Read this strip at gocomics.com.
Lucy is such a caring and supportive sister. Her laughter consists of the serif'd letters of malice.
I love how Linus carefully puts all the cards back in the pack before throwing it at Lucy.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
Lucy is such a caring and supportive sister. Her laughter consists of the serif'd letters of malice.
I love how Linus carefully puts all the cards back in the pack before throwing it at Lucy.
There's another missing week in gocomics' archive, from October 25-30. It picks back up the following Sunday, Halloween, although it's not a Halloween strip.
Read this strip on gocomics.com.
Not the most complicated gag in the world. This is basically what people here in Georgia have to do to get a connection with AT&T.
And we're back!
Remember, one week before this Charlie Brown was heaping ridicule on Linus' blanket. At least the kid is open-minded! The thing that makes this strip for me is Schroeder's look of despair in the last panel. Oh no, I've been discovered!
Just letting you guys know I'm at DragonCon. There isn't much Peanuts content here, other than the odd person with wearing a Charlie Brown shirt. The con ends Monday, probably regular updates will resume Tuesday. (I already have most of a new post written out, I might finish it sometime today if I can find the time.)
Did you know that there is a complicated system of categorizing folk and fairy tales? Like, assigning letter and number codes to them, so someone can say something like "Oh, Little Red Riding Hood? That's a 73-B, juvenile travels through woods to relation, who has been replaced by wolf." Strips like this make me want to come up with such a system for jokes. This could be 13-G, kid gets tripped up by minor misunderstanding concerning meaning of word.
26-Q, part of dog takes on dual-role as inanimate object.
930-A-IV, smart kid finds clever way to remind friends they are to bring her birthday presents.
8-W, sight gag causing dog to resemble hand puppet. (Not to be confused with 8-V, dog pushed off table by irate cat. Okay, I'll stop now.)
It's easy to forget the relative sizes of the Peanuts characters compared to the world around them. The sight of the bathtub behind Patty shows just how young the kids are meant to be. Even in the early days the kids behave more like small adults than children, but the age discrepancy back in 1954 seems almost shocking to me.
This strip is almost a trope for Schulz at this time; a character gets in the way of Snoopy watching television, or vice-versa, with a sight gag showing the obstructed character restoring his view at the expense of the other.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
This isn't Linus' first time with the security blanket, but it's the first time it's presented in terms of providing security. It's not called a "security blanket" yet, but it's almost there, it just needs to connect those two nouns with nothing else in-between. This is a term that entered our language largely because of Peanuts, so this is a momentous strip.
I like Lucy's loud "INSANELY happy!!" I can't picture that coming out of Nancy or Sluggo. Here Lucy is generally in favor of Linus' blanket. Her attitude later on wavers between for and against, with their blanket-hating grandmother pushing her against I think. Charlie Brown, contrary to his general opinion later, seems to be against it on principle, but willing to give it a try. Isn't a blanket more than just a swath of material, though?
Linus' expression in the first panel is interesting, an expression that doesn't read easily. The sequence from panels 6-8 are interesting for how unconcerned Charlie Brown and Lucy are about Linus' feelings throughout their conversation; his reactions to them are pretty funny.
There is a role-playing game out there called Call of Cthulhu, which involves players encountering horrible creatures from beyond time and space. That game gives players a statistic called "Sanity," or SAN, which is rated on a scale from 0 to 99. Whenever something happens to a character that tests his grasp on reality, he's told to make a sanity roll, rolling a couple of dice to generate a number from 1 to 100. If he rolls beneath his sanity, he loses no or a few points. If he rolls above, he loses more, sometimes a lot more.
That paragraph is just to explain the following statement: In the next year Charlie Brown will receive a ton of sanity rolls. A lot of things seem to drive the poor kid crazy.
This is another version of the strip for September 20, 1953, although much shorter.
Does it seem to any of you that, sometimes, Schroeder is a bit defensive about Beethoven?
Snoopy was very energetic as a young dog. Someone should drop a piece of candy just to give him a focus for all that nervous tension.
The lid may be on the pot for now... but the fire is lit, and the water boils.
Lucy has seen Snoopy's nose enough times that she should know it's not a handball. Snoopy's nose is a bit strange though, as dogs don't really have round noses like this, and this joke is as much a self-referential sequence about Schulz's art style as were all the jokes about the size and shape of Charlie Brown's head. Schulz had been known to say later on that it was difficult to get the size of Snoopy's nose exactly right.
Most of the time, when characters express annoyance or frustration at Charlie Brown, he internalizes their words and gets depressed. This looks at these exchanges from the other point of view; Violet really is overreacting.
I overshot it by a few days, but it's true: we've now reviewed four years of Peanuts. Only 45 to go!
In the upcoming year, 1954-55:
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
Snoopy shows a lot of the passion of his younger years here. Later he's a much more sedate dog, maybe because his late-era character design is incapable of much motion.
Panel two is rather cute, I think anyway. Panel four is a transition between compact, sitting-down Snoopy and stretchy, loose running-around Snoopy.