November 1-6, 1954: Leaves can be surprisingly vindictive

November 1

This strip reminds me of later strips in which characters try to figure out what to do with jack-o-lanterns after Halloween. I seem to remember "Peppermint" Patty trying to make a pie.
November 2

Oh they look harmless, but don't make them mad!
November 3

More of Lucy's off-kilter way of looking at the world. She's old enough now that she knows a bit of the world, but isn't old enough that she has all the concepts right in her head, which I expect made her a fun character to write for. Which might explain why we've had a lot of her lately.
November 4

Why is Pig-Pen so happy in the third panel? The rest of it is easily understandable, but why is he so amused there? Is it because he knows Snoopy standing there and he sees the hole Charlie Brown is digging for himself? Is it just that he doesn't care how he is perceived?
November 5

Oh, to be delivered unto Lucy's tender mercies! Linus is right to be afraid. "AAGH" doesn't seem to be nearly frightened enough by my reckoning.
November 6

Well, getting a picture is a lot easier than taking a whole bath.

Sunday, October 31, 1954: Have you tried changing providers?

There's another missing week in gocomics' archive, from October 25-30. It picks back up the following Sunday, Halloween, although it's not a Halloween strip.

Read this strip on gocomics.com.

Not the most complicated gag in the world. This is basically what people here in Georgia have to do to get a connection with AT&T.

Sunday, October 25, 1954: Schroeder's shameful secret

And we're back!

Remember, one week before this Charlie Brown was heaping ridicule on Linus' blanket. At least the kid is open-minded! The thing that makes this strip for me is Schroeder's look of despair in the last panel. Oh no, I've been discovered!

META: Hiatus continues

Just letting you guys know I'm at DragonCon. There isn't much Peanuts content here, other than the odd person with wearing a Charlie Brown shirt. The con ends Monday, probably regular updates will resume Tuesday. (I already have most of a new post written out, I might finish it sometime today if I can find the time.)

October 18-23: Towards a classification system of comic jokes

October 18

Did you know that there is a complicated system of categorizing folk and fairy tales? Like, assigning letter and number codes to them, so someone can say something like "Oh, Little Red Riding Hood? That's a 73-B, juvenile travels through woods to relation, who has been replaced by wolf." Strips like this make me want to come up with such a system for jokes. This could be 13-G, kid gets tripped up by minor misunderstanding concerning meaning of word.

October 19

26-Q, part of dog takes on dual-role as inanimate object.

October 20

930-A-IV, smart kid finds clever way to remind friends they are to bring her birthday presents.

October 21

8-W, sight gag causing dog to resemble hand puppet. (Not to be confused with 8-V, dog pushed off table by irate cat. Okay, I'll stop now.)

October 22

It's easy to forget the relative sizes of the Peanuts characters compared to the world around them. The sight of the bathtub behind Patty shows just how young the kids are meant to be. Even in the early days the kids behave more like small adults than children, but the age discrepancy back in 1954 seems almost shocking to me.

October 23

This strip is almost a trope for Schulz at this time; a character gets in the way of Snoopy watching television, or vice-versa, with a sight gag showing the obstructed character restoring his view at the expense of the other.

October 17, 1954: Outing Flannel

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This isn't Linus' first time with the security blanket, but it's the first time it's presented in terms of providing security. It's not called a "security blanket" yet, but it's almost there, it just needs to connect those two nouns with nothing else in-between. This is a term that entered our language largely because of Peanuts, so this is a momentous strip.

I like Lucy's loud "INSANELY happy!!" I can't picture that coming out of Nancy or Sluggo. Here Lucy is generally in favor of Linus' blanket. Her attitude later on wavers between for and against, with their blanket-hating grandmother pushing her against I think. Charlie Brown, contrary to his general opinion later, seems to be against it on principle, but willing to give it a try. Isn't a blanket more than just a swath of material, though?

Linus' expression in the first panel is interesting, an expression that doesn't read easily. The sequence from panels 6-8 are interesting for how unconcerned Charlie Brown and Lucy are about Linus' feelings throughout their conversation; his reactions to them are pretty funny.

