Sunday, July 18, 1954: The nature of nothing

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

From the Wikipedia article on Virgil Thomson:
"[...] Thomson was famous for his revival of the rare technique of composing "musical portraits" of living subjects, often spending hours in a room with them before rushing off to finish the piece on his own. Many subjects reported feeling that the pieces did capture something unique about their identities even thought nearly all the portraits were absent of any clearly representational content."

A sly strip. Schroeder's looks of concentration, followed by his throwing his hands up, are important for understanding that he's giving up. I think it works better this way, allowing us to see him throwing in the towel, than being told directly that he's got nothing, which would seem a bit harder on Charlie Brown's feelings.

March 19, 1953: That's the Charlie Brown we remember

I think this is the first strip to really solidify Charlie Brown's emerging personality. That of the depressed everyman, who considers himself mediocre and ends up being, so partly because of his belief, and partly because everyone can't be Dave Singleman. Who even his own dog (now cemented as Charlie Brown's in three strips) finds boring.

Chagrimace!

August 27, 1952: Bridge building

The card game Charlie Brown and Patty are playing here is probably Bridge, a game we hear Schulz was devoted to around this time.

As time passes, there are two types of character roles generally in Peanuts: those who we are expected to empathize with and those we view from without. Charlie Brown is nearly always someone with which we are to identify with, but with other characters it varies. After she settles into her role of Resident Crab Lucy, a force-of-nature type, is viewed from outside. Linus can play both roles, the former when interacting with his sister, the latter when playing the part of inscrutable wise kid. It's the difference between having a three-dimensional character and a two-dimensional one: both are actually necessary, but it can be troublesome to have all one or the other. (With three dimensional characters, it is easy to have them come out bland and wishy-washy. They tend to need elemental, two-dimensional characters to bounce off of and define them.)

Patty and Violet seem to be used more as persecutors for Charlie Brown later on, but here she and CB are used identical roles.