Wednesday, December 14, 2011
March 7-12, 1955: Candy and bugs
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
February 21-26, 1955: Beware the Rhinoceros
Friday, November 18, 2011
February 6-13, 1955: Square Balloons and Valentine's Day
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.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
January 24-29, 1955: Snoopy unmoors from reality
Another early Linus/Snoopy interaction. That's a rather overstated frown in the last panel there.
A simple gag about a kid not understanding an idiom. Yeah yeah, let's get to the real reason we're here:
THIS. One of the most important strips in Peanuts' entire run. The first strip in which Snoopy fantasizes about being something else. In these four panels we see the origin of the World War I Flying Ace, Joe Cool, and a hundred World Famous things. They are cute strips of course, but there are strange depths buried there.
This strip is a bit problematic mechanically though. Schulz uses a thought balloon for Snoopy's thoughts in the first panel, but in the second the balloon does double-duty as a thought and speech balloon, which makes it seem like Snoopy is speaking in English.
Charlie Brown's wide, amused smile is, in its way, as funny as Snoopy's snarl.
Lucy is willfully wrong about something else. Some notes here:
1. The subplot about Charlie Brown's paddleball is a nice touch.
2. The letters asked about and responded with are written with serifs and with little single-quotes around them.
3. Charlie Brown's annoyance that Lucy refuses to believe 'F' follows 'E' in the alphabet is interesting. He seems to care that Lucy get her facts straight, and takes it personally when she refuses to see reality. That's admirable in a way, but will probably cause him problems later in life, for there is no shortage of Lucys in the world.
When I was a kid, I would read these strips where Lucy is referred to calmly as a fussbudget, and the sarcasm flew roughly two miles over my head. It didn't help that Lucy would then respond without a trace of irony. The humor of Peanuts could be really dry sometimes.
Violet's smile throughout this strip is vaguely infuriating.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 1955: Charlie Brown's deep attachment to an ephemeral thing
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.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
January 3-8, 1955: It snow problem
Snoopy vs. the Yard: Snowflakes
This is the first sign of strife between Lucy and Linus concerning Linus' blanket. Still, Linus' holding onto a security blanket hasn't been presented in anything other than positive terms otherwise -- this seems to be more Lucy selfishly claiming Linus' property as her own than shame or anger that he's carrying it around.
Lucy might have just a touch of OCD....
It is funny when a character defines a trait so completely that it causes extraordinary things to occur. Pig-Pen seems quite pleased by his accomplishment, and even the snowman itself seems happier than average.
Lucy's mood continues to sour. Although Linus hasn't spoken much yet, we can already see their relative ages beginning to approach each other.
It's like, the snow might all melt tomorrow, so might as well get your snowman quota for the year out of the way now.
It's becoming harder to find insightful things to say about every strip, and it was never the purpose of the blog to re-publish every strip anyway, so it is probable that soon we'll go back to only notable strips, of which there are still a good number at this point.
Monday, October 31, 2011
December 30, 1954-January 2, 1955: Once upon a time they lived happily ever after
gocomics' archives are missing the strips from December 27-29, 1954. Anyone have access to these strips? Perhaps it's just as well as, other than the Sunday strip, these aren't particularly inspiring, IMO.
The doggy tradition of eating anything offered to them has its pitfalls.
But the wool fibers are the best part!
Another of the surprisingly long-running series of strips involving Snoopy trying to watch television.
This is a good one. The exchange in the lead panel, "Charlie Brown" in a sing-song voice delivered by Lucy followed by a weary "Good grief" from the other, was probably duplicated in at least one football strip. We've had one strip so far in which Lucy pulled away the football that Charlie Brown was trying to kick (twice), but it was accidental, and it hasn't become a yearly tradition yet. This strip brings us closer to the antagonistic relationship that is at the heart of the football strips.
It's also pretty witty. "Once upon a time they lived happily ever after. The end." That's what we call simplifying the equation right there.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Sunday, December 5, 1954: Large-format Pig-Pen
1. "Poor ol' Pig-Pen" indicates a certain amount of resignation from Charlie Brown concerning Pig-Pen's condition.
2. The joke about raising a cloud of dust while running on a sidewalk would be reused multiple times over Peanuts' run. This is the first use.
