January 19, 1951: Give him some Prozac

There's a strong New Yorker-cartoon vibe to this one, with kids throwing around psychiatry terms. In the end it turns out to be nothing... or is it?  Surely there must be something wrong with a kid who purosely wears over-tight shows all day without taking them off....  Well, maybe he's breaking them in.

January 15, 1951: No wonder they hate Charlie Brown later

Another CB-and-Patty exchange here.  Boy, wasn't Charlie Brown something of a smart aleck back then? Maybe his later troubles are a result of negative karma build up during the first couple of years.

I think even the shaggy dog jokes from this era are saved, though, by Schulz's winning art style.  Look at Patty's "angry look" there.  So much emotion conveyed with a simple angry eyebrow and a balled fist.

January 11, 1951: The chair recognizes Patty

Revealed!  The secret origin of all those Peppermint Patty in school strips in the later days!  (No relation to the original Patty, of course.)  This is a pretty topical strip even today.  It's not hard to see one of the better modern strips using this joke.

Site news: Metafilter link, other things

Metafilter linked to the blog yesterday. Thanks for the promotion from Projects, KokuRyu!

Peter From Japan (from comments): I've switched the feed over to Full.

Issac (from comments): I think I will add a "depressing" category, thanks for the idea. Such a flag seems uniquely suited to Peanuts, although not so much in the early strips we're in now.

January 10, 1951: The chase is on

Another example of the last-panel turnabout joke, this time involving a chase.  Be warned: a lot of these are coming up.  It's funny how this joke, about "being hot" would be considered flirtatious today.  I like the exclamation point above Patty's head in the third panel, a way to show surprise without having it register on the character's face.

The punchline from Charlie Brown, "I get my laughs," is rather meta.  The formula on this style of joke is pretty strict, and the ultimate humor relies on coming up with something for the joking character to say in reference to his motive in the last panel.  Schulz used them enough that he must have had a hard time coming up with fresh punchlines for these sequences.

January 5, 1951: Loyalty, indeed

Another example of female violence.  I have to wonder to what extent Schulz was influenced by James Thurber....

What I like about this strip is the disconnect between Patty's opinion of Charlie Brown (the kid) and Charlie Brown (the name).  At least CB isn't too broken up about it.

January 4, 1951: Dad's not a boxer

Another example of the problem of what to do with the characters as they tell a verbal joke.  The joke itself, by the way, is a rather good one, turning on its end the "My dad can lick your dad" schoolyard argument.  At the end though, Schulz makes sure we know they don't hate their fathers.  For all the hostility these kids can display towards each other, Schulz's basic humanism somehow shines forth.  What a complicated man.

January 3, 1951: Why you little!

This is the beginning of a particular strip formula that would be used a lot in these months, especially between Charlie Brown and Patty.  The first three frames present either a bad joke or one that insults one of the parties, and the fourth shows the non-joking character's reaction, usually in the form of the joking character knocked down but still mirthful, or being chased.  We'll see this pattern so many times in the upcoming strips that I should think of a name for it.

"Turnabout" strips are the best I've come up with, referring to the sudden, undepicted change of attitude between the third and fourth panels.  The punch from the formula comes from the sudden break between the last two panels.  Notice that Patty hasn't changed expression between the second and third panel of this strip, and we only see the result of her wrath in the fourth.

It's fairly amazing, really, that with all the hostility the Peanuts characters are capable of showing for each other, so much of it is understated or not shown.  It wasn't until crash of thunder Lucy showed up that a character could commonly get away with much wrath depicted directly on the page.

EDIT: fixed formatting.

December 29, 1950: What were they doing?

I like the look on Snoopy's face here, resenting Charlie Brown's intrusion on his and Patty's private time.  But what were they doing?  Was Patty reading to Snoopy?  The current-day, South Park-informed joke to make here, of course, is to suggest some naughty activity they were engaged in.


I will resist these implications with every fiber of my being.

December 27, 1950: They grow up so fast

One source of jokes in early Peanuts is in puncturing the premise.  Children behaving like adults, right up to the moment in which they suddenly don't.

Look at Shermy's expressions and body language as he goes through panels two through four.  Angry in three, pleading in four.  They're a little exaggerated, but on purpose since they can't move on the page.  It's not as easy as you might think to come up with good poses for characters as they play their roles!  It's one of those little things that cartoonists have to do to give their characters life.