Saturday, October 10, 2009

December 10, 1951: Revolutionary

Peanuts

This one seems kind of pointless until you recognize it as a U.S. Revolutionary War slogan.

(If you were confused about the comment on yesterday's post, the wrong strip got linked. It's been fixed now.)

Friday, October 9, 2009

December 7, 1951: That's going to make a mess

Peanuts

It's the first time anyone in the strip has played hockey, which is one of those pasttimes Snoopy and Woodstock engage in later on.

EDIT: The strip from the day before was showing up. Fixed.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

December 4, 1951: Dog At The Wheel

Peanuts

This one's funny too.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

December 3, 1951: Beware the Wrath of the Irate Prodigy

Peanuts

This is just a funny cartoon. Go, Schroeder!

The marks in the last panel used to show dazedness are interesting. A question mark, two stars, a dizzy spiral and motion lines. It actually seems a little overstated, now that I look closely at it.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

December 1, 1951: Pork Chops vs. Stew

Peanuts

Not really a lot to talk about here, except for the ground in the third panel which is, unusually, blocked in solid black. Notice that you can only tell the outlines of Charlie Brown's pants there because of the incomplete shading applied to them at the edges.

Monday, October 5, 2009

November 30, 1951: However....

Peanuts

This strip is a kind of mirror of the first Peanuts strip, in which Shermy, in panel 3, said "Good ol' Charlie Brown" right before adding "Oh, how I hate him!"

Funny, lots of later retrospectives of Peanuts make it a point to show that first strip, but then skip over the first couple of years, the ones we're going through now. That first strip, though in the original art style,

If you pay attention, this strip marks a slight change to the characters. They've been changing slowly this whole time of course, but they're subtly taller here than before, or so it seems to my eye anyway. It might just be because they're sitting down in all the panels; usually Schulz has to cheat a little when characters are shown sitting, since the lengths of their arms and legs make it difficult to show them bending cleanly.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Noveber 29, 1951: Comic books!

Peanuts

The kids' love of comic books is a staple of the early years of the strip. Part of this may be due to the fact that Universal Features Syndicate published comic books in those days, in which many of their newspaper strip characters, including the kids of Peanuts, would feature. I saw an issue of their classic title Tip Top on a dealer's shelf while at DragonCon a couple of weeks ago. It was selling for around $200 dollars, if I remember correctly.

Noteworthy is the fact that, as the decades rolled by and comic books lost their prominent place in kid culture, that nothing really moved in to replace them, except perhaps television. (As we've seen, in the earliest Peanuts strips the kids listened to radio instead of sitting watching TV.) Since then there's been rock music, action movies and video games, but the kids never really caught on to those things. One can only speculate what Schulz thought about those strange advents.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

November 26, 1951: Some Advice: Before Hiding, Make Sure You're Playing

Peanuts

How do mistakes like this even happen?

Check out the halftone in the second panel. You don't see that a whole lot in Peanuts.

Friday, October 2, 2009

November 25, 1951: Let Play the Fanfare

Peanuts

It's the first appearance of Schroeder's famous bust of Beethoven! Also, the first time he's said "Beethoven." It's fun to say Beethoven. Beethoven!

Technically that bust breaks the rules about depicting adult figures, but it is just a knickknack, and it's nice to see that Charles Schulz could render realistic faces too. There's so much character in that face. I think half the humor in this one comes from the different art style used to render that bust.

It seems to me that, over time, the characters get bigger. I think it comes from the slightly more mature proportions and the decreasing thickness of the lines. There's usually nothing to compare scale with other than the other characters, but Schroeder's piano and Beethoven bust give us something to judge scale by. Here the bust is bigger than the piano, and juts out over the top. Lucy wouldn't have any room to lean here. Later on the bust fits entirely on the piano, implying that either the bust is smaller or the piano is bigger.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

November 24, 1951: Cute, Too

Peanuts

Rather a strange thing for Charlie Brown to be jealous about. The exclamation point over Snoop's head is a nice touch.