May 29-June 4, 1955: Ol' Aerial Ears

On gocomics.com's archive, this sequence begins here.

Sunday, May 29

I should certainly say Lucy drives Charlie Brown crazy. She has caused him to hallucinate his kite string turning into a heavy anchor chain! It's not like we can believe that was one of the "few things" Lucy had. The question remains how Charlie Brown was able to run that chain up high enough into the air so that it could ground the kite with such a resounding CLANK, not to mention how Lucy brought it to him in the-- you know what, skip it.

May 30

Pinky Lee was the star of a children's TV show in 1954 and 1955. His catchphrase was "You make me so mad!" The Wikipedia page on him notes that he collapsed on-air later in 1955, which the audience of children had assumed was part of his goofy act. This basically ended Pinky's role on the show, although contrary to rumors at the time he didn't die until 1993.

June 1

By my reckoning, this is the first time Linus has ever had an attack due to the absense of his blanket. Lucy's attitude towards her brother's flannel dependence varies from warmly supportive to fierce antagonism.

June 2

At least he didn't say Beethoven!

June 3

I spoke too soon. Good grief!

June 4

He still COULD have licket Crockett, he just had something else to do.

June 5

Snoopy powers demonstrated: prehensile ears & improved auditory reception.

 

May 22-28, 1955: Scenes from an Illustrated Childhood

Sunday, May 22

These old Sunday strips show off just what Schulz was capable of when his drawing hand was at its best. Just look at all that. In panel 6 Charlie Brown is leaping a barbed wire fence, and those cans in panel 9 can't exactly be safe to wade through either.

These strips show us a kind of iconic, idealized version of the world of kids that largely doesn't exist anymore, one made up of unfenced backyards, vacant lots, junkyards, back alleys and broken fences.

May 23

Lucy doesn't have many weaknesses, or at least ones that she'll admit to, but rollerskates are one of them.

May 24

The Peanuts characters are accident-prone.

May 25

Shades of Calvin and his bicycle here. And a scribble of ire!

A character displaying affection, love, tolerance, pleasure, joy? These things are not funny. Conan! What is funny in life?

May 26

Lucy turns into quite the feminist later on, this attitude turns out to be fairly atypical of her.

May 27

It's possible to miss it if you just glance at the strip, but the joke here is that Lucy is missing one skate, which is the one that Snoopy's riding.

May 28

Violet and her mud pies again. Old habits die hard. Y'know, I don't remember if we've ever seen any of the Peanuts kids eat one of those mud pies. I'd assume that they're just playing, but that look of distaste on Charlie Brown's face implies that he at least has considered eating one of the things. I guess kids had stronger immune systems back then.

May 16-17, 19-20, 1955: Lucy and the Clover

(Skipped this time out are a couple of minor baseball gags. My blogging client seems to be displaying these locally at low resolution, so I don't know if they'll turn out unreadable when published.)

May 16

Charlie Brown and Lucy make a good team act. Charlie Brown tends to know things, but isn't strong-willed enough to express them with certainty. Lucy is headstrong but ignorant.

May 17

Shades of the much-anthologized instance where Lucy hands Charlie Brown a list of his faults.

May 19

Back to that four-leaf clover. How would one tell if one was luckier, really? One doesn't get killed in a car crash? Wouldn't it be luckier not to have crashed to begin with?

May 20

Charlie Brown's pose in the last panel is not the kind of thing he'd be seen doing in later years of the strip. There's still something of the old, more confident Charlie Brown still around.

 

Sunday, May 15, 1955: Linus takes out his frustrations

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This calls forward to Charlie Brown's dismayed reaction at the end of A Charlie Brown Christmas. BTW, if when you watch that cartoon, after Charlie Brown walks off-screen, you immediately change the channel and pretend the show ended there, the outcome is a lot more realistic and also more in keeping with the general tone of Peanuts.

I think this strip is slightly stronger with the lead panels, as then there's a nice rule-of-threes progression up to the toy's deflation.

Cute determined expressions on Linus' face throughout here.

May 9-14, 1955: That's the way it goes

Note: Although this is still solidly Peanuts' classic period, there are sometimes strips of which there isn't much interesting to say. It has never been the aim of this blog to cover every Peanuts strip, just the most interesting ones. This doesn't matter for this post, but in the future I will start skipping over uninteresting strips again. This is so that A. I don't spend the rest of my life maintaining this blog, and B. because legally, we'd be on more unsteady ground if we ended up effectively mirroring gocomics' entire archive.

May 8, 1955, a Sunday strip, is missing from gocomics' archives.

