EXTRA: Early Peanuts newspaper ads

Found skimming through Reddit's Comics discussion, Comics Alliance found some early newspaper ads used to popularize Peanuts in the early days.

Some basic character illustrations.  That goofy grin on Shermy's face might be the most personality that character ever displayed.

This one uses the earliest style of character art.  I like how the "PEANUTS" logo is largely the same as it was used even towards the later years of the strip.  Have any of you been captured by their cuteness and amazed by their antics yet?  Remember to WATCH FOR THEM beginning (date)!

There's more at the original page:  I might inline them later, but until them I encourage you to check the out at the original site.


Well, go on!  Encourage, encourage!

October 20, 1952: Bridge column

I remember looking with just as much bewilderment at the bridge column in our local paper as a kid.

Glancing at the last panel by itself, it looks very close to the classic Peanuts look. Patty is almost completely in that style, Charlie Brown's head is just a little too oval and his eye a little too thick.

March 31, 1952: First non-traditional layout

Newspaper comics, for all the (potentially) wonderful things about them, are also heavily restricted in format. Charles Schulz is recorded as saying that for a long time he stuck with a four panel layout because it allowed the newspapers the most flexibility in arranging them. They could be run in a two-by-two box, or as a column of single panels. But here we see him experimenting within the form by sub-dividing the panels into two sub-panels each.

It works well here because there is little speech in this one. It wouldn't exactly lend itself to Linus expounding on the Old Testament.

Noveber 29, 1951: Comic books!

The kids' love of comic books is a staple of the early years of the strip. Part of this may be due to the fact that Universal Features Syndicate published comic books in those days, in which many of their newspaper strip characters, including the kids of Peanuts, would feature. I saw an issue of their classic title Tip Top on a dealer's shelf while at DragonCon a couple of weeks ago. It was selling for around $200 dollars, if I remember correctly.

Noteworthy is the fact that, as the decades rolled by and comic books lost their prominent place in kid culture, that nothing really moved in to replace them, except perhaps television. (As we've seen, in the earliest Peanuts strips the kids listened to radio instead of sitting watching TV.) Since then there's been rock music, action movies and video games, but the kids never really caught on to those things. One can only speculate what Schulz thought about those strange advents.