February 7, 1951:Violet is introduced

Here is the introduction of Violet, another frequent player in the early Peanuts roster.

Patty lasts in the strip longer than Shermy, but is later completely supplanted by "Peppermint" Patty. Schulz and Peanuts states that the Patty characters were both based on the same real-life person, with the second one being closer to her actual personality, although with decades between the characters' heydays it's easy to allow him some leeway in his depiction.

Violet leaves the strip as a major player a little later than Patty (if my memory holds up), but would occasionally show up even in the 90s.

Shout out: Weapon Brown

Weapon Brown (some images potentially NSFW) is an parody indie comic that places the Peanuts characters as grown-ups. Oh, and after the apocalypse.

I ran into Jason Yungbluth, the guy who draws this, at DragonCon last year. He's cool. And he linked to the site, so the least I could do is link back.

February 5, 1951: Sitting at the kids' table

More Snoopy cuteness here.  Here we see him begging and standing in a normal dog-like pose.  Awww.

But the real reason I picked this strip out is the size of Charlie Brown's table.  Not only is it his size, but it looks a little funny in order to squeeze his legs under it and have his arms above it.  Notice that he's pulled a bit away, probably because he can't sit close to it!  Visual puzzles like this must have been a tremendous test for Charles Schulz's ingenuity in the early days.

February 3, 1951: Fight my slaves, I command it

Patty is probably the most girlish girl Charles M. Schulz ever put into Peanuts.  Look at her body language in the first, second and fourth panels.  Here she pines that Shermy and Charlie Brown don't love her, and they stage a mock fight over her to cheer her up.  It works, too.

The fight in the third panel is interesting because the characters speak in order to make the fight seem more severe than it would without the text.  I put this down to insecurity on the part of CMS that his abstract characters could depict motion well.  I notice here that they say "What a battle" and "What a struggle" both in the same panel, which is a little awkward from a writing standpoint.

February 2, 1951: The scribble of shame

Look at Patty in the distance in panel 2.  Would someone only familar with Peanuts' later days recognize her as being a Charles Schulz character?  But the design, as opposed to many other comics of the time, is unquestionably modern; you could probably find a recent illustrated children's book out there somewhere with a character that looks like Original Patty.

Also in this one, we see the cartoon shorthand of showing anger with a word balloon containing a scribble. The scribble of shame.

February 1, 1951: Candy isn't good for dogs

More Snoopy cuteness.  With his tongue in panel two and his head-tilt in panel 3, he's very puppy-like here.  Schulz is known to have said that, once Snoopy developed a personality and began living in his own fantasy world, ordinary dog jokes became progressively less-suitable for him.

Snoopy's design is so winning in the early days that I'm sure there's a market for Classic Peanuts Snoopy toys, in the same way you can get stuff with the original, un-Disneyfied Pooh characters on them.

By the way kids, please do not feed your own dogs candy. Chocolate is really bad for them!

January 30, 1951: Snoopy is named

At last, Snoopy is named!

NOTE: I wrote these some time in advance, scheduled to go up one a day. As has been mentioned in comments several times up to this point, Snoopy has been named before. I got all this wrong. Bleah.

January 29, 1951: How does it handle in traffic?

Another case of adult words put into a kid context here.  Not a bad joke either, I'd say.

Let's take a moment to compare this with the first strip:

It's been around for just under five months at this point, but already the characters show considerable changes.  We're immersed in the early days of the strip so far in this blog, but although there is a winning style in these early strips, it really doesn't last long.  Already the character's eyes have enlarged into ovals, their hair has filled out, the faces are more expressive and the lines are darker.  Character heads are beginning to vertically expand into the near-circles we knew for over forty-five years of the strip's history.

Three years after the strip's debut, the original style will be almost completely gone:

January 27, 1951: Then why is it in the attic?

Referring to the last post, here's one of the dumb kid jokes right on the next day.  (Although Charlie Brown's not really dumb here, I think.  He has a point.) 

January 26, 1951: Viewing them head-on

Sometimes the real humor of a strip comes from a little thing.  Here, the joke would be much less effective if it weren't for two little things: the smile on Charlie Brown's face and the annoyance of Patty, both in the last panel.  Those tip off the reader that the characters know it's a joke, and that it's kind of dumb.  Although the strip does offer a "dumb kids" joke sometimes, more common are these strips where smart kids say something dumb to entertain themselves.

I mentioned last time that the characters look more like their later-day versions when viewed from the side, with only one eye visible, than from head on or three-quarters, when both eyes are visible.  It's due, I think, to the distance between the eyes, which is fairly substantial here, and the way open mouths are depicted, with a vertical line to define the nose and mouth when we shouldn't be seeing one.