Overthinking a plate of peanuts (which are a kind of bean)
A selective trip through all of Charles Schulz's classic comic strip. Updates daily.
We have a fairly uninteresting Sunday strip to lead off, so I included the following week with it. And then just to go that little bit farther, I included the next Sunday strip in with it.
Well, they can't all be winners. Although the sight of a snowman with extremely long arms is kind of amusing. Next!
More of Linus' square balloons. This does make it a lot easier to store them. By the way, I like how the cartoon convention that blown-up balloons automatically float upward is ignored here. People don't typically exhale helium dammit.
I wonder if Charles Schulz drew this one in response to letters asking Violet's question.
This is a good example of something Schulz is good at, taking an absurd premise and elaborating upon it entertainingly. I believe it's not impossible to create a balloon that would blow up into a cube, but I don't know if you could do it with just latex.
We've seen Lucy at the piano before, and we've seen Schroeder cut her down, but this, I think, is the first time when the setting retreats into the background and it's really settled into the Schroeder/Lucy formula. This strip could just as well shown up ten years later.
Chagrimace. More willful ignorance from Lucy. I guess some skepticism is healthy, but what a thing to be skeptical of.
Every year, thousands ones of children accidentally construct cages around themselves using building sets. Won't you please give today to the cause of outlawing these horrible toys?
Particularly noteworthy: this is the first time Linus makes an utterance that isn't obviously either baby talk or an internal monologue. From here, it's only a matter of time before he starts quoting the Old Testament.
That car in the first two panels is entirely a throwaway, but it helps to underscore just how much the world has changed in the years since 1955.
That's an uncharacteristically mocking attitude from Schroeder in panel 2.
This is the first strip that focuses on Charlie Brown's problems with Valentine's Day, I think. Although the object of his affections isn't the Little Red-Haired Girl, this is definitely the kind of silly mistake he'd make with her later.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
This is one of those strip concepts Schulz returns to later. I remember there being a similar strip involving Snoopy, who befriends a snowman, and is heartbroken when it melts away. Cut to Charlie Brown and Linus, who have been watching. Linus: "Poor Snoopy, he's too sensitive." CB: "I notice he's not too sensitive to eat the carrot." I'm paraphrasing, but it happened more or less like that. Even the carrot eating is here, which makes me wonder if that later strip weren't a conscious callback on the part of Schulz.
Anyway, this strip provides a good example of Charlie Brown's developing depression. He really takes this too seriously. I mean, going so far as to beg the sun to stop shining? Wow. A futile statement of man protesting against the universe! I smell a thesis coming on....
As the first panel indicates, snowman building is an artistic statement with Charlie Brown. He's a sculptor who works in the medium of snow, and he's at least got Schroeder's admiration for it.
I wonder if this isn't some kind of statement, conscious or not, by Charles Schulz about the ephemeralness of his own medium? Peanuts will probably be around much longer than other concluded strips, mind you. There are a lot of forgotten newspaper comics out there.
Another snow pun for a title! Get used to them, it's far from the last....
We had another strip like this not long ago, where Charlie Brown didn't seem to come out of it too badly, but poor Snoopy was overwhelmed. Like in that strip, the funniest thing to me is how effortlessly Charlotte Braun belts out her words. There's a good set of lungs on the girl.
Oh no. Oh, no no no no no. What character in comicdom can get something as willfully wrong as can Lucy Van Pelt? Other than Mallard Fillmore, of course. Lucy actually knows she's wrong unconsciously, I think, which is why she sets herself against Charlie Brown's disagreement before she even hears his opinion. She's so happy with her discovery.
Notice... both here and in the previous strip, Schulz draws forward-facing characters with neutral expressions without a mouth, possibly for parity with the way he draws his characters when they face the side. He experimented with this a time or two before. He abandons it eventually.
I've had conversations with people that have gone exactly like this, right down to my depressed skulking away at the end.
Another mouthless face. And Lucy called Charlie Brown's face funny-looking.
Charlie Brown has some standard ways of expressing displeasure, which are already beginning to get set in. 1. "Good grief." 2. "I can't stand it." 3. "My stomach hurts."
Schroeder is practicing his scowl for the role.
A disturbing insight into Lucy's attitude towards property.
