Week of May 10-15, 1954: Jellybeans, Coconut, Baseball and Swings

May 10:

I really hope they aren't resting in a bowl of milk. Most breakfast cereals probably have close to that much sugar as it is.

May 11:

A nice understated last panel on this strip.

May 12:

This is similar to a certain Friz Freling-directed Sylvester and Tweety cartoon, in which, in an effort to get high enough to grab Tweety's cage, Sylvester swings back and forth in a swing, going higher and higher. Unfortunately, part of the arc happens to intersect the field of motion of a pole-driving machine, and....

May 13:

The more I think about this strip the more grossed-out I get. Maybe she should wash them off in a bowl of milk? (We already knows she likes putting her hands in milk from a previous strip.) Maybe Schulz had jelly beans on the brain at the time he wrote these.

May 14:

Every so often a character reacts with surprising self-knowledge. You don't tend to get that kind of reflection from Beetle Bailey. It's a bit unsettling when it happens, whether in the comics or in real life.

May 15:

Coconut-flavored cough medicine?

This is a structure Schulz uses sometimes, where a character reacts strongly in the third panel, and another character shows up in the last panel expressly to watch and explain why the first character is reacting. Violet's wide smile here is interesting -- why is CB hating coconut funny? My interpretation is, it's the joy of watching someone you know act in an expected fashion. "Good ol' Charlie Brown. Boy, does he hate coconut!" That radio is really an innocent party in this however. Charlie Brown is just kicking the messenger.

Notice that Schulz isn't spelling it "cocoanut" anymore.

April 5, 1954: Snoopy will not be deterred

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Another Snoopy power! This makes sense once you realize that Snoopy's open mouth is magnetically attracted to treats. (Oh if you want to be boring you could say he just smelled it.)

Snoopy is slowly becoming looser in design, and it has been good for the character. He was almost like a piece of clip-art at first, but now he's slowly growing larger (more obvious when he's walking -- note how large he is in the last panel compared to the rest of the strip) and his mouth is capable of opening wider, in the second panel here particularly. He's slowly turning into the outgoing, wildly imaginative werewolf we all know.

January 18, 1954:

January 19, 1954:

January 20, 1954:

January 21, 1954:

Let's do a few this time:
January 18: This strip is a callback to December 16, 1953.  Like that earlier strip, Schroeder's legs reveal attention to how they're braced against the fence.  Nowadays it seems weird that a kid would get off of school for his birthday, or that of any random classical composer.  That fence is weird -- it's in both strips.  This must be the edge of Schroeder's yard.  Chagrimace!

Of note for trivia contests: Schroeder's birthday is January 18.

January 19: It would be so easy to derive a political message from this strip.

January 20: This strip is something of a callback to July 2, 1953.  In that strip the kids are saddened by the prospect of being left with a babysitter.  Here, they're gloating at the prospect of the other being left behind.  Gradually, their relationship is evolving.

January 21: I like this one for how the shape of the notes in the last frame fill in the space between the top and the piano.

December 24, 27 (Sunday) and 28, 1953: Three with Snoopy

December 24, 1953

December 27, 1953

December 28, 1953

Three good no-thought-bubble Snoopy strips, presenting the dog as annoyance, victim and helpful friend.

November 26 & 30, 1953: Two with Violet

November 26, 1953

 November 30, 1953

Violet was such a sweet little girl at first, wasn't she?  That seems long ago now, but it's been less than three years since then.

In the first strip here we have another case of Charlie Brown being thrown out of Violet's house.  Until now, usually Violet forgets what made her angry before C.B. is evicted or long gone, but not in this case.  In the second strip she takes naked advantage of Charlie Brown's lack of backbone, and doesn't even have the venom to make an evil smile about it.  It's just a business translation for her.  She wants what Charlie Brown has, so it becomes hers.  Wow.

It's difficult to feel sorry for C.B. in that one.  It's not like she threatened him or anything!

Charlie Brown's hat in the first strip is rather stylish. 

November 25, 1953: Wrath of Dog

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Snoopy only has a limited number of ways of expressing annoyance at this point.  His ears in the last panel are adorable though, in a Mickey Mouse kind of way.

Was it kids' habit back then to eat whole bags of candy at once?  I'm amazed the Peanuts kids didn't all become diabetics.

Sunday, November 15, 1953: The Great Experiment

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

More to add to the list of Snoopy's powers:
8. Super hearing
9. Teleportation (induced by hearing candy wrapper)

For his sake, I hope we can add:
10. Immune to canine chocolate toxicity

This strip actually reads better without the two lead panels.  Try it out!  We don't need to be told twice that they're running an experiment.  All the important facts are presented without the optional panels, and they aren't repeated.

