Let's Read Peanuts (The 50s are over, but the trauma of the cold war will last us a lifetime) – December 1960
There are lots of great strips I just don't have room to comment on. I strongly encourage everybody to read along at the official GoComics page or by purchasing the Fantagraphics hardcover collections.
The modern version of this would have had Linus selling Beethoven NFTs. He seems like the type for it.
Yeah, ok. That’s a pretty solid job.
I liked the way this storyline was spread out over a month of daily strips rather than it being all told at once. There were only 12 strips in total (I counted) but it felt more substantial than that since it was allowed to simmer in the background for a while. I hope Schulz does this more as time goes on because it goes a long way to making it feel like these characters have ongoing lives rather than a series of isolated events they deal with one at a time.
Also I think it’s really cute how they gave Snoopy his own little chair.
Why do you care? Why don’t you just bring your football in at night if it bothers you so much? Why are we dedicating so much time to this stupid storyline??
Well thank God. I was worried for a minute that this whole affair might have had a point.
I’m with Linus on this one. Public speaking is a scourge and if you try to make me do it you are my enemy.
Man, Rerun is going to be pissed when he learns his family has had a secret dog this whole time.
Wait, shit! Spoilers. Forget I said anything.
You know who’s finally grown up enough to warrant an end-of-year spotlight?
OK, so going through 10+ years of strips for samples is getting exhausting so I’m going to start using a more cultivated selection to preserve my own sanity. If you want to see how the strips have changed in more detail then maybe consider actually reading the dang strip or maybe even buying the dang books.
I already covered a lot of his development as a character in my December 1959 post so I won’t go into an exhaustive recap here. The short version is that he went from the obligatory baby of the strip (which must always exist for some reason) and slowly morphed over time into some kind of weird child prodigy with anger issues and then again later into a kindergartener with anxiety and an intellectual streak. He and Lucy also kind of stole the show over the last few years to the point where the rest of the supporting cast has effectively been sidelined. Hell, I’m not going to sit down and actually do the math or anything, but it wouldn’t shock me if the Van Pelt siblings actually get more screen time than Charlie Brown these days.
And to be fair, it's not hard to understand why. Lucy is a natural counterbalance to Charlie Brown and creates conflict simply by existing in his vicinity, so she naturally ended up a becoming major fixture of the strip after her introduction. Linus by extension, is a perfect counterbalance for Lucy in the opposite direction. While Charlie Brown brings a sort of frustrated dad energy to the equation (curious, that), Linus is instead an overwhelmed younger brother. Like Charlie Brown, he’s Lucy’s intellectual superior in a lot of ways, but unlike Charlie Brown Linus lacks the maturity or experience to see through her bullshit or the emotional temperament (or physical stature for that matter) to properly stand up to her. Which all comes together to create some absolutely fabulous chemistry between the pair. I know I shit on Linus a lot for being an insufferable dork (and will continue doing so), but he is actually one of my favorite parts of Peanuts for precisely this reason.
Speaking of Charlie Brown, Linus has grown into the more subtle, but equally important role of being Charlie Brown's ~actual~ friend. That might not seem important but for a while there in the mid-50s there was this weird transition period where Charlie Brown had just emerged into his current “sad kid the universe hates” form but was still being treated like his earlier “kind of a dick who makes his own problems” persona and the results were kind of bleak. Letting him have ~just one~ person he can open up to who’s (usually) not actively hostile to his existence does so much to lighten the tone of the strip and keep things fun.
On that note, I think one of the biggest changes this year has been the introduction of Sally and how it’s affected Linus’s character. Now that he's officially handed off the title of “obligatory baby of the strip” to Sally, Linus has been much more free to develop as a real person without the fact that he’s a little kid constantly defining him. He’s still immature, yes, but that’s increasingly being treated as a character quirk that’s a side-effect of his weird anxiety issues rather than a function of his physical age, if that makes sense.
This is reflected in his character design, which has shifted over the past couple years to be much more similar to the rest of the cast. He’s still a bit short and clearly the youngest of the group but he's increasingly able to convey more subtle and complex expressions than he has been in the past. He’s still not ~quite~ at his final form yet (his head isn’t lumpy enough, for one) but he’s getting there.
Speaking of character designs, now is probably a good time to discuss how the art across the strip has changed over the last year. And unfortunately… there’s not much to talk about. In the last 3rd of 1959 (around the time Sally showed up) we saw a fairly significant shift away from the stiff late 1950s style and towards the more loose and fluid style most people probably recognize as “Golden Age Peanuts”, and it’s pretty much held steady since then. Even Snoopy came out of this year relatively unchanged, which is kind of nuts. I suspect that this was because around this point Peanuts was starting to move into other forms of media, which meant that after an initial revision of the style of the strip, additional changes were discouraged in order to keep things on-brand and recognizable.
That said, I will give the strip credit for one positive change I’ve noticed recently in the form of backgrounds starting to make a bit of a comeback.
They’re still not all that common these days, but I’ve seen an increased willingness to play with more detailed foreground and background elements in order to make more detailed panels and the results can be very nice to look at. Not to mention the fact that Schulz's panel composition work continues to be on-point.
I guess the last thing worth touching on for this year is the storytelling itself. The jokes themselves are very similar to last year but the format they are told in is evolving a bit. Storylines are becoming longer, more detailed, and better written (Mad Punter aside). Schulz still struggles when they get long enough to require proper character arcs with setups and payoffs, but what we’re getting now feels a lot more like a proper story that what we were seeing even a year or two earlier. We’re even seeing continuity over multiple Sunday strips, which is both a nice change of pace and something that must have been a pain to pull off considering how much newspaper editors hate doing that kind of thing.
I think I’ve enjoyed this year more than I have many others for a while, maybe even going back as far as the early 1950s. For me nothing will beat that early retro look, but I think we're getting pretty close. Here's hoping Schulz can keep up this momentum for a while!
So... that’s where we are for now I guess. Onward to 1961!
