Week of May 10-15, 1954: Jellybeans, Coconut, Baseball and Swings

May 10:

I really hope they aren't resting in a bowl of milk. Most breakfast cereals probably have close to that much sugar as it is.

May 11:

A nice understated last panel on this strip.

May 12:

This is similar to a certain Friz Freling-directed Sylvester and Tweety cartoon, in which, in an effort to get high enough to grab Tweety's cage, Sylvester swings back and forth in a swing, going higher and higher. Unfortunately, part of the arc happens to intersect the field of motion of a pole-driving machine, and....

May 13:

The more I think about this strip the more grossed-out I get. Maybe she should wash them off in a bowl of milk? (We already knows she likes putting her hands in milk from a previous strip.) Maybe Schulz had jelly beans on the brain at the time he wrote these.

May 14:

Every so often a character reacts with surprising self-knowledge. You don't tend to get that kind of reflection from Beetle Bailey. It's a bit unsettling when it happens, whether in the comics or in real life.

May 15:

Coconut-flavored cough medicine?

This is a structure Schulz uses sometimes, where a character reacts strongly in the third panel, and another character shows up in the last panel expressly to watch and explain why the first character is reacting. Violet's wide smile here is interesting -- why is CB hating coconut funny? My interpretation is, it's the joy of watching someone you know act in an expected fashion. "Good ol' Charlie Brown. Boy, does he hate coconut!" That radio is really an innocent party in this however. Charlie Brown is just kicking the messenger.

Notice that Schulz isn't spelling it "cocoanut" anymore.

April 6, 1954: So that's what radio static looks like

Read this strip at gocomics.com.

Some nice, although strangely un-Peanuts-like, abstract art here brought to field in the cause of drawing white noise.  Charlie Brown is still kind of silly/naive sometimes; Linus would be more the type to listen to static later.  Of course it has to be Schroeder who offers to fix C.B.'s radio, because he cares enough about music to help people experience it better.

November 28, 1952: No one said you had to stay and listen

This is an extremely Calvin-like move on Charlie Brown's part, right down to the happy look on his face as he walks away.

September 18, 1952: Snoopy and the Radio

Snoopy leaps up and sticks out his tongue at Charlie Brown. It's not yet a "BLEAH!" but it's a step there. How does he do that with his ears?

It's a lot of fun to look at Snoopy in weird poses like this one, and I imagine it must have been a lot of fun to draw.

August 28, 1952: Ol' Pal Ol' Sock

It's only the second strip Schroeder has had a full line, and disappointment rules the day.

"Ol' sock?"

February 8, 1952: Beware the Wrath of the Prodigy

Can't really blame Schroeder for getting angry over this one!

Two things. First, Peanuts characters seemed to mellow out a lot over time. Even the mighty Lucy rarely seemed to wear an expression of this ferocity. Second, the rules concerning the depictions of adults and their communications was much less in force here. In many later strips, you wouldn't have seen a word balloon over the radio, and the joke probably would have had to be reworked into a conversation between two of the kids.

January 17, 1952: More wavy lines

Although he still barely speaks, Schroeder is out and about! An important step towards his becoming a full character. Notice his bed in the corner in the third and fourth frames; it is a weird quasi-crib with low rails.

The post title comes from the aura around his head in the third frame, which we also saw used yesterday to denote embarrassment.

November 12, 1951: 50 Words or Less

These kinds of essay contests used to be all over the place. There was a woman some time back who managed to support her family entirely on winning contests such as this one, and writing jingles, and the like. There was a book about her, written by a daughter, but I've forgotten the title. (Probably one of you out there remembers it....) Anyway, if such a person could exist, who could win these contests with any kind of consistency, then it implies pretty strongly that there is a certain technique to winning them, maybe a specific type of phrase that resonated with contest judges.

Now, contests are a lot more likely to be about being the person who just happens to draw a winning game piece. A lot less vulnerable to gaming, but entirely uninteresting as "games."

200 posts!

February 17, 1951: Radio used to be cool

Notice: the only signal that the radio program is exciting, essential to understanding Violet's question and the point of the joke, is Charlie Brown's body language in the first three panels.  In later strips Charles Schulz would probably provide some additional visual signal, like some words hanging in the air.

Ah, for the days when turning on the radio would more likely present some exciting adventure show or comedy, instead of lame pop music or a blustery cadre of demagogues. The world changed greatly during Peanuts' run, the peace and love generation were yet to be seen at the strip's start, and both the creator and strip had to adapt to the times.