. Updates daily.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
I find the huge 'X' at the end of Lucy's aborted count to be starkly evocative. Those tally marks could be raindrops, or stars, or maybe lives.
Charlie Brown remembers Lucy counting the stars in previous strips. The spectre of continuity rears its head here, and with it, unavoidably, the characters move closer towards being individuals more than interchangeable placeholder images for jokes.
Only the second bit of negativity we've heard from Pig-Pen, the first being in his introduction.
That's not Snoopy, someone switched his bust of Beethoven for a figurine of the RCA dog!
Is this sarcasm from Schroeder, or condescension?
Charlie Brown still has some of the old ego in him, I see. I wonder when is the moment when that's finally pounded out of him, and when it happens, if ultimately it's Lucy, or Patty and Violet who are the cause
Her beleaguered mother has resorted to trying to play her and Linus against each other. Lucy takes the long view here. Lucy is forward-thinking in the next Sunday strip too, although she doesn't look quite so far ahead.
This is a fairly standard comic inversion. Not really terribly noteworthy, but I've commented on all the other strips this week, so why not?
(If I do leave strips out, I will still link to the gocomics page for the absent strips. I don't think it's proper to present strips I don't have much to say about, since I'm hosting these copies to avoid hot linking gocomics, and not to provide an alternate archive of strips. As I said before, they are presented here for commentary purposes only.)
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
I think this strip is more effect without the lead-in panels, which means our first glimpse of the floating wading pool will be the same as Charlie Brown's. Lucy's final comment also works better in that case; it's unnecessary with the first two panels included.
This is a very funny strip (especially "He pointed his flame thrower right at me!"), but it's a kind of humor that seems out of place in Peanuts, heavily reliant on sight gags. At least it's Charlie Brown who's the silly one here.
That's gotta be a pretty strong wind.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
Another chapter in the unfolding story of Lucy's mother's desperate search for peace and quiet.
This is a particular favorite strip for me. It has several funny drawings that suit the story perfectly, it reveals something about Lucy's personality, and along the way it paints a vivid picture of the dynamic between Lucy's mother (who needs Lucy to be out of the house sometimes) and father (who foots the bill).
As Lucy becomes more bullheaded and cantankerous, Linus would grow into the role of asking Charlie Brown science questions. In one memorable strip, he asks an angry-faced Lucy why the sky is blue. She snaps back at him "BECAUSE IT ISN'T GREEN!"
That coy smile on Pig-Pen's face in panel three is interesting, in a Mona Lisa kind of way.
This is a growing part of Lucy's personality, a refusal to acknowledge basic facts. At she isn't laughing about what a joker Charlie Brown is afterwards this time. Charlie Brown's stomachache of dismay when confronted with one of his friends' quirks is a developing part of his character, too.
It's been a little while since we've seen a fussy Lucy strip. This one fits right in with the pattern: Lucy looks a gift horse in the mouth, and the horse kicks. Charlie Brown's expression is a little different this time: it's a more introspective look of annoyance, more of a look of "why does this happen to me?" than "why do I put up with her?"
I might have to agree with Lucy, however, if there really are weeds in the lemonade.
Having trouble coming up with something to say about this one. Not the most complex joke we've seen.
This seems more like something Linus would do. Actually, Schroeder has been in a good number of non-musical strips around this time. He's catcher of the baseball team, he's Charlie Brown's cartooning audience, and he's also around as a bit character. I remember as a kind seeing Schroeder strips at the piano and wondering why I never saw him anywhere else. He seemed to exist in a piano-centered universe, with occasional visits from the Satan of his personal world, Lucy.
The first panel demonstrates a curious aspect of Peanuts' artwork from around the time. Characters wearing a neutral expression viewed front or from the diagonal are often drawn without mouths. I thought it was weird the first time I saw it, and I still think it's weird now.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
This isn't the first time Lucy's played baseball, but it confirms her position in right field. This is the first bona-fide joke about how bad Lucy is as a fielder. Charlie Brown's comment in the first panel implies that Lucy already has a negative reputation as a ball player.
This week, there is no sign of Patty, Shermy or Violet.
The existence of fingerprints is a little convenient, don't you think?
In 1954 Linus would be called a prodigy. Now, he'd probably get labeled autistic, or diagnosed with ADD. Although his ability to build things like card houses so quickly, or gravity-defying stacks of blocks, borders on the magical.
The first baby in the strip was Schroeder, who developed into a musical genius. Here we kind of see Schulz taking the same steps with Linus, although his personality became rather different.
Do they have little flourishes at the edges of the ridges? Do the whorls form a delightful swooping pattern?
Be careful what you beg for, Snoopy. I hope Linus didn't go back to sucking on that thing afterward. Notably, we don't actually see Snoopy link the thumb; we infer it from his reaction.
Charlie Brown seeks to branch out into adventure comics. Adventure comic strips are a sad and moribund category any more so some of you might not be familiar with them. The real money now, such as it is, is in comic magazines*, with their X-people and their Superfolk and their Batguys and their....
* I've decided: I'm reviving this usage. Who's with me?
Silly Lucy, everyone knows only the index finger contains a gun barrel.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
Sometimes the heavy stylization of Peanuts works in the service of a gag. In this strip, it isn't clear what exactly it is that Snoopy is doing until he tells us in the last panel. Although "whoops!" is kind of a weird thing to say in response to something cold pressed against your back.
Snoopy isn't as long in these panels as he was a few weeks back, he looks to be of a more reasonable size compared to when he's sitting down. But we do have a few panels where we see his face in three-quarters' perspective and get that weird broad face. Snoopy's snout really only exists in profile.
