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.
When Lucy gives you rubber, Linus makes rubber-ade. And this is full-bore Lucy here, in full Hate Mode. The funniest thing about it I think is Linus' annoyed scribble of ire as Lucy addresses him with a serif'd "Hey!" He knows what's coming.
That's a weird look on Linus' face in the last panel.
I think this is second time a character has written things that are depicted as hanging over his head. (I forgot exactly when the first was, unfortunately -- it's possible I'm getting confused and this is the first, this post has been a few days in coming.)
The convention is odd, and I think originates with Peanuts. It is hard to come up with new conventions that are still at-a-glance comprehensible to the reader. This one is helped by the fact that Charlie Brown is obvious writing, and the words hanging in the air are hand-written. Thought balloons had to have been a harder sell.
A hint that Charlie Brown doesn't get much for Christmas. This could be taken as another hint that his family is working-class; the first such hints were from Violet snobbishly lording it over him, and Shermy's huge train set contrasted with CB's tiny loop.
Once again, an early Peanuts strip presents a scene that wouldn't have been out of place in Calvin and Hobbes.
If you ever find a discarded calendar with December 17 circled in red, you'll have a pretty good idea who owned it. Schroeder's affection for the composer is alternatingly touching and worrying. I am reminded, for some reason, of that guy who left roses and cognac on Edgar Allen Poe's grave all those years.
To reveal that Santa travels around the world on a flying sleigh pulled by reindeer would be a let down.
That's a pretty harsh response, heh. I wonder if we can consider that it's Charlie Brown's parents who sent him that rejection slip, in order to manage their son's expectations for Christmas presents?
The blog has been updating sporadically lately because the blogging client I usually use, Blogsy (basically the only worthwhile iOS blogging client I've seen), was broken first by Apple and iOS 5, second by Google and WebAUTH 2.0, which hangs if you try to upload more than three images within a limited time. I hadn't noticed how slow the Blogger web interface workflow was until I was forced to go back to it for a while. Blogsy still isn't completely fixed yet, but at least it's useable again.
In more relevant news, the writer of Sally Forth (rather an underrated strip if you ask me) keeps a webcomic called Medium Large that referenced the Great Pumpkin yesterday. (Warning: language, NSFW)
He is a dog, after all. I'm surprised that Snoopy's amazing, candy-detecting nose failed to realize Charlie Brown had no candy on him.
Here is introduced the second of Peanuts' one-joke characters, and the first character to eventually leave its cast. 'Pig-Pen' lasts until nearly the end of the strip because there have always been, and could well always be, dirty kids. Poor ol' Charlotte Braun's niche gets taken up by Lucy pretty quickly though.
How weird is it that CB's friends tend to call him "Good Ol'" Charlie Brown, and that he remarks upon it?
This is one of those strips where the setting changes from panel to panel in such a way that it implies that the conversation is longer than we're seeing on the page. Particularly, between panels two and three, Violet and Charlotte suddenly go from standing on a path to sitting at a curb, and Charlie Brown has had materialize a tree to ineffectively hide behind -- which suggests that Charlie Brown has been stalking the two to eavesdrop on their conversation.
Charlotte's mouth in the third panel is pretty funny. I think, some time later, some of Charlotte's character was used for Sally; the hair is somewhat similar, and she has a similar head shape.
Snoopy shows distress very well. And I love how Charlotte doesn't even look particularly distressed when she shouts in the last panel. The reactions of Charlie Brown and Snoopy serve to illustrate her volume.
I don't think this will be the last time we see those words spoken. Scribble of ire!
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
This is a momentous strip: it marks the first appearance of imposing, wrathful Lucy. While all the Peanuts characters are complex, I think it's safe to say that this aspect of Lucy's personality will grow and become the most prevalent. It's certainly the most memorable.
It is interesting, I think, that so many of Lucy's most memorable attributes have arisen so rapidly, and over consecutive Sunday strips. Last week we saw a particularly extreme example of her fussiness. The week before saw the first really empathic treatment of her affection for Schroeder. Schulz and Peanuts puts forth the theory that Lucy's character (other than some early bits inspired by their young daughter) was adapted from Charles Schulz's wife Joyce. If we accepted that, then these strips might suggest some marital strife at the time.
It is my own theory that, when forced to create a lot of material over a long period, that it's impossible to avoid revealing and using aspects of your inner self, that eventually it comes out onto the page one way or another. However, I don't think it's necessarily the case that we can draw a direct line from Joyce to Lucy. I think a canny creator will obfuscate matters, and end up combining aspects from different people to write his characters. Still, the rapidity with which Lucy is approaching her mature form suggests (but certainly doesn't prove) Schulz had some kind of breakthrough or epiphany as he was drawing these strips.
Some meta stuff:
Sorry the blog has been slow lately. I've been trying to catch up with old projects (especially In Profundis), and it's left me a little bereft of energy. Am plugging away at them though.
