Remainder of AAUGHust 1955

So, my new plan is to do a post every week or two, covering a month.  Not every strip in that month, because there are a lot that are just some wordplay or a minor joke.  But still, a good number.  Here's a few now!

August 14

She certainly "broke," all right.  Lucy continues to develop into the terror we know and love.  This is an excellent strip from the time; it's got good art, and not only does it show the characters' personalities clearly, but it even ends with a good sight gag.  The only weird thing about it is Schroeder saying "Where's the chalk?" in the first panel, which doesn't have a purpose as far as I can see.

August 15

Is that really how a dog says "bow wow?"  This one's linked for containing an extensive Snoopy thought bubble, which are still rare at this time.  It's also the second strip in a row to contain a "good grief," one of Peanuts' particular catchphrases and a favorite of Charlie Brown.

August 16

And this one got selected for showing Linus' increasing blanket mania.

August 17

Poor ol' Charlie Brown.

August 18

1. Snoopy and Linus are a prominent double act in the early years of the strip.
2. Linus' shirt lacks its characteristic stripes here.

August 19

A use of "rats," just about strongest curse a Peanuts character will ever utter.  In any case, we know Snoopy has his day, it's August 4th.

August 20

Presented for laugh value.  The aspect of this strip that elevates it for me is Charlie Brown's warning.  Snoopy's leaps have a lot of character, the design reminds me of the looser, leaner, 60s Snoopy.

August 21

Nice backgrounds in this strip!  I've remarked about them before of course, but this one has a wealth of unnecessary detail.

August 24

This is a good example of a kind of joke that you rarely see outside of Peanuts, taking something we take for granted, extrapolating it in an unexpected direction, and illustrating a reaction.  Also, it gives us an early AAUGHH!

August 25

More serif Zs, and a good ornate question mark above Shermy's head too.  I'm surprised more hasn't been said about Charles Schulz's attention to detail in rendering language.  You art majors out there, I'm sure there's a decent paper in this for you!

August 28

"I thought I heard hoofbeats?"  Wait, what?

A good example of Snoopy as energetic mischief maker, a prominent role for him in this age of the strip.  Also note the looped 'W' in WHAM.  Let's also note, for a moment, Charlie Brown's warning in panel 6, which breaks up the Zooms, gives us an effective comedy beat right before the collision, and makes Snoopy's crash more painful by showing us another character reacting with dismay at it.  While the action of Snoopy running around is entertaining, if you read it while leaving out the sixth and last panels it's just the scene of an accident.  It's Charlie Brown's annoyance that makes the strip funny.

August 29

This is the first time Snoopy has acted out one of his fantasies, an important step in the development of his rich internal life, which would become one of Peanuts' defining characteristics.

August 30

We've seen a reference to Miss Frances, of the nearly-forgotten preschool kids' show Ding Dong School, before.  Interestingly, the Miss Frances Wikipedia page mentions that Peanuts referred to them four times.  This is the second; the other two are in 1956.  It goes to show, Peanuts wasn't afraid to make pop culture references, even from a fairly early point.

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Well, that's a good start towards reviving the blog.  I actually had most of this written two days ago, but Blogger ate the images and some of the text and I had to rebuild it.  The next post should cover all of September, and from there we're going to try to do a month at a time for awhile.  Note these images are not linked to their gocomics versions.  Sorry about that, I just wanted to get the thing up after the hiatus, I'll go back to linking them to the official archive soon.

Let's see, where were we

We left off on August 13, 1955, on a post made October 3, 2012.  We'll probably be looking at more of a weekly schedule now, and trying (once more) not to cover every strip.  There are still plenty of notable ones, but I must maintain some kind of discipline or I'll never finish this, and I'll end up falling off the update schedule again out of hopelessness.

Since the last comic-related post, tragically, my and most of the internet's favorite feed reader, Google Reader, was deemed unimportant by its company and terminated, an act for which I carry a grudge against Google that I am prepared to bear until my dying day.  I expect that most of you who still use RSS have found other solutions by now.  Of course, I am fully prepared to keep the feed going, at least as long as Blogger keeps going, knock on wood amirite?  (glare)

I'll see about making a more substantive post soon, maybe this weekend, and we'll see how it goes from there.  Thanks for keeping us in your reader.

