The first panel contains an excellent drawing of Snoopy walking. You can plainly see here that he's changed a lot since his original appearance:
Although, looking at Patty there, he's not changed nearly as much as the other characters. If Peanuts' art style remained like that throughout the strip's run, would it be as popular? It does look very fifties.
This is the period that he looks the most like a BEAGLE, instead of the Generic Doggish Thing of his earliest appearances, or the Funny Looking Kid With The Big Nose of the later decades.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'll go one further than saying that first Snoopy strip looks "very fifties" -- it looks very NEW YORKER.
Nearly two years too late, this comment, but I think that the reason the first strip might look so very "New Yorker" is that it very specifically looks like James Thurber.
DeleteSeriously, look at Snoopy's eye and eyebrow in the last panel. That's exactly how James Thurber always conveyed that same facial expression. It's the same eye and eyebrow that you see over and over again in, say, Fables for Our Time.
It's interesting, too, because although I grew up on paperback collections of early Peanuts, I'd never really noticed that influence before. But it's really, really striking in that particular strip.
(By "first strip," by the way, I mean the chronologically earlier one, which is actually the second strip on this page. Just realized that my phrasing there wasn't terribly clear. It's in the last panel of the second strip, the earlier one with Patty and the flowers, where I see such tremendous James Thurber influence.)
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