A running theme in Peanuts in the early days is Charlie Brown being dismayed at some obviously false notion one of his friends has come up with, and their refusal to see sense regardless of all other matters. Up until now it's been Lucy who's been Chuck's opponent in this, but sometimes Schroeder sneaks in there as well in his uncritical idolization of Ludwig Van Beethoven. Later on a variety of other characters fill this role, and their notions take on differing levels of actuality. The most-remembered example of this, of course, is Linus' fixation on the Great Pumpkin, which became one of the trademarks of the strip.
June 7
The humor in this sequence comes not just from Charlie Brown's reaction, but the incongruity of seeing a fur hat on the head of Schroeder's bust.
June 8
Sometimes Peanuts' comedy is kind of like a mathematical formula that could be solved for a number of different variables. Character personalities, and cultural signifiers like Beethoven and Davy Crockett, are what realize the jokes.
Schroeder is singing the refrain from the famous song "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," written by George Bruns and Thomas W. Blackburn, written to publicize the Disney movie Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier. The song made the Billboard charts on March 26, 1955 and the strip was published June 6, so it was floating around the cultural mindspace at the time. Come to think of it, this explains some of the other Davy Crockett references in the strip. Here you go:
Incidentally, there is another, more recent, alternate-reality version of that song, written by They Might Be Giants:
June 9
Charles Schulz was from Minnesota, and although he moved around a bit (to Colorado and later to California), it typically expresses a midwestern kind of humor, self-deprecating and wry. For more, turn on A Prairie Home Companion on your local NPR station, or alternatively go get some Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVDs. Go on, I'll wait. (No I won't.)
June 10
Lucy's brand of evil is currently directly only towards her brother. It takes some time to fester and flower into the true breadth of its malevolence.
June 11
At the time Schulz's first son Monte would have been about four. I don't know if this is the title of a real book or one that Schulz made up for the strip.
This one's more about Charlie Brown creating his own problem than any malice on Lucy's part. There are fun drawings of Snoopy in the first two panels, Schulz is loosening him up more and more. His body is longer now, and so is his snout, which enables him to smile a lot more broadly.
That's a good drawing of dismay on Charlie Brown's face in the next-to-last panel.
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It's been slow going here due to interference from other projects. The blog's not dead quite yet though.
On gocomics.com's archive, this sequence begins here.
Sunday, May 29
I should certainly say Lucy drives Charlie Brown crazy. She has caused him to hallucinate his kite string turning into a heavy anchor chain! It's not like we can believe that was one of the "few things" Lucy had. The question remains how Charlie Brown was able to run that chain up high enough into the air so that it could ground the kite with such a resounding CLANK, not to mention how Lucy brought it to him in the-- you know what, skip it.
May 30
Pinky Lee was the star of a children's TV show in 1954 and 1955. His catchphrase was "You make me so mad!" The Wikipedia page on him notes that he collapsed on-air later in 1955, which the audience of children had assumed was part of his goofy act. This basically ended Pinky's role on the show, although contrary to rumors at the time he didn't die until 1993.
June 1
By my reckoning, this is the first time Linus has ever had an attack due to the absense of his blanket. Lucy's attitude towards her brother's flannel dependence varies from warmly supportive to fierce antagonism.
June 2
At least he didn't say Beethoven!
June 3
I spoke too soon. Good grief!
June 4
He still COULD have licket Crockett, he just had something else to do.
These old Sunday strips show off just what Schulz was capable of when his drawing hand was at its best. Just look at all that. In panel 6 Charlie Brown is leaping a barbed wire fence, and those cans in panel 9 can't exactly be safe to wade through either.
These strips show us a kind of iconic, idealized version of the world of kids that largely doesn't exist anymore, one made up of unfenced backyards, vacant lots, junkyards, back alleys and broken fences.
May 23
Lucy doesn't have many weaknesses, or at least ones that she'll admit to, but rollerskates are one of them.
May 24
The Peanuts characters are accident-prone.
May 25
Shades of Calvin and his bicycle here. And a scribble of ire!
A character displaying affection, love, tolerance, pleasure, joy? These things are not funny. Conan! What is funny in life?
May 26
Lucy turns into quite the feminist later on, this attitude turns out to be fairly atypical of her.
May 27
It's possible to miss it if you just glance at the strip, but the joke here is that Lucy is missing one skate, which is the one that Snoopy's riding.
May 28
Violet and her mud pies again. Old habits die hard. Y'know, I don't remember if we've ever seen any of the Peanuts kids eat one of those mud pies. I'd assume that they're just playing, but that look of distaste on Charlie Brown's face implies that he at least has considered eating one of the things. I guess kids had stronger immune systems back then.
