May 30, 1952: Pride in ownership

Schroeder has expressed fewer words in the strip than Snoopy at this point, and yet he has money to pay off his piano. Hm, and somehow he was able to buy it on installment in the first place.

Sunday, May 11, 1952: Schroeder in concert (with backup)

The entire joke here rests in Violet saying "let him play by himself" instead of "let Schroeder."

There are some nice touches in this one. In addition to the musical staffs that Schulz spent so much effort on, and he put a G-clef instead of an S in his name in the first panel. But best of all we have Snoopy in this strip for no story-related reason other than just being cute and funny there on his end of the couch. His reaction in panel 6 is best here, he's just rendered so winningly in that pose, exactly halfway between a dog-like and a human reaction. It's great.

May 2, 1952: When Schroeder Met Snoopy

I believe Snoopy and Schroeder have been in the same strip before (a Sunday baseball one), but this seems to be the first one in which the two interact.

I suppose we should be thankful that Snoopy isn't a musical prodigy too.

April 14, 1952: Schroeder's Adventures in the White Void

Wait, is he inside or outside? The lack of any background makes it difficult to tell.

There's another musical staff in this picture, I notice. No, I have no idea what song it is, although I have no doubt that it must be some song.

March 15, 1952: 100m Piano Toss

This strip is a variant of the same kind of sudden reaction as the turnabout strips brought up before. Tossing objects is still a common expression of cartoon anger, isn't it? Do this in real life and I don't like to think of how the police would react.

I'm pretty sure I have never heard the term "pianoforte" outside of Peanuts.

January 24, 1952: Hammer-Klavier

German is a funny language when you think about it. I guess it is somewhat less funny when you try to spell something in it.

Schroeder gets annoyed with the other kids fairly often. ‘tis the curse of the misunderstood genius, I guess.

January 23, 1952: Schroeder’s first multiword utterance is in German

Schroeder gets way into his playing in this one. His holding out his arms in the last panel is hilarious.

Also, I laughed out loud when I noticed how Schulz signed this one.

january 16, 1952: But he CAN read music?!

The wavy line around Schroeder’s head is an interesting idea for showing embarrassment. Imagine what the frame would look like without it. The joke seems like it would be just a little flatter with just his blush, hands and expression illustrating his reaction.

November 25, 1951: Let Play the Fanfare

It's the first appearance of Schroeder's famous bust of Beethoven! Also, the first time he's said "Beethoven." It's fun to say Beethoven. Beethoven!

Technically that bust breaks the rules about depicting adult figures, but it is just a knickknack, and it's nice to see that Charles Schulz could render realistic faces too. There's so much character in that face. I think half the humor in this one comes from the different art style used to render that bust.

It seems to me that, over time, the characters get bigger. I think it comes from the slightly more mature proportions and the decreasing thickness of the lines. There's usually nothing to compare scale with other than the other characters, but Schroeder's piano and Beethoven bust give us something to judge scale by. Here the bust is bigger than the piano, and juts out over the top. Lucy wouldn't have any room to lean here. Later on the bust fits entirely on the piano, implying that either the bust is smaller or the piano is bigger.

November 8, 1951: Schroeder Learns the Score

Maybe the kid is annoyed with his status as Peanuts Resident Musician. I love his annoyed expression in panel 2, his patronizing "plink plink" in panel 3, and his focused, furious look and how he's thrown in the air with the effort of his playing in panel 4. I think Schroeder's fury here must somewhat mirror the effort Schulz himself put into the strip.

Let's talk a little about how the characters changed over time.

I really can't believe how much the Peanuts guys (in my opinion people who are serious should not use the word "Peanuts gang" to describe them) change in the first few years of the strip. They've already began edging towards their later appearances here. What's odd about them is that the characters move towards becoming less cute and more iconic.

Compare how the Peanuts characters evolve to the evolution of Garfield. Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, used to be an assistant artist on the bizarre-looking strip Tumbleweeds, and maybe a little of that comes out in the very earliest Garfield strips, which have markedly different-looking characters. Arguably the characters became cuter over time, and that helped the strip to gain traction with readers. But going the other direction, becoming less cute, giving his characters less-over, more circular heads, pushing their stylization beyond the point of maximum attraction and making them still more stylized, that is a strange choice to make.

Right here is, to me, about as cute as Peanuts characters would ever get. The attribute of this style that fixes it in my mind is the expressions on the characters' faces, especially Schroeder here. Eyes wide apart, and with long eyebrows almost mirroring the mouth line. I think this general style continues on later, especially on characters like Lucy, but it's not as balanced, compositionally, as it is in these strips.

Why did Schulz abandon this look? It might have to do with how much time it took to produce. Line thickness, and even the precise thickness of the eyes, is very important to the look.
The more modern versions of the characters tend to have lines that are the same width. The eyes are not just dots but little ovals, and become thick commas when the character is looking around.

