February 22, 1954: The sun is a mass of incandescent gas

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

We're here on the ground floor of another emerging Peanuts story theme, Lucy's willful ignorance.  She's come a long way from her doll-like, third-person-referring, self-pitying ("Poor Lucy") early personality.  Her mistaken knowledge of the universe, and her spreading that knowledge to Linus, is an upcoming cause of Charlie Brown's stomachaches.

The way the path behind Charlie Brown, in the first panel, curves up only to disappear is strange when you notice it.  I think it's being represented as disappearing over a hill and Schulz didn't draw the horizon.  My guess is, drawing the horizon line would connect the two characters visually, subconsciously connecting them when the whole theme of the strip is disconnection.

Lucy's pose in the second panel is great.  She puts a lot of energy into her mockery.

Ho ho ho!

February 18, 1954: Lucy's quest

Read this strip over at gocomics.com.

Charlie Brown's patience with Lucy over her misguided project begins to wear down here.

February 20, 1954: Violet's short attention span

Read this strip at gocomics.com.


Violet throws Charlie Brown out rather often.  She forgets why she was mad at him fairly often too.

February 18, 1954: Baby Linus has a lot of energy

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Schulz uses a few different styles of large-form lettering, and we can see them all here in close proximity.  We find outlined and filled in examples of:

serif:

serif-ed

sharp-cornered (in the M)

square-cornered

rounded simulated pen strokes 1

rounded simulated pen strokes2

February 8-12, 14, 1954: The missing strips are back

The strips I mentioned yesterday as having been missing are back, so let's have a look at them.

February 9, 1954:

A nice inversion of the usual way these Schroeder vs. Charlie Brown strips go, with Schroeder proving to be the one who annoys Charlie Brown.  One of Schulz's particular observational gifts appears to be being able to see all sides of a situation.  No character is wholly admirable or horrible.

Scribble of ire!

February 10, 1954:

Snoopy vs., not the yard, but the living room.  Panel two is weird; it seems obvious that Snoopy is trying to pick the top up, but it's not something we often see Snoopy do.  Panel three isn't immediately readable, but thinking about it I think Snoopy is being pushed away by the top's rotational force.

 February 11, 1954:

Charlie Brown returns to the idea of perfection.  At first he thought he was perfect.  Now he aspires to perfection.  Soon he'll realize his faults (and those he doesn't see Lucy will be happy to point out) and despair of ever overcoming them.  Isn't this how it goes in real life?  There is no truth more clearly and bitterly seen than that which comes from disappointing disillusionment.

February 12, 1954:

Fence gags aren't common in Peanuts, but for some reason Schulz decided now was a good time for one.  There's another coming soon, with Patty and Lucy.

Sunday, February 14, 1954:

Lucy counting the stars.  This is the first one where she seems to be serious about it.  Interestingly here, the sky is not represented as solid black; instead the grass in the background is solid.  You can only really tell it's night from the characters' words and the moon hanging in the sky.

February 13, 15, 16 and 17, 1954: Lucy, Patty and Violet

The strips for February 9-12, and the 14th, are currently missing from Universal's website.  We'll skip those for about a week, then will probably try to get them from another source.

February 13, 1954:

Lucy seems to be exhibiting problems with her indoor voice.  When she's shouting, notice the post of dismay Violet is wearing.  But Lucy doesn't have "angry eyebrows" in any of these panels.
Sometimes Charles Schulz will draw a doll in one of the panels, and I'm always amazed by the effort that goes into them.  Like I said about the last strip, showing a character small isn't really like just drawing it at a smaller scale.  The doll here shows so much attention to detail looks like it could well have been a new character.

February 15, 1954:

 Here is what I meant by "angry eyebrows."
I assume this is before class started, or else I'd think Violet's outburst would cause a disruption.
The change in Charlie Brown's poses from panels 2 to 3, and from 3 to 4, are strange.  He goes from happy, to flinching like he's about to be hit, to a kind of casual leaning back.  Violet is still pretty angry in the last panel though.
For some reason my attention is drawn to Violet's exclamation in the third panel.  It doesn't have an exclamation point, and it has an apostrophe noting the removal of the "e" in "the."
This is not the first strip that shows characters in a school setting, but it might be the second.

