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.

March 21, 1953: Charlie Brown Is Not A Manipulator

Shermy's developed a fair amount since the early strips. Here's a strip with him from March 28, 1951, just two years before:



Of course Violet's changed a lot too, but we so rarely see Shermy.

The very earliest strips, to me, look like the kind of thing that might be drawn for a magazine periodical like the New Yorker, which fits Schulz's early sale to the Saturday Evening Post. The characters as we see them in today's strip up above are actually less stylized, they have proportions closer to the human norm, but they're also more obviously something of Schulz's own devising.