For some reason this strip reminds me of that disco version of Beethoven's 5th Symphony.
That's kind of hyperbolic. Lucy didn't even know what a metronome was before Monday!
Girls in Peanuts tend to be rather more rough-and-tumble than in other strips. Lucy, of course, eventually gets to where she won't think twice about returning a slug in the jaw for an insult. "Peppermint" Patty won't even be arriving on the scene for many years yet.
When someone tells you to close your eyes, yeah, it's usually a good idea not to if you can get away with it. Anyway, why doesn't Violet just rummage through her candy bag facing the other way?
An enthusiastic speech by Schroeder, boldly staking his claim as the neighborhood artist.
Read this strip at gocomics.com.
"You'll never believe this, but I was hoping you'd come over.." Gee thanks, kid.
This strip neatly encapsulates much of Schroeder's character. I remember seeing it in a compilation when I was maybe eight or so. Even then I had trouble believing in the existence of 12-volume biographies of Ludwig van Beethoven in comic book form, Beethoven ballpoint pens and Beethoven bubble-gum, but maybe there's some Beethoven subculture out there I've had no contact with. Is that Beethoven brand bubblegum, or is it bubblegum with Beethoven trading cards? Anyway, "Very scowly."
I imagine one of Schroeder's parents getting him the train in a desperate attempt to broaden the kid's interests outside his overpowering obsession. Because idolization is one thing, but this is bizarre.
Here's another early sequence, in which Linus confounds Charlie Brown by blowing balloons into cubes. I've joked about Linus having uncanny powers, but how else can you explain this?
At least you can stack them neatly this way.
Look at Lucy's look of horror in the second panel. This strip makes it a little more clear what Schulz is getting at with this sequence. Although blowing up balloons into squares is a marvelous skill, Charlie Brown seems to think it's something wrong somehow, and Lucy thinks it'll bring dishonor to her house. I guess people put more importance into balloon-inflating style back in 1954.
Even if he tries to blow it up into a rough sphere, it comes out square. This could be taken as a metaphor for something I suppose. Actually, multiple somethings.
What would happen if you gave Linus an innertube to blow up?
"Hey! Come back with my pagan idol of music!" "Take it easy, I'm just replacing it with a good, honest Christian symbol! Er, that used to be an element of nature-worship. Merry Christmas!"
We'll have more of Charlie Brown and Schroeder and Christmas next time....
I think this is second time a character has written things that are depicted as hanging over his head. (I forgot exactly when the first was, unfortunately -- it's possible I'm getting confused and this is the first, this post has been a few days in coming.)
The convention is odd, and I think originates with Peanuts. It is hard to come up with new conventions that are still at-a-glance comprehensible to the reader. This one is helped by the fact that Charlie Brown is obvious writing, and the words hanging in the air are hand-written. Thought balloons had to have been a harder sell.
A hint that Charlie Brown doesn't get much for Christmas. This could be taken as another hint that his family is working-class; the first such hints were from Violet snobbishly lording it over him, and Shermy's huge train set contrasted with CB's tiny loop.
Once again, an early Peanuts strip presents a scene that wouldn't have been out of place in Calvin and Hobbes.
If you ever find a discarded calendar with December 17 circled in red, you'll have a pretty good idea who owned it. Schroeder's affection for the composer is alternatingly touching and worrying. I am reminded, for some reason, of that guy who left roses and cognac on Edgar Allen Poe's grave all those years.
To reveal that Santa travels around the world on a flying sleigh pulled by reindeer would be a let down.
That's a pretty harsh response, heh. I wonder if we can consider that it's Charlie Brown's parents who sent him that rejection slip, in order to manage their son's expectations for Christmas presents?
The blog has been updating sporadically lately because the blogging client I usually use, Blogsy (basically the only worthwhile iOS blogging client I've seen), was broken first by Apple and iOS 5, second by Google and WebAUTH 2.0, which hangs if you try to upload more than three images within a limited time. I hadn't noticed how slow the Blogger web interface workflow was until I was forced to go back to it for a while. Blogsy still isn't completely fixed yet, but at least it's useable again.
In more relevant news, the writer of Sally Forth (rather an underrated strip if you ask me) keeps a webcomic called Medium Large that referenced the Great Pumpkin yesterday. (Warning: language, NSFW)
