October 20, 1953: What were they doing in there?

Is this the site of the meetings of their "Doing Things Without Charlie Brown" club? Because that's about the most charitable explanation possible for what these four kids and Snoopy were doing in that pile of leaves before CB jumped in.

Sunday, October 11, 1953: The CROQUET GAME

This is quite an interesting strip. In addition to carrying an extra title other than just "Peanuts," there are several different jokes competing for space in these eight complex panels.

- Every character appears except for Linus. However, Schroeder's only in the first three (in the third he hiding behind the tree), Shermy's only in two of them, and Snoopy's relegated to one.
- Although the major gag of the strip is Lucy's trying to bounce a croquet ball, the most interesting exchange is between Patty and Charlie Brown, which is a fairly good depiction of the direction Schulz is taking the round-headed kid. Patty's blunt statement is rather shocking; one can imagine her intent is to reassure Charlie Brown that it's not personal, but when put that way how could one take it as anything but?
- Lucy shows greater appreciation for experimental evidence here than she does in many later strips.

October 9, 1953: A brief glimpse of the larger world

There are few times when adult-sized objects are brought into the kids' world, but here's one of them. By the way, notice that both here and back in the Charlie-Brown-loses-his-shoe strip from a couple of days ago, they're using more modern helmets, instead of the ones with ear flaps from the prior strip.

EDIT: Fixed the strip.

September 28, 1953: Things haven't changed that much since then

People ridiculing things they don't understandd! If you want the modern-day version of this, just turn on Fox News.

Charlie Brown shows strange insight into the motivation behind his own behavior. That's kind of creepy.

September 26, 1953: That's the way it goes

Second time Charlie Brown has said "That's the way it goes" in a week.

Shermy gets a taste of the lovelorn longing that CB would adopt later. One interesting thing here is the subplot, concerning Snoopy and a Scribble of Ire, which is rather rare in a four-panel strip. It serves as a commentary on the main plot, yes, but it isn't what I'd call important. For the record, dogs don't really make good arm-rests.

Snoopy goes through the Four Stages of Annoyance here: Observation, Recognition, Exasperation and Rejection.

August 15, 1953: Snoopy punches the clock

This one's linked mostly for the perfect view of Snoopy from a three-quarter perspective. We don't see him in the hand puppet pose anymore, but still this is an unusual depiction of the dog if you look closely. Snoopy's face appears to be narrower when viewed from the side than from an angle. Notice, you only rarely see a character's face straight-on; they're almost always at least a little angle in there. In most of the kids' cases this is probably so their nose doesn't look funny since that C-shape best reads as a nose in profile. Although Snoopy doesn't have the nose problem, his snout is even harder to read straight on. It's like how Mickey Mouse, in cartoons, his ears are always shown in profile, and sometimes artists depicting the mouse have to be clever so they read correctly.

Sunday, August 16, 1953: Full Frontal Snoopy

More three-quarters' drawings of ol' Snoops. We also get more of his thoughts, again delivered as speech balloons. Here it is obvious that none of the kids can hear his thoughts. I think we're approaching the point soon where Schulz abandons the speech balloons for the dog's thoughts and switches over fully to thought bubbles.

Sunday, August 9, 1953: KRINKLE

I think this is one of the funnier strips, but it's also interesting for the action poses Charlie Brown uses while hiding (although his head seems unnaturally large in the crawling pose).

August 1, 1953: Plaid Ice Cream

Y'know, I think this is a common attitude with kids. I know when I was little I thought chocolate was just better, generally, than vanilla, which seemed like plain, or "default," ice cream.

Plaid, however, is not one of your more common flavors. Funny thing is, Schulz has used this joke before. I do think it's common for kids to confuse flavors and colors, a state of affairs that is not, I'd say, helped by modern kiddie marketing.

Sunday, July 12, 1953: A page-turner

The various characters are picking up quirks that help to differentiate them. In the near future:

Lucy is a reader, but also gets facts wrong readily and laughs off suggestions that she might be wrong. Charlie Brown, on the other hand, when he gets something wrong he's very self-conscious about it, and Lucy's continued willful ignorance will give him ulcers. Linus, even when he starts really talking, is pretty quiet. Patty and Violet aren't that different, but Violet is more antagonistic, cold, sometimes even hostile to Charlie Brown. Schroeder, well, is obvious. Snoopy has problems with inanimate objects.

I think it's obvious that Shermy is in the pool in the first panel, but it's less evident that the kid he's with is Schroeder. It probably is, but that's mostly because I don't think Schulz would throw an extra in there just to have one.

