April 18-23, 1955: Watson come here, I need groceries

April 18 

More of Pig-Pen's philosophy, which could be regarded either as kind of profund or as indicative of the lengths he'll go through to excuse his willful messiness.

April 19

Fun with halftone!  It definitely is possible to get mad at someone who's really neat, if they're still marking up the wall, although I suppose the Van Pelt folks could just tell people it's wallpaper.  Really freaky wallpaper.

April 20

Lucy believe, if you're losing on one front, just open up another.

April 21

Snoopy has the advantage of having a flatter head.  It'd be a lot harder for Charlie Brown to balance like that.  By the way, this strip demonstrates well how much Snoopy's body shape has changed.  He still has a little ways to go before he starts to balloon out.

April 22

You can't please all the people all the time.  There's kind of a Betty-and-Veronica thing going on between Patty and Violet here.

Charlie Brown's rather pleased with himself in the second panel.

April 23

I never got much use out of tin can telephones as a kid, beans or not.  I figured out much later that they really depend on the string between cans to be pulled tight, which it obviously isn't here.  Anyway the matter is moot, as the first panel makes it clear that whoever it is Charlie Brown is talking to is standing right off panel, well within earshot.

Tin can telephones have passed into the lore of kid life, as something that children make to amuse themselves, even though I imagine in this age of cell phones and casual texting that this type of playground technology is hardly ever put into practice anymore.  This hasn't stopped the things from soaking into our culture -- an episode of the My Little Pony cartoon (don't laugh) used one in a scene, and that "Kids Next Door" cartoon from some years back used them as an essential communications tool for its weird kind of tree fort tech.

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April 11-16, 1955: Phooey to you Schroeder

April 11

Charlie Brown doesn't have nearly the fixation on D. Crockett as Schroeder does on Beethoven, but his embarrassment makes the strip.

April 12

At first this seems like another joke on the size of C.B.'s head, but really any of the characters could see around that thin tree.  The angry look on Lucy's face is adorable.

April 13

There are a handful of strips that establish that Schroeder isn't simply a child prodigy, but actually has a music career.  Lucy's general apathy towards music makes her choice of crush an odd one; Schroeder doesn't actually have much personality other than his music.

April 14

The first line drive Charlie Brown ever dodged (although it looks more like it bowled him over, dodging is how it's described in later strips).

April 15

This is more of a Lucy kind of strip, but neither her right field position nor her incompetence at baseball have been firmly established yet.

April 16

 For some reason, I can easily imagine one of Thurber's dogs in Snoopy's place here.

April 4-6 & Sunday April 10, 1955

April 4

A bit of simple wordplay, but one could take it to provide a lesson on the difficulty in living up to the divine. If one was disposed that way, that is."Pig-Pen" was the first minor character introduced into Peanuts, and is by far the longest-lived. Although present only in a very small proportion of strips, Schulz obviously found the character more compelling even than later "major" characters like Frieda and Eudora. Unlike the rather bland Eudora however (about the most I can remember about her is that she wore a hat and was a girl), Pig-Pen still has a strong personality, and is almost unique among the Peanuts kids in that he doesn't really seem to have any hangups. Linus is the closest to that blissful state, but even he had the blanket for a while, and the Great Pumpkin too.

 
April 5

A weird hanging question ends this strip. The point is clear -- there is nothing to say what we believe now won't be seen as similarly bizarre to people hundreds of years from now.

 
April 6

I think the Neighborhood League, if such an organization actually exists, should probably reconsider their retaping regulations.This is probably a joke on kids playing with laughably decrepit baseballs, but not having had what one might call a sporting childhood I am unfamiliar with the lore in that area.

 
gocomic's archive is missing strips for the 7th through the 9th of April, 1955. Can anyone tell us what the Fantagraphics collections have for those days?

 
Sunday, April 10

Oh, what a tremendously formative strip. It's not the first time Charlie Brown has expressed a mania for baseball (I think we've had one other strip so far where he's wanted to play while everyone else has gone inside), but this one seems rather more Charlie Browny, especially his expression in panel 7, that's pretty iconic right there.

Sunday, April 3, 1955: Security Snoopy

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Lucy continues her develop into the strip's primary villain.

We haven't had a huge amount of Snoopy/Linus interaction so far.  In coming strips, a major point of contention with them is Linus' blanket, so this strip kind of foreshadows that.

We get that weird look from Linus again in the second panel.  It looks a lot like he's pining for a pacifier.

In the third panel, Linus and Snoopy share a single 'Z' balloon.  I may be wrong, but when two characters are asleep near each other I believe they tend to get separate Zs.  I'm unsure whether I should look for deep meaning in their commonality of snoring, however.

