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.
Lucy is still flexible enough to be used with her earlier, naive personality. Innocent characters in Peanuts tend to be capable of amazing feats, abilities that they lose as they gain maturity. That explains Linus' various skills, Snoopy's occasional reality-defying flights of fancy, and Lucy's skill at shooting marbles here. Like a guardian angel, this ability protects the character from those who would take advantage.
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.
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.
Lucy believe, if you're losing on one front, just open up another.
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.
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.
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.
Charlie Brown doesn't have nearly the fixation on D. Crockett as Schroeder does on Beethoven, but his embarrassment makes the strip.
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.
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.
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).
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.
For some reason, I can easily imagine one of Thurber's dogs in Snoopy's place here.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Whatever sounds C.B. is actually making, Lucy seems to be learning to understand it.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