I still exist....

Hey everyone!  I'm sorry I haven't updated this lately, to be honest I'm not quite sure what direction I should take this blog.  I don't think the one-post-a-day thing works out so well, and covering every strip produced a lot of repeating myself.  Any suggestions for a productive way for me to continue this that will be less onerous/more interesting to read?

August 4 is Snoopy Day! What do ya say?

Happy Snoopy day!

August 8-13, 1955: How dare they sully the good name of Crockett?

Sunday, August 7 isn't on the gocomics site.

August 7:

Charlie Brown experiencing this kind of outburst is rare, through the overall history of the strip. This is more the kind of thing the other characters would do, although CB will do it if it regards someone he really admires. Less often Davy Crockett, more often Joe Shlabotnik.

August 8:

Linus hasn't spoken a word to another person yet, but he plays baseball. (Of course, Snoopy never speaks to another person -- or rather, doesn't say things other than "Boo.") Everyone remember Schroeder-the-musician, but Schroeder-the-catcher appears frequently, if less distinctively.

August 9:

Canine prodigies are disconcerting. Sarcastic ones moreso.

August 10:

Yeah Linus, I know how you feel. The blanket hasn't become a big element of the strip yet, but we're getting there.

August 11:

How does Schroeder know about used cars? I like how the kids don't refer to the baby sitters by name, just by their attributes and reputation. It's an impersonal relationship, that between the high school student and her temporary charges. The most legendary babysitter in comics would have to be Calvin's nemesis Rosalyn. It's really difficult to picture a character like her in Peanuts, and not just because she's an adult.

August 12:

Charlie Brown has mostly laughed at this kind of rejection up to now, but this is getting more to his familiar personality from later strips.

Aside:

Since the last post, the comics world took a grevious blow when Richard Thompson, creator of the best modern comic strip going by a wide margin, Cul De Sac, had to lay down his pen due to encroaching Parkinson's Disease. I'm sorry I wasn't about to work in more references to it in these posts; it is wonderful in a way that fans of Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes will find familiar, but still manages to be distinct from both of them in both style and tone. Alice is kind of like Calvin but more realistic and much more random; Petey is like Charlie Brown except much more introverted and nervous. The strip ended just after its fifth birthday, and in far fewer newspapers than you'd expect from its extreme brilliance, but I'm still suffering from a strong sense of deja vu from when C&H closed up shop. Thompson says he's quitting because the disease made it hard to keep up with the strong deadlines of a newspaper strip, so I'm hoping, kind of like Michael J. Fox, that we haven't heard the last from him, or his brilliant creation maybe in some other form.

August 1-6,1955: Boring days in Peanuts-ville

Not a lot to say about most of these strips.

August 1:

Patty and Violet have taunted Charlie Brown with party exclusion before, but now it's starting to look particularly malicious.

August 2:

Not really a lot of joke here, I guess. It does look a little more like Snoops is Charlie Brown's dog, however. I wonder, in the future post-apocalyptic culture-to-come that treats comics as holy texts, if the mystery of Snoopy's early ownership will become fiercely-contested dogma and the subject of vicious crusades?

August 3:

That's a lot of effort Charles Schulz put into that big star on the left. Remember: these panels are blacked-out, so those stars are all made out of negative space.

August 4:

It just occurred to me, we don't see an awful lot of the Peanuts kids hanging out around water throughout the strip. I remember seeing C.B. at the seashore some time back (Patty and Violet mistook his head for a beachball), and there have been several wading pools.

August 5:

I wonder... is that tree back there the same tree, earlier in life, that we would frequently see the kids laying beneath later on?



August 6:

Charlie Brown's attitude in panel 2 is largely my own opinion on riddles. Neither of us would do very well if tasked to win magic rings from slimy cave-dwellers.

 

 

Sunday, July 31, 2012: 1,000 posts!

This strip is a solid point of development towards Snoopy's status as a foil to Charlie Brown. There's a lot of other classic elements in this strip: Charlie Brown's failures as a ball player, Schroeder's role as catcher, Snoopy kind of playing a role as a fielder and his playfulness, and CB's impotent reaction to it at the end.

Notice:

* The short distance between the pitcher's "mound" and home plate, and how Charlie Brown has to throw the ball in an arc to avoid the strip's title.

