Gentle Reader, I am aware you may well be thinking Doesn’t he like anything? When did V. lose his sense of humor? Well, and I have been cranky lately, but I am still capable of laughing, on occasion. For instance, I heartily recommend Francis’ Six Things series, over at Heaneyland, although the most recent one really only works if you’ve been following them. If you for some reason haven’t been following them, a good recent one to start with, and get the idea, might be Motivational Posters I Could Use or maybe Overly Specific Kitchen Utensils. Which leads me to another thing I’ve really enjoyed lately, The Complete Peanuts, Vol. 2: 1953-1954.
Now, I’m a huge fan of Charles Schulz’s early, funnier work. I have, um, seventeen of the original little paperback collections. I thought it was more; maybe it used to be more. In part, my preference for the fifties stuff is that I happened to read that stuff first, in collections, before I started reading the daily strip in the paper. But really, it’s because it’s the best stuff. Not this volume, actually, although it does contain my very favorite Peanuts strip ever (the one with the snowmen, and Charlie Brown saying “Trite, very Trite!” I suspect the strip really hits its peak in 1958 or so, after Snoopy has begun showing his imagination and Linus has been diagnosed with myopia. This stuff is great, but it gets better.
Of course, it’s a lot of fun to see how the characters change in the first decade or so. The most obvious is Snoopy, who is just starting to use think-bubble speech, but who is mostly a dog at this point. There’s the first indication of the interior splendor of the doghouse, but it’s a one-off joke, not part of Snoopy’s character. Mostly, at this stage, Snoopy is interested in candy. The other really obvious one is Linus, who is an infant, unable to speak (other than in brilliant HA! interjections at appropriate moments). His security blanket is just part of his general infancy, and appears only on occasion. He is precocious, although that expresses itself at this stage in an uncanny ability to build card houses and blow square balloons. It’s clear that this is Linus as a baby, but it’s not yet Linus.
Violet is a much stronger presence here, along with her friend Patty (not Peppermint Patty, who doesn’t come along for quite a while). They are older girls, a trifle older than Charlie Brown, and much older than Lucy, whose fussiness is still attributable to the four-year-old bubble, only taken to a grander scale (it’s in 1954 that Lucy is given permanent possession of the trophy for Fussbudget of the Year). One of the things going on that (I seem to recall) drops out of the later strips is the age difference between the older kids such as Violet and Patty and Shermy, the kids Charlie Brown’s age, such as Pig Pen and Schroeder (and Charlotte Braun, of course), Lucy (an important year younger), and Linus (younger yet).
One of the gags, of course, is that these are kids, who act like kids, but now and then talk like adults. This is my favorite bit, personally. There’s a good deal of recognition humor (more recognizable to me now that it used to be), and a lot of character humor, and some reversals, and some pure absurdism (yay!), but the thing he really does beautifully is the disconnect between the kids and their (occasionally) grown-up vocabulary and outlook (note to self: what would really be a good idea would be a long dull note on the different kinds of humor). “I’m frustrated and inhibited, and nobody understands me...” says Lucy, as she runs from the angry mob after destroying all their toys in a series of temper tantrums. Or, as she turns away from Schroeder’s piano after another snub, “I’ll probably never get married.”
Oh, another big difference I’d noticed is that Charlie Brown himself is not so much of a lovable loser as he later becomes. The reason nobody likes him is actually that he’s a self-centered and pretentious blowhard, who has a tendency to dominate conversations which lengthy complaints about his own life. This is actually pretty funny, in some of the strips, but I can see why Mr. Schulz got rid of it.
This collection does have a few instances of the Blank Third Panel, a great device he later perfected, where the third panel is simply a repeat of the second without the word balloons, indicated that somebody is taking a moment to think or react. Then the fourth panel socks you with the payoff. If done right, it’s my favorite thing in comic strips. Overboard and Dilbert used to use it on occasion, but Peanuts was the best. In this collection, though, it doesn’t quite work, the few times he uses it, perhaps because they haven’t found the talking wall that later becomes the location for a lot of those. He also resorts, in a few places, to the dreaded Fourth Panel Reaction, in which the joke is in the third panel, and the fourth panel just has a reaction shot of somebody laughing or doing what in film would be a slow burn. It’s the exclamation point on the joke, and it works about as well as pointing out the joke usually does.
In my vague dreams of eventual affluence, I imagine I will one day own the whole twenty-five volume set of these. I would enjoy reading them over and over. I also could imagine, someday, having them loaded onto a personal digital assistant of some kind, so that I could, when bored or frustrated or in need of diversion, simply call up the Peanuts file and read a dozen or so strips. In the meantime, I’m just happy I’ve got a hip library.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
I remembered you remarking on the Blank Third Panel technique in the context of Overboard, like fifteen years ago, but I didn’t realize that it originally came from Peanuts. Huh.