(Skipped this time out are a couple of minor baseball gags. My blogging client seems to be displaying these locally at low resolution, so I don't know if they'll turn out unreadable when published.)
May 16
Charlie Brown and Lucy make a good team act. Charlie Brown tends to know things, but isn't strong-willed enough to express them with certainty. Lucy is headstrong but ignorant.
May 17
Shades of the much-anthologized instance where Lucy hands Charlie Brown a list of his faults.
May 19
Back to that four-leaf clover. How would one tell if one was luckier, really? One doesn't get killed in a car crash? Wouldn't it be luckier not to have crashed to begin with?
May 20
Charlie Brown's pose in the last panel is not the kind of thing he'd be seen doing in later years of the strip. There's still something of the old, more confident Charlie Brown still around.
This calls forward to Charlie Brown's dismayed reaction at the end of A Charlie Brown Christmas. BTW, if when you watch that cartoon, after Charlie Brown walks off-screen, you immediately change the channel and pretend the show ended there, the outcome is a lot more realistic and also more in keeping with the general tone of Peanuts.
I think this strip is slightly stronger with the lead panels, as then there's a nice rule-of-threes progression up to the toy's deflation.
Cute determined expressions on Linus' face throughout here.
Note: Although this is still solidly Peanuts' classic period, there are sometimes strips of which there isn't much interesting to say. It has never been the aim of this blog to cover every Peanuts strip, just the most interesting ones. This doesn't matter for this post, but in the future I will start skipping over uninteresting strips again. This is so that A. I don't spend the rest of my life maintaining this blog, and B. because legally, we'd be on more unsteady ground if we ended up effectively mirroring gocomics' entire archive.
May 8, 1955, a Sunday strip, is missing from gocomics' archives.
I like the injection of a little horror into Peanuts' gag-a-day world. Would we be creeped out by mailman-shaped dog biscuits? I don't know what it is about serif lettering, such as used in Snoopy's "SHUDDER!," but Schulz uses it a lot in this stage of the strip.
This is a very interesting strip. Who decided who plays what? We're left to assume it's Patty. Keep in mind, this is still solidly the 50s we're in, so we're probably left to assume that queer readings of this strip are unintended.
In any event, it probably doesn't matter much to their game who is who. I'm surprised one of 'em isn't Davy Crockett or some such.
More marbles. Decades from now, when the game of marbles has long vanished from the strip, I like to think of its legacy living on in the name of one of Snoopy's brothers, Marbles.
Cats will regularly do this at any excuse, and sometimes even without one.
We aren't privy to what Charlie Brown and Violet are arguing about. Actually, we don't know whatever it is is in the newspaper at all -- C.B. is holding a book.
We could take a bad message away from here if we were to relate Lucy's silly concerns with those of the then-nascient environmental movement. Lucy's had enough weird notions in that head of hers from previous strips, however, that I find it possible to ignore that reading.
May 3
This is Peanuts' first "full" story, consuming every weekday strip for the week. The whole thing is her imposing her concerns upon her friends. I note that the only value judgement made by any of the cast members on her concerns is made here, by Charlie Brown. All of the other reacting characters wear Peanuts Expression #24, "blank observation." Her face in the first panel is vividly rendered. ("Good grief" sighting.)
May 4
It's easy not to notice that Pig-Pen is in this strip, but without his trademark dust cloud, perhaps because it would confuse the gag of the strip.
May 5
This strip and the previous this one are the same general joke, and they have exactly the same punchline. It feels like Schulz is padding out the story here.
May 6
It's not just that Lucy believes her friends are eroding the Earth, it's that she's vividly imagined it as becoming the size of a basketball, an image worthy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
May 7
This isn't the first time Lucy has responded to a direct refutation of her beliefs with a non-sequitur counterattack. Lucy's not the sort to waste too much time on introspection.
Take the drawing of Charlie Brown on the cover of the first Fantagraphics Peanuts collection and turn it upside down. Presto:
It takes a second for your brain to adjust to the new mouth and eyebrows, but then he turns from an upset young boy into an insufferably smug, big-chinned guy with a goatee. IT'S CHARLIE BRO.
A wonderful strip, mostly for the expressions on Snoopy's face. It's a difficult strip to visualize in motion though. Schulz is depicting the dog jumping rope as a (soon to be) standard Snoopydance, but it looks like he's skipping in a lot of little hops, if his hind feet are technically leaving the ground at all.
I think the strip works a little better with the lead-up panels giving Snoopy's enthusiams a little time to warm up, rather than just having him jump in after watching Lucy for a single frame.