* Snoopy's cloud of "R"s in panel five.

* The tiny Patty off the field in panel six. There's another tiny figure in the background, but I can't tell who it is.

* Panel nine: "Oh good grief!"

* The vigor and looseness of the entire sequence. I think this is Peanuts art at its height right here.

* Snoopy's smug expression in the last panel. That dog!

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And that's 1,000 posts, I think! (Blogger's numbering might be counting some future posts I have scheduled that haven't appeared yet.) Posts have been slow as of late, and for that I apologize, but it's been some weird times out here. We've got some interesting strips coming up though so it should pick up for a while, hopefully I can keep up the energy through the next thousand.

July 25-30, 1955: Fun is Good Enjoyment

July 25:

Lucy's smile in panel three is an atypical expression for her.

July 26:

Whoop? Although it's difficult to think of a better bit of onomatopoeia to use here. Maybe "whine," but that's not really a sound effect. Maybe "ouch," but Snoopy can't talk. Speaking of which, Snoopy's got another thought balloon here. I think he's finally in the phase where he mostly uses thought bubbles.

July 27:

We've not gotten huge amounts of hate out of Patty and Violet yet, although it's flared up from time to time. Charlie Brown does seem to be giving Violet cause for her outburst here. How about a little personal space, kid?

July 28:

Although Snoopy doesn't talk to the characters, they've never shown themselves (to my knowledge) to have any doubts that Snoopy understands them. Charie Brown's phrase here, "You just aren't much for doing things right, are you?", sounds idiomatic in a midwestern kind of way to me, like something that might have been floating around Schulz's hearing that he thought to call up. But that's just a guess, of course. The drawing of Snoopy running here is very nice, and the next strip shows that it's not the only way Schulz has to draw it. You can imagine pretty well what Snoopy would look like in motion from these.

July 29:

This is a very "Peanuts" kind of punchline, taking something the kids have figured out (regardless of whether it's true or not) and extrapolating it to draw further conclusions. I don't think an awful lot of strips would think to do that.

July 30:

Oooooo! Not only do we not get to get the bug's "house," presumably a hole, we don't even get to see the bug. The hyphens between the Ts in "pret-t-t-y fancy" are a good textual representation of a spoken idiom. (I guess "idiom" is the word of the day.)

Sunday, July 24, 1955: WHEN Will I Ever Learn?!

What appears to be an ordinary gag shows unexpected depths when examined more closely.

What does Snoopy mean by "WHEN will I ever learn?!" At first glance it looks like he's expressing regret that he enjoyed himself too much and, in his excitement, hit the pavement. But look at Patty and Violet's faces: they don't smile, or frown, or act even act surprised the whole time. Even in panel six their expressions are remarkably deadpan. In panels eight and nine their reaction is mostly: "Well, that happened. Lemonade?" Because of this, I propose that Snoopy's thought balloon in the last panel has more to do with disappointment at the lack of concern expressed by the human girls than any regret for going overboard.

Oh, also, this is Snoopy using thought balloons completely in the modern style, with a trail of bubbles as if talking to himself. I don't think it's absolutely the first time it's happened, but up until now, except for one or two early instances, he's either been completely wordless or used word balloons. That marks a major advancement for the strip.

July 18-23, 1955: Pig-Pen Cleaned Up

These strips might be slightly out of order or not match up with their dates due to a problem with my blogging client.

July 18:

Another strip that shows off Linus' genius. Lucy still seems mostly proud of her little brother at this point.

July 19 (?):

Snoopy vs. The Yard: Horseshoes. Not a lot to say. The last panel seems to exist mostly as a way to explain to people what's going on in panel 3, in case they couldn't piece together that a game of horseshoes was being played from the stake.



July 20:

Not an awfully kind for a kid to do to her little brother!

July 21:

This isn't that much better either, but I like Linus' reaction, and how it catches Lucy off-guard. Don't put up with it Linus! Fight the Man! Er, Girl!

Lucy pines away for Schroeder a lot, but you see very few strips, that I remember at least, that hint that Lucy might have a crush on Charlie Brown. Other than all the abuse she's heaped on him over the years, I guess. That might actually be considered a pretty solid hint, now that I think of it.

We barely recognize Pig-Pen either. He kind of looks a bit like Shermy like this.