August 14, 1953: Speech Balloon Typography

I think the real purpose of this strip was just to let Charles Schulz play around with drawing type. This had to have been easier to render than the gothic text he drew for Schroeder's German.

August 13, 1953: Real peppermint

It's surprising how much of the kids' (and Snoopy's) lives revolve around candy. Although we have more of it now, I think, kids today don't seem to fixate on it like the kids in the comic. And later on the kids mention it far less.

To again treat a Peanuts strip as if it is something that could happen in life, I would not think dogs would be fans of hard candy at all, let alone peppermint.

August 11, 1953: Schroeder and Snoopy

I'm at one of those points again where I feel like I need to link every strip. It's because this is such a formative period in Peanuts history. Many of the things we've seen frequently in later strips and compilations got their start in this period.

Here, it's the team of Schroeder and Snoopy. Snoopy works well with many characters, but Schroeder most teams only with him or Lucy. Up to this point we've also seen him and Charlie Brown in the strips where Charlie Brown draws a cartoon, and the two sometimes meet on the pitchers' mound.

It might be interesting to do a statistical analysis of which characters appear with which other ones, in what frequency. I'm not gonna do it, though.

I'm not sure, but this might be the first time we've seen a single 'Z' in a word balloon used to signify sleep. Later on Schulz has some fun with this convention, especially with giant, serif'd Zs.

August 10, 1953: You're a flop, Charlie Brown

In the past I've said that Violet and Patty often double-team against Charlie Brown, and we have seen a little of that. But as of yet (and in the near future) Violet tends to be rather more harsh than Patty. So it's a little surprising here to see Patty give the kid such a through dressing-down.

At least, at this point, Charlie Brown still has some bounce-back in him.

Sunday, August 9, 1953: KRINKLE

I think this is one of the funnier strips, but it's also interesting for the action poses Charlie Brown uses while hiding (although his head seems unnaturally large in the crawling pose).

August 8, 1953: Dogs playing baseball

So Snoopy is playing baseball now?

(Takes off critic's hat, puts it in box.) That's it, I'm done. I accepted Beethoven sponsoring Schroeder, but a dog playing baseball? That's too weird for me.

...

What's that you say? Snoopy has already done things far weirder than that, including moving into a doghouse hotel and erecting a TV antenna on his house. Sigh. If you insist. (Puts hat back on.)

I'm not sure if this is actually the first strip that implies or outright shows Snoopy as a player. It's possible at this point that he's just the team's mascot. In Peanuts' odd context, as Snoopy becomes weirder and more capable it makes increasing sense to use him as a player, although Schulz has fun with the idea for many years to come. (Remember "Peppermint" Patty's reaction? It took her years to figure that one out.)

I'm reminded, perversely, of those loathsome "Air Bud" movies Disney puts out, in which a Labrador Retriever proves to be freakishly capable at various sports. You know the ones, they're part of that long and hateful tradition of animal sports movies. They nearly always have a scene with a flabbergasted ref looking through a rulebook, then saying "There's no rule that says dogs can't play, guh-huck!" Yeah, and there's no rule about murdering your opponents either OMG IMA GENIUS.

Let's have a look at the Wikipedia synopsis for that movie:

After the death of his father, who has died in a plane crash, Josh moves with his family to Washington State and is too shy to try out for his middle school's basketball team and too shy to make any friends. He meets Buddy, a Golden Retriever who had escaped from his cruel owner, an alcoholic clown named Norman Snively, who had locked Buddy in a kennel after causing trouble at a birthday party and was taking him to the dog pound when the kennel fell off the truck. Josh soon learns that Buddy has the uncanny ability to play basketball....

Oh look, the dog plays baseball in the 2002 sequel called time to make the scare quotes "Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch":

Josh is off to his first year of college and Buddy has stayed behind with Josh's little sister, Andrea, and the rest of the family. Andrea, attempting to fit in with her Jr. High classmates, decides to join the baseball team and along the way discovers that Buddy also has the uncanny ability to play baseball. Just as the season is settling in, a terrible discovery is made - Buddy's puppies, have mysteriously started disappearing with the help of kidnappers' little helper, Rocky Raccoon. Turns out the kidnappers' were researchers who were kidnapping Air Bud's pups because they thought they had a special gene that would enable them to play sports.

I bring up these upsetting artifacts of popular culture to illustrate, by way of contrast, how awesome Peanuts really is.

August 7, 1953: This strip blows my mind, Beethoven edition

How is that even possible?

I'll tell you what though. Twisting your brain around so that this strip somehow makes sense in an ordinary way is a fun intellectual exercise in self-derangement.

Maybe Schroeder is sponsored by a local bakery called, for some reason, the "Beeth Oven." Or maybe it's renowned for the cooking of pastry. Pastry that contains beets. Beets, and extraneous H's.

Or maybe Beethoven was foresighted enough to leave a provision in his estate to support the sporting life of young enthusiasts of his work? And the representatives of that estate, to promote their own firm perhaps, decided to demand that the name of their long-deceased sponsor be put upon the jerseys of the beneficiaries.

Or maybe a local music store uses the composer's name as a trademark. Yeah, that seems plausible. And boring.

Has anyone tried saying "Beethoven" three times in a row, to summon his spirit?

There is still more interesting about this strip... apparently, Charlie Brown's barber Dad's shop is called "Family Barber Shop." This (and tomorrow's strip) may be the only time this is mentioned.

Finally, it is possible sometimes to believe that Beethoven Schroeder is a different character than Baseball Schroeder, since the two don't often express the interests of the other. Sometimes Schulz has Schroeder whistle something while walking up to talk to Charlie Brown, but that's infrequent. Here, at least, we have a solid (if silly) point of connection.

August 6, 1953: The weirdness of Patty's dress

Lucy exhibits surprising self-awareness here.  She loses these introspective powers as she comes into her own as neighborhood terror.

It's worth noting, for a moment, the bizarre attributes of Patty's dress. All the girls typically wear skirts in this phase of Peanuts' development. Some time earlier, when a girl bent over Schulz didn't bother to wrap the skirt around the legs. In this strip, however, he cheats Patty's legs and skirt longer as she stoops down to Lucy's height.

Even more interesting, however... look at the cross-hatch pattern on her dress. Does something look odd about it? It's like the cloth is a shaped hole in the paper, revealing the pattern behind it. Due to the small size of the panels on the page, I think the pattern reads better this way than if it were more realistically drawn.

I love it when comic strips do things like this. A contemporary example, to borrow from outside the artform for a moment, is in the Monkey Island series of computer games. Most of them feature a salesman character named Stan who wears a loud checked sportcoat. The pattern on the coat is applied across the folds of cloth in much the same way as the pattern on Patty's dress. This fan drawing on Stan (taken from here) illustrates the effect:

Recently the series made the jump to polygonal, 3D graphics. The pattern on his coat is considered to be such an integral part of the character that the developers went to special trouble to preserve the effect (source page):

August 5, 1953: You gotta get the breaks?

Could someone help me out here? What is Schroeder's meaning here? Does it have to do with a specific way of playing? Does "the breaks" refer to randomly-assigned factors, like say talent, in sayings such as "that's the breaks?"

I think Schulz is almost done with the whole "how does Schroeder play Beethoven on a toy piano" gimmick. When he finds a joke he really likes he isn't afraid to use a few variations or iterations, but he does eventually tire of it.

August 4, 1953: There goes Linus again

Another variation on the theme that Linus is freakishly top-heavy. We've seen a few of these strips, and there are still more to come.