3. This is a hilarious strip in how throughly it imagines the intersection between those two ideas, "Pig-Pen" and "candy." "I can't get it out of my pocket... IT'S STUCK!" Oh god.
4. Pig-Pen is totally ignorant of Charlie Brown's discomfort. That kid must have an amazing immune system. I'm reminded of a bit from James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small books where the Yorkshire country vet describes the amazing health of the kids of the local knacker-man, who have been brought up all their lives amid the end-products of the most amazingly deadly livestock diseases.
5. Charlie Brown's concern for Snoopy's well-being is touching in a way. The dog helped him out, it's only right he return the favor. (If the candy had fallen on the ground, it might not have gotten any dirtier but Pig-Pen might not recognize it as being any more sullied. He may even have found it there.)
6. Good grief!
7. Scribble of... what, really?
-----
Sorry for the delay in this update. Foolishly, I went ahead and updated to iOS 5 only to discover my blogging client crashes when uploading images on it, so I'm going to have to use Blogger's web interface to post for a while.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
November 29-December 4: GOOD OL' CHARLOTTE BRAUN
He is a dog, after all. I'm surprised that Snoopy's amazing, candy-detecting nose failed to realize Charlie Brown had no candy on him.
Here is introduced the second of Peanuts' one-joke characters, and the first character to eventually leave its cast. 'Pig-Pen' lasts until nearly the end of the strip because there have always been, and could well always be, dirty kids. Poor ol' Charlotte Braun's niche gets taken up by Lucy pretty quickly though.
How weird is it that CB's friends tend to call him "Good Ol'" Charlie Brown, and that he remarks upon it?
This is one of those strips where the setting changes from panel to panel in such a way that it implies that the conversation is longer than we're seeing on the page. Particularly, between panels two and three, Violet and Charlotte suddenly go from standing on a path to sitting at a curb, and Charlie Brown has had materialize a tree to ineffectively hide behind -- which suggests that Charlie Brown has been stalking the two to eavesdrop on their conversation.
Charlotte's mouth in the third panel is pretty funny. I think, some time later, some of Charlotte's character was used for Sally; the hair is somewhat similar, and she has a similar head shape.
Snoopy shows distress very well. And I love how Charlotte doesn't even look particularly distressed when she shouts in the last panel. The reactions of Charlie Brown and Snoopy serve to illustrate her volume.
I don't think this will be the last time we see those words spoken. Scribble of ire!
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
November 22-27, 1954: Phooey to you, Charlie Brown!
People haven't really given apples to teachers, that I'm aware of, in the years since 1954, where as Charlie Brown remarks was already an outdated notion. And yet, we get this joke, the lore of teacher-apple-giving still lives. (My guess, which could easily be wrong, is that the custom arose as a way of helping to support teachers, who were traditionally spinsters.)
Oh, how I love this strip. It's awesome. I love it so much that, over on Metafilter, I've started using "phooey" as a general term of disdain, usually against people who are trolling or spouting incredibly stupid opinions. (Them: "I don't vote, and I don't see why anyone should!" Me: "Phooey to you. Phooey all over you.")
I think why I love this, more than how funny and yet satisfying it is to read "Phooey to you Charlie Brown," is that Schroeder says it twice. The first time we don't know why he's angry; the second time reminds us of his anger. It is perfectly constructed, it reads great, the sentence has a great rhythm, just, wow. This is one of my favorite strips to date.
This is either the beginning, or close to the beginning, of Lucy's obsession with bugs, which drives a good number of strips to come.
In case you hadn't noticed, Charlie Brown embarrasses easily.
A strip like this reminds us of how relatively recent casual sexism was. I'm not sure many comic characters could get away with Charlie Brown's rude summation, although to Schulz's credit it is rare that a male character gets away with declaring superiority to females without some form of rejection, refutation or comeuppance. Calvin might declare how much better boys are than girls, but he certainly wouldn't be allowed to get away with it.
The animated adaptions of Peanuts, in addition to not showing adults, also replaced speech with muted trumpet noises. I think the later days of the comic tried to get away with not printing adult words, but in the early days at least Schulz was not above the occasional adult speech balloon.