Posted on April 16th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy, Cartoons.
An unusual number of Peanuts characters started as babies. I remembered the babyhood of Linus and Sally, but I had forgotten that Lucy and Schroeder began as babies. Lucy talks in a childish syntax in several early strips, including referring to herself in the third person; the others pretty much pass from babyhood to adult talk directly.
Snoopy changes more than any other character (though Charlie Brown changes significantly as well). In the early strips he walks on all fours and has no thought balloons. He also doesn't belong to anybody.
Charlie Brown has more power in the early strips. The beginnings of the loser Charlie Brown character are there in the early strips -- there are many jokes about him being disliked, including the famous very first strip ("Good ol' Charlie Brown! . . . How I hate him."), and his losing thousands of consecutive games of checkers to Lucy presages his suffering at baseball -- but there are as many in which he is liked (one of the most persistent comic riffs in early Peanuts is the extreme changeability of childish affections). There are many jokes at Charlie Brown's expense, but he gets off many good lines at the expense of others, including a whole series of gags in which he pisses off Patty (the early Patty, of course) and is chased by her while he laughs some line ("I do have my fun!"). There are also a series of strips in which Charlie Brown is tiresomely opinionated in an adult way, of which my favorite is one that will be entertaining to most science fiction or comics fans:
Violet: This poem, "Three Blind Mice," is the best I've ever read. Gee, I enjoyed it...
Charlie Brown: I've heard about it... Animal poems drive me crazy! I don't believe in them... How can people read that sort of thing? To me it's just a waste of time! Life is too short, and this old world is too full of trouble, and.... [Violet wanders off]
One of the odd things about the early strips is that the later characters are much more vividly delineated, so the early strips are mostly about gags and less about character. Charlie Brown's character starts to firm up around the time that Lucy enters the strip. Snoopy's personality doesn't really emerge for years. Patty and Violet have some distinguishing characteristics, but none of importance; most gags with one of them could easily have the other instead (and indeed many have both). Shermy has no significant character at all. It's no surprise that of the first five characters, only Charlie Brown and Snoopy remained of importance to the strip.
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