In this early baseball strip Charlie Brown's team is losing even though he's catching this game.
Look at that first panel for a moment. There are six kids pictured. Counting from the left, it's hard to tell who the second and third ones are. The second kind of looks like Charlie Brown, and the third like Shermy, but they're already in the shot viewed up close. This would make these two kids the first "extra" human characters in all of Peanuts. (Animals have had a couple of extras so far, an anonymous dog and a bird.) Some of the other panels have unknown extras too, as well as Lucy and Schroeder a couple of times.
Just wanted to add, Shermy's hitting of the baseball in frame 4 is rather a more dynamic drawing than we usually see of a Peanuts kid. You can see the seem where his sleeve joins with his shirt! His legs look at little awkward though. (Oddly, less awkward than Patty's look.)
ReplyDeleteAt this point, the cast was still too small to make up a nine-person team! (Linus and Lucy weren't much help yet, since they were so young.) So to show a quasi-realistic ball-game scene, Schulz HAD to introduce some one-offers. (Of course, in the future, he wouldn't have shown a spread-out field scene like this, so the point would have been moot.)
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