Sunday, June 27, 1954: Snoopy should lay off the sugar

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

This strip sets a couple of precedents all by itself.

First, for a while now, there have been kind of two designs for Snoopy. One is when he's sitting down, where he is a cute, compact little dog. Then other is when he's doing anything else, in which case he'll stretch out into an animal more than twice the size of the other one.

This strip doesn't have any drawings of Snoopy sitting dog-style, which become less frequent as Peanuts continues. The other one, the one depicted here, eventually becomes predominant. It is difficult to think of a beagle so large as a puppy, which is probably why this part of Snoopy's character is allowed to be forgotten. This is a much looser style for the character, which in turn allows Snoopy to become much more expressive and energetic, which fuels the growth in his personality.

Second, this is the first strip in which Snoopy's energetic personality annoys Charlie Brown. Once it's conclusively stated that Snoopy is his, he'll say things about wishing he had a normal dog, but until then it's more like being annoyed at a weird friend (a "Kramer") than a family member. Notable is that Charlie Brown refers to Snoopy as a "person."

The drawings of Snoopy here are very attractive generally. I especially like the ones in the first two panels. The first one is iconic, the second shows him running dog-style, which we don't often see.

Sunday, November 29, 1953: Charlie Brown should see this

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Lucy's joy at being the best at jumping rope is wonderful.  Panel 2 is a bit strange for its abstract ground, but it works.  Panel 4 is terrific though, even if, when you look closely at it, Lucy's rope jumping isn't as fluid as it appears at first.  It's really several different, unconnected images of her jumping rope presented together in such a way that it scans as a continuous stream.  It does further the illusion of her skipping rope with a forward motion though, which is important since one jumping rope in place cannot come across other people.

He put so much work into this that I almost feel embarrassed to notice there's a small mistake here in the strip construction.  If you remove the top panels (like some newspapers do) the joke becomes much weaker, since Linus reaching 700 jumps isn't as impressive if we didn't know Lucy was so proud because she hit 600.  The boldface on "SEVEN HUNDRED" loses its relevance.  The strip is still understandable in that Lucy's change in demeanor implies that her brother has surpassed her.  I suppose, in that regard, the knowledge that she had reached 600 is extraneous information?

EDIT: Fixed gocomics link.

December 22, 1950: Put your hand inside the Snoopy head

Another somewhat pointless strip, Schulz must have been close to his deadline for some of these.  Snoopy is especially cute and puppet-like in this one however, especially in panel two, where we get a three-quarter perspective into his smiling mouth, and in panel four, where his eyes are winningly far apart.  As Snoopy became a much stranger creature later on, Schulz would lose the ability to draw him like this; Snoopy became a creature of imagination far more than a placeholder dog in a world of child jokes.