February 16, 1954:

This is classic Lucy, and helps to show what a terror she's developing into.  Although there's no spite shown on her face it's difficult to avoid assuming some.  We also get a somersault here, although it's not the side-view one we usually get later.

February 17, 1954:

The question presented by this strip is, is Patty's long pause her intended to be hers, or are we just sort of seeing Charlie Brown's mental state illustrated?  The latter is a bit of a stretch, so I believe it's the former.
Note Charlie Brown's expression in the last panel is not a chagrimace.  It's more like a frown.

META: "This comic is currently unavailable"

Dammit gocomics and Google.




Concerning gocomics:

It seems that a number of strips, including the ones I was just coming up on, currently display graphics stating "This comic is currently unavailable check back soon."  At this time this includes comics for Fabruary 9-12, 1954, as well as the 14th, the 18th, the 20th and the 22nd.  There may be others too.


In fact, the paragraph I just gave you us slightly out of date.  That was yesterday, which I couldn't post because Blogger was down.  Now the strips in question don't even show the error image.  Just navigation elements.  See for yourself.

I think I know why.  When I was looking through these strips before, I noticed that a few of them had been poorly cropped.  Specifically, there were three or four strips in the same image,  I seem to remember noticing they were like that back at comics.com.

I was all set to remark upon the problem when I got up to it, but what do you know, they seem to have found it just about the moment I got up to them.  I wonder if anyone at Universal reads this blog?  A pleasing, and yet unsettling, thought.

I'm going to hold off on discussing those strips to see how quickly gocomics fixes the problem.  (I could get them from Other Sources, but let's give them a week to fix it themselves, it's not like it should be a particularly hard thing to correct.)  There are some interesting strips affected so I'm loathe to skip them for long.

Concerning Blogger:

You'd think that Google themselves would know something about site reliability, but geez.  Blogger was down all of yesterday, and there was a worry that some posts would be lost.  That doesn't seem to have happened, at least in my case, but the outtage is the reason there was no post yesterday.

February 8, 1954: Lucy is Loud

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Lucy's not been an overly loud character so far, but the sheer size of her voice becomes a distinctive feature in the coming years.  (But not before another character becomes known for it....)

This strip depicts Lucy in four different sizes.  One of the interesting things about comic strip art, I think, is that it is almost always depicted in set sizes.  Considering how fluid is the medium, it seems weird that characters are always produced at the same sizes each week.

There is at least one good reason for this.  Comic characters are drawn using pen lines, and those have set thicknesses.  If you reproduce a comic character, especially a black-and-white one, at a larger size but without using a thicker line, they tend to look a little funny, like they're "lighter" than they should be.  The opposite happens if you draw a character smaller but use the same size line.  And comic artists, who must be able to precisely reproduce characters, probably have concerns about their ability to do that with different thicknesses of pen.

If you draw the character at its usual size and just resize it using printing equipment, however, it will stick out if it shares a frame with other objects drawn at normal size.

The solution, as Schulz demonstrates here, is to redesign the character at different sizes, simplifying it the smaller it's drawn.  Lucy gets less detailed the further away she gets from the viewer.

Sunday, February 7, 1954: The nerve-wracking sled ride

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

In an unusual inversion from the norm in later strips, here it's Charlie Brown's imagination that's active and Snoopy is the realist.  I can't help but think Charlie Brown realizes his little sled ride's kind of pathetic; otherwise why would he talk it up with exclamations like "Down! Down! Down!" or "Racing like the wind..."

The chain he's using to hang onto the sled is a nice touch, as is the care Schulz uses to draw the sled.  It's very well-rendered!

The lead panels, which can be kept or left off of a strip at the newspaper's option, are a continual problem with Peanuts' storytelling.  Schulz has to write each strip so that it works either with or without those panels, which sometimes messes with his timing.  Here he presents what is probably a little too much lead-in, which slightly damages the joke.

EDIT: As Sarah Loyd rightly noticed, Snoopy is sporting a chagrimace in the next-to-last panel.

February 6, 1954: You know the thing I like best in the world? CAUSTIC SODA

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

There is spite, and there is this.  There's something almost affectionate about holding an entire party specifically to focus on something a particular, pointedly-uninvited person likes, although it's rather a lot of trouble to go through.  I can't help but think that the result would be rather a slapdash affair.  Why would you do otherwise, when the "guest of honor" won't even be there?