And just look at how rounded the character's heads are; there's not a tremor anywhere, it's perfectly smooth every time, the same curve no matter how the characters are facing or posed. That takes skill, and probably at least a little time. (One must wonder how Schulz must have felt about it later in life when hand tremors forced wavering into the perfectly round head of Charlie Brown; even now after Schulz's death, all official depictions of the characters continue to include those tremors.) Also, the characters look very fifties in these strips. If the strip continued on in this style, the characters probably would have turned into something like Calvin and associates.

In terms of the long-term health of the strip it's probably a good thing that it changed. There is still a lingering perception that Peanuts was about cute, and trite "Happiness is a Warm Puppy" sentiment. The move towards less cute, more abstract figures would help the strip as it picked up intellectual depth as the years passed.

October 2, 1951: Year 2

He doesn't get that the adult piano is so big Schroeder's tiny arms couldn't possibly stretch to the end of the keyboard from his seat?

---

This strip marks the beginning of Peanuts' second year of publication. During that time:

The characters of Charlie Brown, Shermy, Patty, Snoopy, Violet and Schroeder were introduced, and all are still in rotation, although sights of Shermy are already kind of infrequent.  We've also seen an anonymous bird (chased by Snoopy) and an unknown dog (seen chasing a car).  We've heard Charlie Brown talk about his dad, and characters have also with an unseen druggist.

Charlie Brown's already begun to settle into his eternally-pessimistic personality.  Patty is his main antagonist, and sometimes shows signs of malevolence, but not quite up to Lucy's later volcanic standards.  Violet is more girlish in general.  Shermy's pretty much a non-entity.  Snoopy is very doglike, although he sometimes gains human attributes when it suits a joke.  Schroeder was first the strip baby, but very soon became the strip musician, although he's still obviously younger than the other characters.

We've seen a fence a couple of times that CB's seen things drawn on, and he's drawn on it himself.  The characters have spoken of school, but no school scenes have appeared yet.  

Let's have another look at the first strip for comparison purposes:



Eye ovals have become thicker, characters are overall cuter, heads (except for Charlie Brown's) are less ovoid, and, although it's hard to tell with Schroeder's still ill-defined hair, its shape plays a bigger role in defining a character's head.

September 27, 1951: Cigar-Box Banjo

Schroeder actually doesn't do much in the past three strips other than play the piano. The humor comes mostly from the other characters reacting to it. A tremendously silly thing is not as funny as people dealing with it.

As the strip gets older, the characters eventually kind of become creatures of their settings. Schroeder eventually becomes seen in few places other than before his piano, which also means that Lucy, the other resident of their little two-kid pocket universe, becomes his main contact with the rest of the Peanuts world.

September 26, 1951: Yeah, That'd Probably Be Asking Too Much

Another in the Schroeder-as-musical-prodigy series. There is also a first in this strip: it's the first time a character is represented as participating in a real-world organization or event, long before Snoopy's games at Wimbledon.

Let's note the progression of the joke:
Strip 1: Charlie Brown introduces Schroeder to the Piano. The gag: he takes to it immediately, and brilliantly. The punch comes from the suddenness of the ludicrous situation.

Strip 2: Strip beings with the ludicrous situation, set up by the past strip. The gag comes from examining its consequences. Punch is added by making it even more ludicrous, by taking the already-amazing event of a baby playing piano extremely well and making him a composer, one who's even titled his work despite being barely verbal.

Strip 3: Begins again with the ludicrous situation, but now takes it for granted. The punch comes from putting a lampshade on it; Schroeder is talented enough to tackle Braham's First Concerto but not the second because he's "only a baby," even though no baby (except maybe Mozart) could do any of these things. This also subtly normalizes the situation.

In tomorrow's strip it'll be completely normalized, and the humor will come from another character interacting with the bizarre sitation.

September 25, 1951: More Schroeder at the Keys

Look at the piano score in the first panel. Intense. Schulz had been quoted as saying he took time to make the scores accurate and loved how they looked on the page. Keep in mind, at this point Schroeder has only said a couple of words, yet he's already titling his compositions.

Another subtle innovation in these strips is a recurring gag template for Peanuts, the blatantly bizarre thing that is somehow real that the other characters can react to. Snoopy is a particular focus for these kinds of shenanigans later (I remember the "whirlidog" sequence, coincidentally also featuring Schroeder), but Lucy gets into some of it too. It works best if the bizarre character possesses an elemental, "force of nature" style of personality for it's a good way to illustrate their strength of will, by presenting it as triumphing over reality itself.

September 24, 1951: The Ceremonial Changing of the Archetypes

AH, it's Schroeder's first time in front of a toy piano, cementing his long-term role in the strip. We even get a good blush out of Charlie Brown while we're at it.

For purpose of winning trivia quizzes later, note: it is Charlie Brown who introduces Schroeder to the piano.