March 27-April 2, 1955: The Martian Chronicles

March 27

 A fairly intriguing sequence this week, continuing the prior spaceman strips.  Schulz gets some good mileage out of halftone shading, a system which I don't think I recall him using much outside of these strips.  Maybe he got given a free sample of halftone transfer sheets or something and figured, in a thrifty midwestern sort of way, that he should at least get some use out of them.

March 28

More halftone language gags.  What sound is Charlie Brown actually producing in these strips?  I like to think it's like radio static, but that's difficult to shout like in the third panel here. 

March 29

 Whatever sounds C.B. is actually making, Lucy seems to be learning to understand it.

March 30

And to translate it!  But this all is simply a throwaway joke for CMS, something to use one week then never refer to ever again.

April 1

 This strip proves that the halftone speech effect is not a representation of distortion provided by the helmet but some sound Charlie Brown was actually making.  Lucy takes the opportunity to rag on C.B.'s round head again.

April 2

 Hey kids, don't try this with a cat!  I love how Schulz leaves the actual rubbing undepicted -- you can tell what happened just from context, Snoopy's fur, and the look on Snoopy's face.

Sunday, March 27, 1955: Bumpety-bump

Read this strip at gocomics.com. 

The best thing about this strip is the lead panels, the two that some newspapers would strip out.  That hilariously cold way Charlie Brown greets Lucy, who immediately shows why he's responding that way.  It's difficult to mistake "fussbudget" for a compliment this time.

Linus' display of skill is typical for him -- almost everything he tries he turns out to be great at.  Imagine Charles Schulz sitting hunched over his desk, thinking of all the ways be can write out the word "bumpety" and "bump."

Imagine him doing that, and imagine him thinking to himself afterwards, "How did I manage to land this wonderful job?"

March 21-26, 1955: What did you expect?

March 21

This is an early version of a later strip in which Lucy complains that she didn't get what she wanted for Christmas, which was "REAL ESTATE."

March 22 

A callback to Charlie Brown's pretending to be a martian earlier.  It's interesting how television aerials were considered to be futuristic back then.  It's very much Jetson-chic.

March 23

This one's mostly an excuse to draw more funny pictures of Snoopy.  And I am not complaining at all.

March 24

Another serif'd word, the "Hey" in Lucy's speech in the first pane.  I wonder what it was that inspired Schulz to use serifs for emphasis.

March 25

This strip is the beginning of the long war between Snoopy and Linus -- to the victor goes the blanket.  Snoopy may hate cats, but he's definitely picked up this maneuver off of one of them.

March 26

But... then what prompted this exchange?  Does Charlie Brown really have that short an attention span?  TV is still young yet, so we can't blame that.

Sunday, March 20, 1955: STOMP STOMP STOMP

1. As Lucy gets angrier, she shifts from speaking in normal letters, to serif'd letters, to thick letters.  That's some temper she's developing there.

2. Schroeder has picked up some additional disdain for Lucy since the occasions around his piano.

3. I think this one is slightly stronger without the two lead-in panels.

4. Scribble of ire!

March 14-19, 1955: ALL RIGHT, THAT'S ENOUGH

March 14

Lucy sticks with this fussbudget thing for a good while.  I don't think she ever gets it into her head that her mother wasn't complimenting her.

March 15

Back in the first fussbudget strip, Charlie Brown seemed like he understood that Lucy's mother was complaining when she called her daughter a fussbudget.  It's not as obvious here if Charlie Brown is in on the joke.  He's either forgotten, or he's exceptionally straight-faced in his sarcasm.  It could really be either -- there are other strips in which Peanuts characters say sarcastic things without breaking expression even slightly.  When I saw the fussbudget strips as a kid, I didn't get that the joke was on Lucy.  (And to this day, I'm not sure on the origins of the word, or even how it's said.  Is it really "fuss-bud-jet"?)

March 16

Snoopy seems awfully pleased about his pink collar.  I dunno, it doesn't seem really like a Snoopy sort of color.  

March 17

Schroeder's mania continues.  His Beethoven fixation is slowing being made an object of fun, which culminates, I think, in his carring around signs informing people as to how many shopping days it is until Beethover's birthday.

March 18

Why is Charlie Brown sighing here?  Should that be coming from Schroeder instead?

March 19

I think this is the first time Lucy really, really rags on Charlie Brown, which of course becomes a common event in the strip.  It's a chase strip, but going by the rather silly and idiosyncratic rules I've made up, not really a turnabout strip.