October 11-16, 1954: Charlie Brown's dog begins to drive him mad

October 11, 1954

There is a role-playing game out there called Call of Cthulhu, which involves players encountering horrible creatures from beyond time and space. That game gives players a statistic called "Sanity," or SAN, which is rated on a scale from 0 to 99. Whenever something happens to a character that tests his grasp on reality, he's told to make a sanity roll, rolling a couple of dice to generate a number from 1 to 100. If he rolls beneath his sanity, he loses no or a few points. If he rolls above, he loses more, sometimes a lot more.

That paragraph is just to explain the following statement: In the next year Charlie Brown will receive a ton of sanity rolls. A lot of things seem to drive the poor kid crazy.

This is another version of the strip for September 20, 1953, although much shorter.

October 12, 1954

Does it seem to any of you that, sometimes, Schroeder is a bit defensive about Beethoven?

October 13, 1954

Snoopy was very energetic as a young dog. Someone should drop a piece of candy just to give him a focus for all that nervous tension.

October 14, 1954

The lid may be on the pot for now... but the fire is lit, and the water boils.

October 15, 1954

Lucy has seen Snoopy's nose enough times that she should know it's not a handball. Snoopy's nose is a bit strange though, as dogs don't really have round noses like this, and this joke is as much a self-referential sequence about Schulz's art style as were all the jokes about the size and shape of Charlie Brown's head. Schulz had been known to say later on that it was difficult to get the size of Snoopy's nose exactly right.

October 16, 1954

Most of the time, when characters express annoyance or frustration at Charlie Brown, he internalizes their words and gets depressed. This looks at these exchanges from the other point of view; Violet really is overreacting.

Four Years

I overshot it by a few days, but it's true: we've now reviewed four years of Peanuts. Only 45 to go!

In the upcoming year, 1954-55:

• We meet the second minor character, and the first really temporary character. You can tell just from the name that Charlotte Braun isn't going to stick around for long.
• Lucy grows into her role as cast bully, gaining useful practice by terrorizing her brother Linus.
• We catch a fleeting glimpse of an adult's hand! Gasp!
• The long-running strip template of Lucy pining away after Schroeder the aloof musician really gets established.
• Snoopy begins imagining things, which marks the real beginning of the character we're familiar with today.
• We get the first letter that a character writes that's depicted as words hanging in the air.
• Lucy doesn't believe what Charlie Brown tells her some more times, and Charlie Brown develops an epic series of stomaches in response.

Sunday, October 10, 1954: Snoopy vs. The Yard: Another Leaf

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Snoopy shows a lot of the passion of his younger years here. Later he's a much more sedate dog, maybe because his late-era character design is incapable of much motion.

Panel two is rather cute, I think anyway. Panel four is a transition between compact, sitting-down Snoopy and stretchy, loose running-around Snoopy.

October 4-9, 1954: Get back there

October 4

Back then, often movies would show first in big cities, and then move into suburb theaters if they were popular enough. It's a sly and effective joke.

Good grief!

October 5

This kind of personal devaluation from both Violet and Patty will only get more common in the future.

October 6

Charlie Brown is becoming more of a straightman, someone who reacts in funny ways to the foibles and antics of the other characters. Given Schroeder's past reactions to more modern forms of music, his willingness to (I think we're supposed to assume) adapt Beethoven into a mambo seems kind of sacrilegious of him.

October 7

Actually, I think Lucy has given Charlie Brown far more than half of that piece of bread. She still calls it "bread an' butter," I notice.

October 8

You can tell what people are eating by how many decibels their chewing noises rate, although in Charlie Brown's case we might have to move up to the Richter scale.

October 9

Lucy's power to impress with a quiet word is matched only by her ability to do so by shouting, although this hasn't really been established much yet. Notice that Schulz has drawn her words a little differently than usual; they're wider and the strokes are thicker, almost like block letters. She is obvious using some of her infernal power here.