Finally, importantly, the strip is just funny.

November 5, 1953: Lucy speaks under the advise of her lawyer

gocomics.com's page for this strip.

Quite knowledgeable of the little girl. Most precocious children gags are basically the same kind of joke, so just doing them repeatedly gets old without pushing the envelope. Later on Schulz would mostly drop precocious children strips except for a few long-established examples such as Schroeder at his piano.

October 19, 1953: Withers under questioning

When Charlie Brown begs for a piece of candy, he hints and is often disappointed.

When Lucy wants a cookie, she interrogates and demands.

It has to be noted, Lucy probably has a higher success rate.

September 23 & 24, 1953: Charlie Brown and Violet, the slow decay of a friendship

September 23:


September 24:


The cracks are showing. In that second strip BTW it's kind of jarring how cocky Charlie Brown is. Look at his posture throughout it; from sleeping, to yarning, to that propped-leg pose. Scribble of ire, indeed.

CB's expression in the last panel is not a chagrimace, but it's a similar expression.

The MIGHTY PEDE informs us that "Cocoanut" is an old-fashioned spelling of the word.

Sunday, September 6, 1953: MAYBE

This one's awesome for that last panel, and that note of concern you can hear in Charlie Brown's voice. Yes I said hear. I know they're just words on the page, that doesn't mean I can't hear it.

This does put the uncertainty back into just who is Snoopy's owner. It still has not been conclusively said at any point, it's just been implied from time to time.

August 13, 1953: Real peppermint

It's surprising how much of the kids' (and Snoopy's) lives revolve around candy. Although we have more of it now, I think, kids today don't seem to fixate on it like the kids in the comic. And later on the kids mention it far less.

To again treat a Peanuts strip as if it is something that could happen in life, I would not think dogs would be fans of hard candy at all, let alone peppermint.

Sunday, August 9, 1953: KRINKLE

I think this is one of the funnier strips, but it's also interesting for the action poses Charlie Brown uses while hiding (although his head seems unnaturally large in the crawling pose).

August 3, 1953: Lucy Van Pelt in Outer Space

The fun of this strip is the stuff Lucy sees after staring at the sun. This might be the only time in the whole strip Schulz gets to draw Saturn. Why Charlie Brown is concerned Lucy might beg some candy off of him, we don't know. It's not really standard Lucy behavior.

Of course, staring at the sun is very bad for your eyes. But we can see that here!

June 27, 1953: He who hesitates is lost (or at least gets no ice cream)

Lucy is what we might call an expert drinker of other peoples' milkshakes.

Chagrimace!

Sunday, April 5, 1953: Charlie Brown's first breakdown

Remember when I said that a character's personality tends to become set the moment other characters refer to it? This is what I mean. Charlie Brown's exaggerated reaction could be taken as cartoonish hyperbole right up until Violet and Patty remark upon it. That proves that his hysterics are intended to be hysterical, and the relief the reader feels at having any first reaction to CB's weird behavior as weird justified lends extra comedic punch to the strip.

Roasted Peanuts: dedicated to over-analyzing each strip to the point where all humor is lost!

(P.S., Again I feel compelled to remind you: don't give your own dogs chocolate creams, or indeed chocolate anything. Chocolate is toxic for dogs.)

March 17, 1953: Mmm, cellophane

It's weird that Snoopy didn't notice the candy was wrapped until Charlie Brown told him. But this strip is most interesting for its continued cementing of the fact that Charlie Brown now seems to be Snoopy's owner, when he calls him "ol' pal." It's not been explicitly said, but it seems to be more heavily implied now.

March 4, 1953: When Charlie Brown was thawed out 1,000 years later, he found Snoopy fossilized in that state

This is just a great strip. Snoopy's in shock!

It's important to note that Snoopy isn't drawn exactly the same in each panel. His smile in the second panel fades in the third, and wears grieved eyebrow-lines in the last.

February 24, 1953: Snoopy the Opportunist

Further establishment of Snoopy's food-crazy personality.

Sometimes a crazy sight gag can stand on its own, and sometimes it needs a reaction frame to set it off. This one, I think, needs the reaction panel.

February 6, 1953: Snoopy's Thought Bubbles Return

It's been a few months since Snoopy had thought balloons. They still have the speech balloon tail. (If I remember correctly, one strip so far has had the standard "thought balloon" tail, with all the others having a tapering speech balloon tail.)

The contents of the bubble is more typically Snoopy this time, dissatisfied with the world of dogness.