People haven't really given apples to teachers, that I'm aware of, in the years since 1954, where as Charlie Brown remarks was already an outdated notion. And yet, we get this joke, the lore of teacher-apple-giving still lives. (My guess, which could easily be wrong, is that the custom arose as a way of helping to support teachers, who were traditionally spinsters.)
Oh, how I love this strip. It's awesome. I love it so much that, over on Metafilter, I've started using "phooey" as a general term of disdain, usually against people who are trolling or spouting incredibly stupid opinions. (Them: "I don't vote, and I don't see why anyone should!" Me: "Phooey to you. Phooey all over you.")
I think why I love this, more than how funny and yet satisfying it is to read "Phooey to you Charlie Brown," is that Schroeder says it twice. The first time we don't know why he's angry; the second time reminds us of his anger. It is perfectly constructed, it reads great, the sentence has a great rhythm, just, wow. This is one of my favorite strips to date.
This is either the beginning, or close to the beginning, of Lucy's obsession with bugs, which drives a good number of strips to come.
In case you hadn't noticed, Charlie Brown embarrasses easily.
A strip like this reminds us of how relatively recent casual sexism was. I'm not sure many comic characters could get away with Charlie Brown's rude summation, although to Schulz's credit it is rare that a male character gets away with declaring superiority to females without some form of rejection, refutation or comeuppance. Calvin might declare how much better boys are than girls, but he certainly wouldn't be allowed to get away with it.
The animated adaptions of Peanuts, in addition to not showing adults, also replaced speech with muted trumpet noises. I think the later days of the comic tried to get away with not printing adult words, but in the early days at least Schulz was not above the occasional adult speech balloon.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
This is a wonderful strip overall. Although the punchline (or punch panel) is kind of flat and could have been done in a daily strip, the buildup to it is marvelous. Charlie Brown and Lucy's argument is wonderful and energetic, especially panels six and seven, where the characters lean into the other as they express their anger. Although most of the strip is just talking, it's far from static talking heads, Charlie Brown really acts out his frustrations.
The first two panels make the strip, for that feeling of dread Charlie Brown suffers through knowing what's about to happen while powerless to stop it. (It also gives us another use of thought balloons, which are far from a standard part of Peanuts at this point.) Lucy, as is often the case, argues from a misguided position, but she still believes in it and defends it.
I'm not sure I've seen a strip yet with this much shouting and anger. That recent Lucy and Schroeder strip had Schroeder quite angry, but it was a single burst of emotion, not a sustained assault. This seems like a breakthrough strip to me, in terms of Schulz's depiction of conversation and anger, and just the energy he infuses into it.
This strip begins a sequence where Charlie Brown frets over Lucy's willful ignorance of the world. Coupled with the Sunday strip we just saw, I think we're now just at the beginning of Peanuts' "classic" period, where Schulz comes to more fully inhabit his characters and deal with them as people, with developing personalities.
Sarcasm is no use; Lucy is impervious to it.
One interesting thing about this sequence is that Charlie Brown is depicted as really worked up over Lucy's ignorance. Could it be that she's trolling him? From a modern perspective, from all the willful ignorance we see in the world today, I think I sympathize with Charlie Brown a bit more here.
For some reason here, I imagine Lucy as Stephen Colbert and Charlie Brown as one of his guests. That's a pretty funny drawing of Charlie Brown there, although it seems to suggest he might have a neurological condition.
Panel three here, that's one of the most frustrated looks we ever get out of Charlie Brown, I think. Later on he's more the type to suffer with a sigh, but he boils over here.
To finish out the week, a bit of silliness with Snoopy. Every one of these drawings of him is a winner, but I especially like the ones in the first and last panels. Peanuts have to be drawn carefully, I'd say; the characters depend heavily on the angle they are viewed at to read properly. This is actually true of most comic strips, but it's especially true of Peanuts. If the top of Snoopy's head were facing away from the reader in the last panel, I'm not sure there's any way he could be drawn that would read well. (Although it's entirely possible there IS such a way; I just can't think of it.)
November 8-13, 1954 are missing from gocomics' archive.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
We've seen Lucy and Schroeder fight over the piano before, but this one I think puts Lucy's case forth as sympathetically as we ever see. Panel seven in particular is surprisingly effective, almost pleading. The dramatic thrust of the strip seems to imply that it was the offer of hot chocolate in the next panel that caused Schroeder's rejection. How mundane! But what else could she offer -- er, that's suitable for a kid's strip, of course.
Schulz and Peanuts seems to suggest that Schulz got ideas and energy for the Lucy vs. Schroeder strips from his personal life with his first wife. Schulz's family disputes that he got as many ideas for strips from his relations with people that the book suggests. My own theory, which I've stated before, is that a cartoonist can't help but draw from his surroundings, that eventually the contents of your brain end up on the page whether you intend it or not, and that would seem to agree with the book's angle on Schulz's work.
This is also, I think, the first panel in which Lucy notes her own face as being pretty, a habit of hers that spreads to her dealings with other characters, especially Charlie Brown.