May 9

I like the injection of a little horror into Peanuts' gag-a-day world. Would we be creeped out by mailman-shaped dog biscuits? I don't know what it is about serif lettering, such as used in Snoopy's "SHUDDER!," but Schulz uses it a lot in this stage of the strip.

May 10

This is a very interesting strip. Who decided who plays what? We're left to assume it's Patty. Keep in mind, this is still solidly the 50s we're in, so we're probably left to assume that queer readings of this strip are unintended.

In any event, it probably doesn't matter much to their game who is who. I'm surprised one of 'em isn't Davy Crockett or some such.

May 11

More marbles. Decades from now, when the game of marbles has long vanished from the strip, I like to think of its legacy living on in the name of one of Snoopy's brothers, Marbles.

Cats will regularly do this at any excuse, and sometimes even without one.

May 12

We aren't privy to what Charlie Brown and Violet are arguing about. Actually, we don't know whatever it is is in the newspaper at all -- C.B. is holding a book.

May 13

Once you wind Schroeder up, it takes a while for him to run down. It must be nice to be able to lose one's self in a memory like that.

May 14

Even Snoopy's vaunted candy-detection abilities have their limits. Serif Z! Also, a serif'd "sigh," in lowercase.

May 2-7, 1955: Lucy the Environmentalist

May 2

We could take a bad message away from here if we were to relate Lucy's silly concerns with those of the then-nascient environmental movement. Lucy's had enough weird notions in that head of hers from previous strips, however, that I find it possible to ignore that reading.

May 3

This is Peanuts' first "full" story, consuming every weekday strip for the week. The whole thing is her imposing her concerns upon her friends. I note that the only value judgement made by any of the cast members on her concerns is made here, by Charlie Brown. All of the other reacting characters wear Peanuts Expression #24, "blank observation." Her face in the first panel is vividly rendered. ("Good grief" sighting.)

May 4

It's easy not to notice that Pig-Pen is in this strip, but without his trademark dust cloud, perhaps because it would confuse the gag of the strip.

May 5

This strip and the previous this one are the same general joke, and they have exactly the same punchline. It feels like Schulz is padding out the story here.

May 6

It's not just that Lucy believes her friends are eroding the Earth, it's that she's vividly imagined it as becoming the size of a basketball, an image worthy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

May 7

This isn't the first time Lucy has responded to a direct refutation of her beliefs with a non-sequitur counterattack. Lucy's not the sort to waste too much time on introspection.

Comic images from gocomics.com.

 

EXTRA: Charlie Bro

Via Progressive Ruin, from an entertaining post on Rubber Cat Productions.

Take the drawing of Charlie Brown on the cover of the first Fantagraphics Peanuts collection and turn it upside down. Presto:

It takes a second for your brain to adjust to the new mouth and eyebrows, but then he turns from an upset young boy into an insufferably smug, big-chinned guy with a goatee. IT'S CHARLIE BRO.

May 1, 1955: Silly Snoopy, rope-jumping is for kids

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

A wonderful strip, mostly for the expressions on Snoopy's face. It's a difficult strip to visualize in motion though. Schulz is depicting the dog jumping rope as a (soon to be) standard Snoopydance, but it looks like he's skipping in a lot of little hops, if his hind feet are technically leaving the ground at all.

I think the strip works a little better with the lead-up panels giving Snoopy's enthusiams a little time to warm up, rather than just having him jump in after watching Lucy for a single frame.

 

April 25-30, 1955: I'm Well Read

April 25

At least it wouldn't all melt before she could eat it. The word "Boy" in the third panel is both serif'd and contains lowercase letters.

April 26

Once in a while Schroeder says something that indicates there's a slight change he could end up reciprocating Lucy's crush someday. It's quite rare, but it happens once in a while.

April 27

As has been remarked in the comments before, there really aren't a lot of Pig-Pen strips when measured as a percentage of all the Peanuts strips Schulz draw. He's fairly common in this period though.

April 28

Somewhat uncharacteristically, Pig-Pen gets angry at the way people refer to him here. It's a bit difficult, through all the grime, to read his expressions of ire. I'm not quite sure I get this strip though -- I sense there's something about it, maybe some context from the time, that I'm missing. I'm not actually sure the girls are judging his appearance, although if they're not then why would Schulz use Pig-Pen here?

April 29

I think Schulz spelled it "SKWEEK" in the third panel just to mix things up a bit. We get another funny drawing of Snoopy here, who is already the most plastic of the Peanuts characters.

April 30

My favorite thing about this strip is the slight irregularity in Snoopy's jaw in the third panel, indicating Snoopy chewing. Lucy's mouth seems to be missing in the first panel.

 

Sunday, April 24, 1955: Of course we're playing for 'keeps!'

 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.