Sunday, July 5, 1953: First use of "real" extras

We've seen one-use animals other than Snoopy before (a dog and two birds), and we had one strip in which we saw other kids from a distance. But this here is the first time in Peanuts we've seen entirely non-regular character designs as throwaways. Also included: the first kid with glasses, and a kid with a "Jughead" hat.

Note: of all the extras in that sandbox, only two of them are girls, and both are cast members. Also, Violet wears her hair down this time; she's got it in a bob most appearances now.

The tiers of Peanuts characters:
"Cast" characters are the main guys. There are some characters who, once they arrive, are frequently seen for a while. Some of these are long-term characters (like Charlie Brown, who was in the first strip and the last).

We might call "understudy" characters those who join for a little while, like Frieda, but then digress into occasional appearances, usually disappearing completely some time later. Eudora is also one of these, I'd say.

Some never seem to progress beyond being bit characters. These guys are usually introduced as part of a story, and sometimes get used as extras in group scenes. Roy is a good example; he's not quite an extra, and in fact has an important place in Peanuts history for introducing Charlie Brown to "Peppermint" Patty, but he never really joins the main cast. I think "5" and his sisters, the twins "3" and "4," are also in this category. (The digit kids aren't much remembered now, but are notable for appearing in the dance scenes in A Charlie Brown Christmas.)

June 28, 1953: This isn't an argument, it's just contradiction!

Charlie Brown has a bright future ahead of him in cable news.

May 21, 1953: On the mound: The origin of the pitcher's mound

This is the first strip in which there is an actual pitcher's mound, and not a flat spot of earth. Of course the later mound is a lot wider, but it's not actually much shorter.

One flaw with the premise of this strip: when the other team is up to pitch, wouldn't it help them just as much?

May 12, 1953: Snoopy's duplex

This strip is a variant of those previous sight-gag strips in which Snoopy's house had a TV antenna and where he lived in a hotel.

It's funny, but it also slowly pushes the edge on what is seen as "normal" in the Peanuts world. Snoopy's growth into his vibrant later personality is gradual, the change accomplished slowly through strips like this.

Sunday, April 19, 1953: Shermy Pitches

In this early baseball strip Charlie Brown's team is losing even though he's catching this game.

Look at that first panel for a moment. There are six kids pictured. Counting from the left, it's hard to tell who the second and third ones are. The second kind of looks like Charlie Brown, and the third like Shermy, but they're already in the shot viewed up close. This would make these two kids the first "extra" human characters in all of Peanuts. (Animals have had a couple of extras so far, an anonymous dog and a bird.) Some of the other panels have unknown extras too, as well as Lucy and Schroeder a couple of times.

April 18, 1953: Stylish Snoopy

The construction of the punchline of this joke is pure comedy 101. For some reason, I consider, it is important that the reader sees the punch of this kind of joke, that it's a sight gag, instead of reads it out of a word balloon. This lets the humor value of the drawing of Snoopy with a haircut assist the main joke (that of a dog, an unlikely competitor, beating Shermy to getting the first haircut of the summer).

It is important, I think, that the payoff be a sight gag, but I'm not exactly sure why. It might be because the rest of the strip is primarily verbal, so it needs the sight gag for variety. Or it might be because Shermy's reaction is spoken, and having two characters speak at the essential moment of comedy would be unwieldly. It might just have to do with that nebulous comedic concept, timing. Or maybe, if the punch moment of the strip were told instead shown, it'd seem arbitrary and forced.

Sunday, March 22, 1953: The Earth Invaders

One could take this as another Lucy-abusing-her-brother strip, except for the looks on the faces of Shermy, Patty and Charlie Brown, which make this strip more about human nature than Lucy's specific nature.

This is fairly notable for being a complex play scene with many characters, in perspective, with action poses, and with realistic living room scenery thrown in.

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.

February 12, 1953: Hey! Hey!

Doesn't this actually just serve as more evidence that Charlie Brown's right? If Shermy had used Snoopy's name Charlie Brown wouldn't have thought he was being called.

January 29, 1953: GET OUT OF MY HEAD, TELEVISION

The TV has a point I guess. This is a rare strip in which the source of humor comes from outside the characters. While no adult is seen here, one can only guess that an adult wrote that sign and put it on the air.

By the way, it is not true that Peanuts has never pictured an adult figure! We'll see that for ourselves before very long.

Shermy's hair seems darker here than before.