Overthinking a plate of peanuts (which are a kind of bean)
A selective trip through all of Charles Schulz's classic comic strip. Updates daily.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
Last Sunday Charlie Brown's kite contributed to a more general neighborhood chaos. This time a statement is definitely being made about his kite-flying skills. We don't yet know if it's an aspect of his character that sticks or if was just intended to be a one-off joke. Probably the latter.
Besides some cute drawings of Snoopy and the very dense hatching of early Peanuts rain, not really a lot of interest here. We do see a character involved in a paper route for the first time, I guess that's notable.
The abuse from Violet gets harsher as time goes by, but at least it's direct. Lucy is more a get-under-your-skin kind of tormentor.
I looked up Miss Frances; she was the host of a then-famous TV program for children called Ding Dong School. The Wikipedia page for her says that she was mentioned in exactly four Peanuts strips, this being the first. It is something of a shame that she's so obscure today, a relic from the early days of TV. She died in 2003. You can watch an episode of her show if you have access to that relic of the early days of the Web, RealPlayer. Or, here's an episode from YouTube, in three parts, starting here. Part 2. Part 3. There seems to be at least one more episode on YouTube. Dig that organ music!
It's a bit shocking how short-lived memory of TV programming can be. Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo, both deceased shows that date back to the early days of TV, are also receding into obscurity, and I've actually seen those while they were airing.
Being right means more to Charlie Brown than being in pain. Notice the use of the parenthesis around his eyes. This is evolving into a standard way to express focus. Of course Lucy and Linus have those parenthesis as part of their neutral expression.
Snoopy has the advantage of having a lot more face over which to stretch his mouth. (His smile may not look too much bigger than Charlie Brown's here, but you're forgetting he has a whole other side to his head over which to pull that grin.)
Most of the time (eventually) Charlie Brown reacts to Lucy's naive approach to astronomy with a sigh, a headache, or a weary "I can't stand it." Here, he participates.
A fairly clever strip, and one that relies on the visual nature of the medium. I suppose kids today would wonder why he spells "for" here as "four" instead of the obviously correct rendering, "4". Ha ha, but I kid kids today.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
This isn't the first time Charlie Brown has flown a kite, I think. It doesn't count as the beginning of the kite-flying-failure aspect of his character either, since all of the characters are holding (or jumping, or are tied to) some piece of string, and two are actually running with them.
Also different are the character's attitudes at the end. All of them are wearing a "dumbfounded" expression, including Charlie Brown. More frequently after causing a kite crash, Charlie Brown's expression is more like dismay, or disgust.
One thing I wonder about... in the last panel, three of the characters are sticking their tongues out. This is a bit of graphic shorthand sometimes used in comics (especially older ones) to represent dumbfoundedness or annoyance. But where did this convention get started? It doesn't seem like a particularly obvious connection to make, to stick out your tongue in the face of a blameless accident. How did this get invented? (While we're at it, when did "Z" become the universal signifying letter for sleep?)
Notice that Shermy is walking Snoopy here, making the dog's owner more doubtful again.
All of the current characters are represented in this strip except Linus.
I spoke too soon regarding the spelling of "coconut." Actually, it's possible this is the first time Schulz called it "cocoanut," and I misremembered. I sometimes scout ahead a few months so I know what's coming up, and I might be remembering this odd spelling from that.
Charlie Brown's distaste for coconut is one of those facts about the character that didn't really survive into the later strip.
This is the first strip in which Linus holds a blanket, and the first one in which we're told he does it for security-related purposes, although the explicit term "security blanket" isn't in use yet.
On the art of extracting comfort from flannel. Lucy isn't really opposed to it at this point -- in fact, I think you can probably find several strips in which Lucy is anti- and pro-blanket. Their grandmother, however, is less divided about it.
Snoopy keeps one part of his brain awake at all time to watch for food opportunities. It's like a processor devoted to background tasks.
We get the serif-Z representing sleep here again.
We've seen versions of this strip before. An early strip had them playing hide-and-seek, and the width of Charlie Brown's head gave him away.
In fact his head isn't that much wider than the others, it just seems to stick out more. Patty would have trouble hiding behind that tree without the sign (also because her dress extends out wider).
Snoopy vs. The Yard: The Faucet
Even assuming the dog isn't familiar with the workings of human gardening apparatus, it's an oddly specific place to choose for a nap.
Snoopy used to do more dog-like things, like howl at the moon. Most dogs don't bother pro-rating the volume of their howling according to the amount of moon visible, though, because they don't comprehend fractions.
The story of this strip seems at first, pretty much, to be "character does something foolish, which is rapidly undone due to its foolishness, so there."
Here's a thought experiment. If this strip involved Lucy stacking a vertical column of blocks, which eventually went too high and toppled over, causing her to say "Rats!", would it be a strip-worthy scene? What if it involved another character, like leaving out a bag of candy which Charlie Brown or Snoopy then came along and ate?
For some reason I'm very interested in this idea, to an extent that surprises me. It is my view that this strip works more for the "Rats!" at the end than the situation itself; it's about Lucy's learning that the world doesn't work the way she expects, and the disappointment she feels. This is a frequent theme of Peanuts.
The universe never supplies just the right amount of water, Snoopy.
This joke is deceptively complex. Lucy confuses the mood of a piece of music as being a value judgement on its quality.
You know you can tell where a dirge is on a vinyl record by looking closely at the grooves with a magnifying glass? The plastic is grayer at that point.
Didn't we see this one before, or something like it? I can't find it in the archives though, despite my at-times-obsessive tagging.
What kind of gas is in that balloon to be able to hold up that thick rope? What kind of strength must Lucy have to be able to hold it so casually?
I really hope they aren't resting in a bowl of milk. Most breakfast cereals probably have close to that much sugar as it is.
A nice understated last panel on this strip.
This is similar to a certain Friz Freling-directed Sylvester and Tweety cartoon, in which, in an effort to get high enough to grab Tweety's cage, Sylvester swings back and forth in a swing, going higher and higher. Unfortunately, part of the arc happens to intersect the field of motion of a pole-driving machine, and....
The more I think about this strip the more grossed-out I get. Maybe she should wash them off in a bowl of milk? (We already knows she likes putting her hands in milk from a previous strip.) Maybe Schulz had jelly beans on the brain at the time he wrote these.
Every so often a character reacts with surprising self-knowledge. You don't tend to get that kind of reflection from Beetle Bailey. It's a bit unsettling when it happens, whether in the comics or in real life.
Coconut-flavored cough medicine?
This is a structure Schulz uses sometimes, where a character reacts strongly in the third panel, and another character shows up in the last panel expressly to watch and explain why the first character is reacting. Violet's wide smile here is interesting -- why is CB hating coconut funny? My interpretation is, it's the joy of watching someone you know act in an expected fashion. "Good ol' Charlie Brown. Boy, does he hate coconut!" That radio is really an innocent party in this however. Charlie Brown is just kicking the messenger.
Notice that Schulz isn't spelling it "cocoanut" anymore.
We've come around to that strange place in Peanuts history where Charles Schulz experimented with putting adult characters in the strip as background elements, with continuity elements, with a relatively serious storyline, with titling, and with making Lucy a golf whiz.
Thing is, we already covered these strips last year.
I'm taking the day off from the blog, feel free to go back and reread my comments on the sequence, which is among the stranger moments in Peanuts' run, right up there with the time Alfred E. Neuman appeared in the strip.
