Sunday, June 8, 1952: Someone get that kid a helmet

Now imagine this kid pitching a baseball. At YOU.

June 7, 1952: Violet has mood swings

Violet is one of the more generic Peanuts characters in the classic era, but in the early period she seems to be purposely more moody than her counterpart Patty. This is not the first time a joke like this has been used for her, and it won't be the last either.

June 6, 1952: The dangers of accepting random bugs

Kind of an anti-climatic last panel here. Most of the joke, to me, comes from the idea that Lucy just thought Charlie Brown would want a bug at all. Later on, she takes to stomping such insects with exaggerated force.

June 5, 1952: Standing on one foot

Lucy's monomania is developing in this strip, but I link it mostly because you get a really good look at her clothes in this one.

Lucy wore two primary outfits that I know of in Peanuts' run. This shows her earlier outfit and the one she wore during most of the classic period, a slightly formal number with a bow in the back, and colored blue on Sundays. Here the skirt is fairly normal, later on it would become highly stylized and stick out almost at right angles to her body. In later years, probably as a nod to changing fashions, Schulz would adopt a kind of jumpsuit for her attire, which made her look vaguely more athletic.

She still has the round eyes here. I never get tired of pointing them out. They won't be here much longer. When Linus shows up, which is in a month or two I think, he has the same eye style as Lucy but from the start he has her parenthesis, or "Binkley," eyes.

June 2, 1952: Sore Winner

I imagine that Puerto Rico would drive the poor girl insane.

Sunday, June 1, 1952: Don't let him bluff you!

This is one of my favorite Peanuts strips of all. It's just really funny. I've related this one from memory to people on several occasions. Artistically it's pretty good too, the characters don't look like disassociated images that don't relate to each other except by proximity here, which I think is a problem sometimes with Peanuts. Look at Snoopy jumping up on Charlie Brown, and the two running around the tree. I think this is Peanut's first really great Sunday strip. It all works extremely well here. Schulz must have been pleased with it himself, I think, and yet in the cartooning biz there is no time to bask in the glow of a well-made strip; it's always, immediately, on to the next one.

Notice Snoopy gets a thought balloon here containing English words (his second ever), but it isn't the traditional style. It has a tail here. Snoopy's reaction is priceless. "Can this be true?"

And in terms of construction this is also an excellent strip. It's one of the first Sunday strips which tells a complete story instead of a collage of related jokes. Notice how Charlie Brown and Snoopy's positions have become Patty and Charlie Brown's, respectively, in the last panel.

May 31, 1952: I RIDE YOUR TRICYCLE

There is just something very blatant about Patty's commandeering of Charlie Brown's tricycle. He loves his trike and pleads about how he was looking forward to tooling it around, but to no avail. She rides off, the look on her face indicating that she spares not a thought about CB's opinion. She feels no shame, and neither does she feel vicious pleasure. It is a tricycle; Patty likes riding tricycles; anything standing in her way, then, of riding the tricycle is an obstacle to be overcome.

This is really more of a Lucy move, but she has yet to come fully into her infernal powers.

May 28 & 29, 1952: Two strips about baseball

In the first of these two strips Charlie Brown is catcher and Shermy is (I assume) pitcher, but the curse of CB's team is already beginning to take hold. The other strip is the first record I've noticed that CB's team usually loses, and the first time he's noticeably upset by this.

May 30, 1952: Pride in ownership

Schroeder has expressed fewer words in the strip than Snoopy at this point, and yet he has money to pay off his piano. Hm, and somehow he was able to buy it on installment in the first place.

May 27, 1952: A new voice is (not) heard in the land

Snoopy gets his first thought balloon that contains English words.

This must have been a hard decision for Schulz. It isn't just that Snoopy is the dog character, it's that, until now, we never found out what he was actually thinking. We usually found out through his pantomime actions: laughing, angry looks, dancing, and so on. Having a character like that can be useful from a joke-writing standpoint. Now, he can just directly tell us, and so if he doesn't the joke doesn't quite work.

And yet, it is obviously a good choice for the character. If we weren't told what's happening inside Snoopy's head, then his later imagination sequences would become a lot weirder. That is to say, his thought balloons are what make those strips comprehensible, and this possible. Those flights of fancy are one of the most distinguishing and fondly remembered aspects of Peanuts. That put this strip here among the most important ones in the entire sequence.