Sunday, November 23, 1952: CTHULHU RISES

Blogger sometimes takes posts I've set to publish and makes them drafts instead, which once in a while results in strips getting overlooked. Sometimes it doesn't matter much, but this strip is incredibly important, so I'm using it even though it's a couple months old by this point:



This seems to be the first act of full-on spite Lucy commits that cannot be explained by familial antipathy or mere childishness. It is an act of pure evil by her, and it's glorious. Look at that little smile on her face in panel six. It's against her favorite punching dummy, too. And Charlie Brown was so happy in the throwaway panels!

We even get that "down on his luck" slanted mouth in the last panel.

Schulz had many, many positive attributes as a cartoonist, but there are a couple of things in these early days he could have used some improvement on. One of them was in varying his phrasing; here, Lucy uses the "slaughter" line twice, which is a bit awkward. This isn't the only strip in which this defect can be seen. As Schulz gains experience writing dialogue I believe these errors eventually go away.

Sunday, February 1, 1953: Lucy is sarcastic

I love Lucy's deadpan remarks in this one.

January 30, 1953: Charlie Brown, Jr.

I've seen this strip about a half-dozen times now, and the thing about it that always strikes me is how much like modern Charlie Brown the doll is in the last panel. I always end up wondering if Charles Schulz edited the strip long after its original publication, because with that hat it's a dead ringer for Charlie Brown in his baseball days.

January 29, 1953: GET OUT OF MY HEAD, TELEVISION

The TV has a point I guess. This is a rare strip in which the source of humor comes from outside the characters. While no adult is seen here, one can only guess that an adult wrote that sign and put it on the air.

By the way, it is not true that Peanuts has never pictured an adult figure! We'll see that for ourselves before very long.

Shermy's hair seems darker here than before.

January 28, 1953: Ah, here we go

This is upping the ante a bit in terms of the violence level of the strip.

January 27, 1953: The beginning of the courtship

Two days later, here's another important Schroeder strip; the first one between the familiar combatants, him and Lucy, on the familiar battlefield, at the piano, and with the familiar tone, Lucy's infatuation. The main thing missing is Schroeder's annoyance.

Schroeder could get very angry at Lucy later on, but so far no character has really gotten very angry at another. The worse we've seen is Violet throwing Charlie Brown out of her house, and so far, more times than not, they forget why she was angry before the end of the strip and invites him back in.

It's the calm before the storm.

Sunday, January 25, 1953: Schroeder at his zenith

This is a good example of a kind of Schroeder strip that never gets seen later on. It does a fine job of illustrating his personality. Schulz here presents the true Schroeder, not some dilettante doodler at the keyboard but a determined artist. In the classic age of the strip Schroeder is by far most often seen as a supporting character, setting off Lucy's monomania or Snoopy's whimsy. Here he trains alone, building himself up to be capable of performing the music he hears in his mind, determined to live up to his vision.

While we might can sympathize with the spurned Lucy's pleas for affection, and his maniacal worship of Beethoven is often played for laughs, Schroeder is generally an admirable character.

January 24, 1952: MEOW

The first hint in the strip of Snoopy's dislike/fear of cats, which would find fullest expression in his battles with World War II, the unseen Cat Next Door with the incredibly destructive claws, a creature of wrath so potent as to nearly rival fell Lucy herself.

January 23, 1953: The chagrimace

Thanks to Sarah Loyd for this name for the diagonal, straight-lined expression Charlie Brown wears in the last panel here, and he and other characters frequently use around this time. Aditya came up with the other good name, a "dashed" expression, which, while also a pun, doesn't seem to be quite as good. Sorry Aditya. :\

January 22, 1953: Schroeder signs the fence

These days, the ubiquity of computers has give us the cut-and-paste comic strip. That is why we still have (although we really don't need it) B.C., although Johnny Hart died years ago now, the syndicate has a database of all the characters in a variety of poses, and can now just throw together a strip in a paint program. It's just another way that newspaper comics have come to suck as of late.

Peanuts, although its streamlined, iconic look might make one think it to be one of the few strips that could be conceivably improved by such a process, to my knowledge never used it. Thus, when you see a complex bit of art in multiple panels, such as Charlie Brown's signature here, you can be pretty sure Charles Schulz drew it the same way multiple times. It is fun to play spot the differences in those cases: the 'r' in Charlie is a little wider in the second panel and extents further below the 'l', the 'e' at the end has a slightly larger loop, the 'o' is crossed by the board seam at the right place, but the second dip of the 'w' in Brown is smaller....