November 23, 1951: Patty & Violet Team Up

Violet's status as younger than Charlie Brown and Patty seems to have been abandoned. The two are starting to double-team him as well.

Can you believe that, at just over thirteen months of the strip in, we're over halfway through Peanuts' early period already? If you don't believe me, take a sneak peak at the strip that appears one year after this one. In the next year are introduced Lucy and LinuxLinus, and Snoopy starts getting thought balloons.

EDIT: Fixed the link. Thanks Zachary!

November 22, 1951: Starring Patty as the Queen of Hearts

It's the Scribble of RAGE! Grrar!

This seems very much like a Lucy maneuver. This seems a somewhat misogynistic strip, doesn't it? How would we feel about this if it was, say, Shermy who was his opponent?

November 21, 1951: Snoopy likes parties

Does this mean Charlie Brown now definitely owns Snoopy? I'm not sure, because he seems to be treating Snoopy as more of a colleague, an equal, than a pet. He says Snoopy has the biggest appetite of "anyone I know."

Check out Charlie Brown's jacket. It's like a suit version of Patty's dress! That pattern of lines, that continues through the fabric of clothing regardless of body contours or perspective, is not uncommon in comics and probably deserves a post off its own. This one isn't it, though.

Also, look at Patty's cross-legged pose while at the phone. It seems like an ungirlish pose, sure, but it's especially weird because Schulz doesn't cheat on the size of her foot there, and so it comes up to the length of her lower leg. It's a pose that's pretty much impossible in real life.

November 20, 1951: And They Disapprove of Baby Bottles In The Orchestra Pit

Speaking of Schroeder....

Many strips these days aspire to just the crazy stuff from Peanuts, without copying the normal strips in-between. Those strips reset the norm, regrounding the strip's world in reality, which makes it more effective when the strip takes another flight of fancy a few weeks later.

November 19, 1951: Does He Watch the Dog Whisperer?

This marks the point where Snoopy begins to progress beyond just being a generic dog to being something strange and wonderful but, somehow, other. Like when Schroeder turned out to be a musical prodigy and Schulz could make jokes about an infant playing in a concert hall, now we have Snoopy with a TV antenna.

Those jokes are funny because the characters, up to that point, have been represented pretty realistically. Snoopy has always been a dog foremost and Schroeder was a baby before he became a musician. More locally, in the strips immediately preceding this one (and the last one, which also focused on Snoopy's intelligence) we had several strips which were about CB and the girls, depicting fairly normal happenings that could conceivably happen in real life.

As readers became used to the characters in their new roles, to continue to get laughs from them Schulz will have to vary his approach. In Schroeder's case he reins in the unreality a bit and has him play off other characters. In Snoopy's case he goes all-out, making him weirder and weirder. And weirder.

By the way, that third panel is just marvelous. Look at it, the whole joke is contained just in that one panel. It's an excellent sight gag. The panel could really stand on its own, Far Side-like; the other panels serve to accentuate it, but they aren't really needed. (Although Patty's looking back in the fourth panel, eyebrow raised, is pretty cool.)

November 17, 1951: The Smartest Dog Alive

Snoopy hasn't been appearing for a bit lately. His design is subtly different here; he's wider, his body is thicker, he's less puppy-like, and his ears are rounder. His personality also continues to develop.

The problem, or the continuing battle I should say, of drawing a comic strip for years and years is coming up with new expressive ways to draw the characters. If you don't continue to find new ways to have them express themselves then you might as well be using clip-art. The change in the way Snoopy is drawn between the second and third panels is important, to illustrate his increasing pleasure as being complimented. His uplifted tail, his eyebrows and that aura around his head increase the perception of happiness, so the effect is so much greater in the last panel when it comes crashing down.

November 15, 1951: The Girls of Wrath

It's been less than a year since sweet little Violet was introduced, and look at how well she hates Charlie Brown now.

Funny, if Violet and Patty didn't pick up their disdain for CB, then maybe it would have seemed less cruel over time, but probably the strip wouldn't have picked up the depth with which it is remembered for today. Little kids doing funny things day after day is funny, but it's not going to be remembered.

There are plenty of comic strips out there, some as old or even older than Peanuts, where the characters just sort of bumble along amiably. Blondie, Beetle Bailey, Snuffy Smith, Garfield, which characters in those strips really hate each other? Which characters experience unrequited love? These are the aspects of Peanuts which are rarely copied. Everyone instead goes for Snoopy.

I recognize that there may be some selection bias in here. It might not be so much that people don't attempt to attain some of Peanuts' emotional depth, but more that those strips are less likely to be picked up for syndicates who care more about merchandising rights and greeting card sales than complex characters. In a way, part of Schulz's genius is that he was able to get it into papers. If Peanuts had started out the way it would become a few short years later, would Universal Features Syndicate have still bought it?

November 14, 1951: Look familiar?

Well take a look at that! It's basically the familiar pulling-away-the-football gag! Sure, it's Violet and not thunderclap Lucy who's doing it, and the football is dropped instead of yanked away, and the motive is fear rather than sheer, unbridled malice, and Charlie Brown doesn't say "AUUUUGGGHHHH!!!", and it's rendered a little less stylistically than the later annual strips.

But still, there it is.

November 12, 1951: 50 Words or Less

These kinds of essay contests used to be all over the place. There was a woman some time back who managed to support her family entirely on winning contests such as this one, and writing jingles, and the like. There was a book about her, written by a daughter, but I've forgotten the title. (Probably one of you out there remembers it....) Anyway, if such a person could exist, who could win these contests with any kind of consistency, then it implies pretty strongly that there is a certain technique to winning them, maybe a specific type of phrase that resonated with contest judges.

Now, contests are a lot more likely to be about being the person who just happens to draw a winning game piece. A lot less vulnerable to gaming, but entirely uninteresting as "games."

200 posts!

November 9, 1951: Return of the kiddy table

Again, the tiny table and chairs. I like this strip in general actually. It's hard to imagine later Charlie Brown saying something like "Bread isn't worth it."